BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1307 



archccologists, of all these faiths or none, already meet, and even 

 publish their results together. 



Enough then of this long illustration of the distinctiveness of 

 sociology; and from earliest to latest and most complex — say Les 

 Eyzies and Jerusalem — for types of the study of the changeful social 

 groupings of man, and these not only material, and thus partly 

 physical and biological, but with their spiritual factors, emotional, 

 intellectual, and imaginative, their heritages of religions, philo- 

 sophies, histories, languages, and literatures, sciences and arts; 

 and all these determining the interaction and flux of contemporary 

 social evolution. And thus — however fundamentally based and 

 modified from without — essentially from within. For this vast 

 heritage is no mere memory : but of the very essence of the social soul ; 

 and thus reawakening it to higher developments; for all the Muses 

 are here latent, and some already manifest ; albeit the Furies too. 



No subject can be more attractive to the geographically and 

 biologically minded sociologist than that of how, as environment 

 conditions life, so the place makes the people; as Holland has so 

 trul}^ done for the Dutch, Switzerland for the Swiss, and so on. 

 This regional and "economic determination of history" is perhaps 

 the best of all examples of the qualities of a half-truth, yet also of 

 its limitations, that the modern world can show; witness its vast 

 and ever-increasing acceptance. Yet though this doctrine can be 

 fruitfully applied in Palestine as elsewhere, the other half of the 

 truth is also here plain, that of how the people make their place, 

 and are ever re-shaping their environment; witness how the Dutch 

 have made Holland, indeed are at it again more than ever ; and the 

 Swiss are mastering their very torrents. Men are ever making them- 

 selves anew with their environment anew; and so on throughout 

 history, back and forward. 



In all this a further concept is needed for the understanding of the 

 Social Heritage: it is never all pure and healthy; we have also to 

 recognise in it and investigate its accompanying burden of evils; 

 far worse than the taint in an organic heredity. This is indeed the 

 hardest of sociological riddles, since nothing less than the great 

 "problem of evil", so long insoluble for theologians and philosophers, 

 separately or together; yet now beginning to yield to the scientific 

 observation and analysis of life, organic and social together. The 

 biologist as physician, and of body and mind together, has been 

 leading the way; and now sociology and biology are learning from 

 each other ; and even the political and the economic world begin to 

 learn; though still too little, and that slowly, in the great school of 

 experience, albeit with fees so high. 



