THE PROBLEMS OF SOCIOLOGY 821 



ism that is, individual weal and common weal into harmony? 

 One requires no profound insight into reciprocal human relationships 

 to recognize that this problem is in causal relationship with the ques- 

 tion of the political organization of society, with the total of legal 

 development, and with positive ethics; that is, with the norms 

 of conduct derived from the essential interests of human beings. 

 When, however, we take into consideration the nature of man 

 that is, his native talents there is at once presented (6) the tre- 

 mendous race-problem, which may be presented in the form of the 

 following questions: 



(a) Is the origin of the human race such that it can be regarded 

 as a unity? What social and ethical consequences follow from the 

 answer to this question? 



(6) What value has the race-concept for social evolution in gen- 

 eral, and in particular in given times and places? 



(c) What differences of value are to be attributed to the pure 

 races, which have developed the permanent forms of racial mixtures 

 through in-and-in breeding, and what values are to be assigned to 

 the mixed races with fluctuating traits? 



(d) What consequences for social development follow from the 

 fact of race-difference, and of the variety of inherited talents (An- 

 lagen), as products of biological development, of history, of locality, 

 of environment, and of prevailing ideas? 



This race-problem, over which fierce struggle is raging to-day in 

 Europe, will not be solved from the single standpoint of ethnology, 

 or anthropology, or geography, or biology, because the race itself is 

 not a product of biological evolution, or of geographical conditions, 

 or of anthropological classification. Its social significance can be 

 made out only on the basis of all those factors with which all 

 the special sciences are concerned, from whose subject-matter soci- 

 ology attempts to organize its syntheses. This Congress is sitting 

 in a part of the world, and in a federation of states, whose future 

 centres about the solution of the race-problem. Sociology can 

 regard the amalgamation of the races that are in contact merely 

 as an ideal. The mere comparison of the periods, measured by 

 thousands of years, required for the evolution of a race, with the 

 brief periods that come into view in questions of social reform, 

 reduces the belief in a healing harmonization of all the racial 

 characteristics to an absurdity. 



Connected with this race-problem is (7) the problem of public 

 hygiene, which in the last analysis is the question of rooting-out 

 pathological tendencies. The suppression of hereditary diseases 

 and tendencies to disease syphilis, gonorrhea, epilepsy, alco- 

 holism, neurasthenia, etc. is one of the most vital issues of 

 popular life in Europe, where people attend less to the morpho- 



