Principles of Sociology

I do not mean that the energy thus resulting determines, of itself, higher social development: this is neither implied deductively nor shown inductively. But greater energy, making easy the conquest of less active races and the usurpation of their richer and more varied habitats, also makes possible a better utilization of such habitats.

§ 17.

On passing from climate to surface, we have to note, first, the effects of its configuration, as favouring or hindering social integration.

That the habits of hunters or nomads may be changed into those required for settled life, the surface occupied must be one within which coercion is easy, and beyond which the difficulties of existence are great. The unconquerableness of mountain tribes, difficult to get at, has been in many times and in many places exemplified. Instance the Illyrians, who remained independent of the adjacent Greeks, gave trouble to the Macedonians, and mostly recovered their independence after the death of Alexander; instance the Montenegrins; instance the Swiss; instance the people of the Caucasus. The inhabitants of desert-tracts, as well as those of mountain-tracts, are difficult to consolidate: facility of escape, joined with ability to live in sterile regions, greatly hinder social subordination. Within our own island, surfaces otherwise widely unlike have similarly hindered political integration, when their physical traits have made it difficult to reach their occupants. The history of Wales shows us how, within that mountainous district itself, subordination to one ruler was hard to establish; and still more how hard it was to bring the whole under the central power: from the Old-English period down to 1400, eight centuries of resistance passed before the subjugation was complete, and a further interval before the final incorporation with England. The Fens, in the earliest times a haunt of marauders and of those who escaped from established power, became, at the time of the Conquest, the last refuge of the still-resisting English; who, for many years, maintained their freedom in this tract, made almost inaccessible by morasses. The prolonged independence of the Highland clans, who were subjugated only after General Wade's roads put their refuges within reach, yields a later proof. Conversely, social integration is easy within a territory which, while able to support a large population, affords facilities for coercing the units of that population: especially if it is bounded by regions offering little sustenance, or peopled by enemies, or both Egypt fulfilled these conditions in a high degree. Governmental force was unimpeded by physical obstacles within the. occupied area; and escape from, it into the adjacent desert involved either starvation or robbery and enslavement by wandering hordes. Then in small areas surrounded by the sen, such as the Sandwich Islands, Tahiti, Tonga, Samoa, where a barrier to flight is formed by a desert of water instead of a desert of sand, the requirements are equally well fulfilled. Thus we may figuratively say that social integration is a process of welding, which can be effected only when there are both pressure and difficulty in evading that pressure. And here, indeed, wo are reminded how, in extreme cases, the nature of the surface permanently determines the type of social life it bears. From the earliest recorded times, arid tracts in the East have been peopled by Semitic tribes having an adapted social type. The description given by Herodotus of the Scythian's mode of life and social organization, is substantially the same as that given of the Kalmucks by Pallas. Even were regions fitted for nomads to have their inhabitants exterminated, they would be re-peopled by refugees from neighbouring settled societies; who would similarly be compelled to wander, and would similarly acquire fit forms of union. There is, indeed, a modern instance in point: not exactly of a re-genesis of an adapted social type, but of a genesis de novo. Since the colonization of South America, some of the pampas have become the homes of robber-tribes like Bedouins.

Another trait of the inhabited area to be noted as influential, is its degree of heterogeneity. Other things equal, localities that are uniform in structure are unfavourable to social progress. Leaving out for the present its effects on the Flora and Fauna, sameness of surface implies absence of varied inorganic materials, absence of varied experiences, absence of varied habits, and, therefore, puts obstacles to industrial development and the arts of life. Neither Central Asia, nor Central Africa, nor the central region of either American continent, has been the seat of an indigenous civilization of any height. Regions like the Russian steppes, however possible it may be to carry into them civilization elsewhere developed, are regions within which civilization is not likely to be initiated; because the differentiating agencies are insufficient. When quite otherwise caused, uniformity of habitat has still the like effect. As Professor Dana asks respecting a coral-island: –

«How many of the various arts of civilized life could exist in a land where shells are the only cutting instruments ... fresh water barely enough for household purposes, – no streams, nor mountains, nor hills? How much of the poetry and literature of Europe would be intelligible to persons whose ideas had expanded only to the limits of a coral-island, who had never conceived of a surface of land above half a mile in breadth – of a slope higher than a beach, or of a change in seasons beyond a variation in the prevalence of rain?»

Contrariwise, the influences of geological and geographical heterogeneity in. furthering social development, are conspicuous. Though, considered absolutely, the Nile-valley is not physically multiform, yet it is multiform in comparison with surrounding tracts; and it presents that which seems the most constant antecedent to civilization – the juxtaposition of land and water. Though the Babylonians and Assyrians had habitats that were not specially varied, yet they were more varied than the riverless regions lying East and West. The strip of territory in which the Phoenician society arose, had a relatively-extensive coast; many rivers furnishing at their mouths sites for the chief cities; plains and valleys running inland, with hills between them and mountains beyond them. Still more does heterogeneity distinguish the area in which the Greek society evolved: it is varied in its multitudinous and complex distributions of land and sea, in its contour of surface, in its soil. «No part of Europe – perhaps it would not be too much to say no part of the world – presents so great a variety of natural features within the same area as Greece.» The Greeks themselves, indeed, observed the effects of local circumstances in so far as unlikeness between coast and interior goes. As says Mr. Grote: –

«The ancient philosophers and legislators were deeply impressed with the contrast between an inland and a maritime city: in the former simplicity and uniformity of life, tenacity of ancient habits and dislike of what is new and foreign, great force of exclusive sympathy and narrow range both of objects and ideas; in the latter, variety and novelty of sensations, expansive imagination, toleration and occasional preference for extraneous customs, greater activity of the individual and corresponding mutability of the state.»

Though the differences here described are mainly due to absence and presence of foreign intercourse; yet, since this itself is dependent on the, local relations of land and sea, these relations must be recognized as primary causes of the differences. Just observing that in Italy likewise, civilization found a seat of considerable complexity, geological and geographical, we may pass to the New World, where we see the same thing. Central America, which was the source of its indigenous civilizations, is characterized by comparative multiformity. So, too, with Mexico and with Peru. The Mexican tableland, surrounded by mountains, contained many lakes: that of Tezcuco, with its islands and shores, being the seat of Government; and through Peru, varied in surface, the Ynca-power spread from the mountainous islands of the large, irregular, elevated lake, Titicaca.

How soil affects progress remains to be observed. The belief that easy obtainment of food is unfavourable to social evolution, while not without an element of truth, is by no means true as currently accepted. The semi-civilized peoples of the Pacific – the Sandwich Islanders, Tahitians, Tongans, Samoans, Fijians – show us considerable advances made in places where great productiveness renders life unlaborious. In Sumatra, where rice yields 80 to 140 fold, and in Madagascar, where it yields 50 to 100 fold, social development has not been insignificant. Kaffirs, inhabiting a tract having rich and extensive pasturage, contrast favourably, both individually and socially, with neighbouring races occupying regions that are relatively unproductive; and those parts of Central Africa in which the indigenes have made most social progress, as Ashantee and Dahomey, have luxuriant vegetations. Indeed, if we call to mind the Nile-valley, and the exceptionally-fertilizing process it is subject to, we see that the most ancient social development known to us, began in a region which, fulfilling other requirements, was also characterized by great natural productiveness.

And here, with respect to fertility, we may recognize a truth allied to that which we recognized in respect to climate; namely, that the earlier stages of social evolution are possible only where the resistances to be overcome are small. As those arts of life by which loss of heat is prevented, must be considerably advanced before relatively-inclement regions can be well peopled; so, the agricultural arts must be considerably advanced before the less fertile tracts can support populations large enough for civilization. And since arts of every kind develop only as societies progress in size and structure, it follows that there must be societies having habitats where abundant food can be procured by inferior arts, before there can arise the arts required for dealing with less productive habitats. While yet low and feeble, societies can survive only where the circumstances are least trying. The ability to survive where circumstances are more trying can be possessed only by the higher and stronger societies descending from these; and inheriting their acquired organization, appliances, and knowledge.

It should be added that variety of soil is a factor of importance; since this helps to cause that multiplicity of vegetal products which largely aids social progress. In sandy Damara-land, where four kinds of mimosas exclude nearly every other kind of tree or bush, it is clear that, apart from further obstacles to progress, paucity of materials must be a great one. But here we verge upon another order of factors.

§ 18.

The character of its Flora affects in a variety of ways the fitness of a habitat fur supporting a society. At the chief of these we must glance.

Some of the Esquimaux have no wood at all; while others have only that which comes to them as ocean-drift. By using snow or ice to build their houses, and by the shifts they are put to in making cups of seal-skin, fishing-lines and nets of whalebone, and even bows of bone or horn, these people show us how greatly advance in the arts of life is hindered by lack of fit vegetal products. With this Arctic race, too, as also with the nearly Antarctic Fuegians, we see that the absence or extreme scarcity of useful plants is an insurmountable impediment to social progress. Evidence better than that furnished by these regions (where extreme cold is a coexisting hindrance) comes from Australia; where, in a climate that is on the whole favourable, the paucity of plants available for the purposes of life has been a part-cause of continued arrest at the lowest stage of barbarism. Large tracts of it, supporting but one inhabitant to sixty square miles, admit of no approach to that populousness which is a needful antecedent to civilization.

Conversely, after observing how growth of population, making social advance possible, is furthered by abundance of vegetal products, we may observe how variety of vegetal products conduces to the same effect. Not only in the cases of the slightly-developed societies occupying regions covered by a heterogeneous Flora, do we see that dependence on many kinds of roots, fruits, cereals, etc., is a safeguard against the famines caused by failure of any single crop; but we see that the materials furnished by a heterogeneous Flora, make possible a multiplication of appliances, a consequent advance of the arts, and an accompanying development of skill and intelligence. The Tahitians have on their islands, fit woods for the frameworks and roofs of houses, with palm-leaves for thatch; there are plants yielding fibres out of which to twist cords, fishing lines, matting, etc.; the tapa-bark, duly prepared, furnishes a cloth for their various articles of dress; they have cocoa-nuts for cups, etc., materials for baskets, sieves, and various domestic implements; they have plants giving them scents for their unguents, flowers for their wreaths and necklaces; they have dyes for stamping patterns on their dresses – all besides the various foods, bread-fruit, taro, yams, sweet-potatoes, arrow-root, fern-root, cocoa-nuts, plantains, bananas, jambo, ti-root, sugar-cane, etc.: enabling them to produce numerous made dishes. And the utilization of all these materials implies a culture which in various ways furthers social advance. Kindred results from like causes have arisen among an adjacent people, widely unlike in character and political organization. In a habitat characterized by a like variety of vegetal products, those ferocious cannibals the Fijians, have developed their arts to a degree comparable with that of the Tahitians, and have a division of labour and a commercial organization that are even superior. Among the thousand species of indigenous plants in the Fiji Islands, there are such as furnish materials for all purposes, from the building of war-canoes carrying 300 men down to the making of dyes and perfumes. It may, indeed, be urged that the New Zealanders, exhibiting a social development akin to that reached in Tahiti and Fiji, had a habitat of which the indigenous Flora was not varied. But the reply is that both by their language and their mythology, the New Zealanders are shown to have separated from other Malayo-Polynesians after the arts of life had been considerably advanced; and that they brought these arts (as well as some cultivated plants) to a region which, though poor in edible plants, supplied in abundance plants otherwise useful.

As above hinted, mere luxuriance of vegetation is in some cases a hindrance to progress. Even that inclement region inhabited by the Fuegians, is, strange to say, made worse by the dense growth of useless underwood which clothes the rocky hills. Living though they do under conditions otherwise so different, the Andamanese, too, are restricted to the borders of the sea, by the impenetrable thickets which cover the land. Indeed various equatorial regions, made almost useless even to the semi-civilized by jungle and tangled forest, were utterly useless to the aborigines, who had no tools for clearing the ground. The primitive man, possessing rude stone implements only, found but few parts of the Earth's surface which, neither too barren nor bearing too luxuriant a vegetation, were available: so again reminding us that rudimentary societies are at the mercy of environing conditions.

§ 19.

There remains to be treated the Fauna of the region inhabited. Evidently this affects greatly both the degree of social growth and the type of that growth.

The presence or absence of wild animals fit for food, influential as it is in determining the kind of individual life, is therefore influential in determining the kind of social organization. Where, as in North America, there existed game enough to support the aboriginal races, hunting continued the dominant activity; and a partially-nomadic habit being entailed by migrations after game, there was a persistent impediment to agriculture, to increase of population, and to industrial development. We have but to consider the antithetical case of the various Polynesian races, and to observe how, in the absence of a considerable land-Fauna, they have been forced into agriculture with its concomitant settled life, larger population, and advanced arts, to see how great an effect the kind and amount of utilizable animal-life has on civilization. When we glance at that pastoral type of society which, still existing, has played in past times an important part in human progress, we again see that over wide regions the indigenous Fauna has been chiefly influential in fixing the form of social union. On the one hand, in the absence of herbivores admitting of domestication – horses, camels, oxen, sheep, goats – the pastoral life followed by the three great conquering races in their original habitats, would have been impossible; and, on the other hand, this kind of life was inconsistent with that formation of larger settled unions which is needed for the higher social relations. On recalling the cases of the Laplanders with their reindeer and dogs, the Tartars with their horses and cattle, and the South Americans with their llamas and guinea-pigs, it becomes obvious, too. that in various cases this nature of the Fauna, joined with that of the surface, still continues to be a cause of arrest at a certain stage of evolution.

While the Fauna as containing an abundance or scarcity of creatures useful to man is an important factor, it is also an important factor as containing an abundance or scarcity of injurious creatures. The presence of the larger carnivores is, in some places, a serious impediment to social life; as in Sumatra, where villages are not uncommonly depopulated by tigers; as in India, where «a single tigress caused the destruction of 13 villages, and 250 square miles of country were thrown out of cultivation», and where «in 1869 one tigress killed 127 people, and stopped a public road for many weeks.» Indeed we need but recall the evils once suffered in England from wolves, and those still suffered in some parts of Europe, to see that freedom to carry on out-door occupations and intercourse, which is among the conditions to social advance, may be hindered by predatory animals. Nor must we forget how greatly agriculture is occasionally interfered with by reptiles; as, again, in India, where over 25,000 persons die of snake-bite annually. To which evils directly inflicted by the higher animals, must be added the indirect evils which they join insects in inflicting, by destroying crops. Sometimes injuries of this last kind considerably affect the mode of individual life and consequently of social life; as in Kaffirland, where crops are subject to great depredations from mammals, birds, and insects, and where the transformation of the pastoral state into a higher state is thus, discouraged; or as in the Bechuana-country, which, while «peopled with countless herds of game, is sometimes devastated by swarms of locusts.» Clearly, where the industrial tendencies are feeble, uncertainty in getting a return for labour must hinder the development of them, and cause reversion to older modes of life, if these can still be pursued.

Many other mischiefs, caused especially by insects, seriously interfere with social progress. Even familiar experiences in Scotland, where the midges sometimes drive one indoors, show how greatly «the plague of flies» must, in tropical regions, impede outdoor labour. Where, as on the Orinoco, the morning salutation is – «How are we to-day for the mosquitos?» and where the torment is such that a priest could not believe Humboldt voluntarily submitted to it merely that he might see the country, the desire for relief must often out-balance the already-feeble motive to work. Even the effects of flies on cattle indirectly modify social life; as among the Kirghiz, who, in May, when the steppes are covered with rich pasture, are obliged by the swarms of Hies to take their herds to the mountains; or as in Africa, where the tsetse negatives the pastoral occupation in some localities. And then, in other cases, great discouragement results from the termites, which, in parts of East Africa, consume dress, furniture, beds, etc. «A man may be rich to-day and poor to-morrow, from the ravages of the white ants», said a Portuguese merchant to Livingstone. Nor is this all Humboldt remarks that where the termites destroy all documents, there can be no advanced civilization.

Thus there is a close relation between the type of social life indigenous in a locality, and the character of the indigenous Fauna. The presence or absence of useful species, and the presence or absence of injurious species, have their favouring and hindering effects. And there is not only so produced a furtherance or retardation of social progress, generally considered, but there is produced more or less speciality in the structures and activities of the community.

§ 20.

To describe fully these original external factors is out of the question. An approximately-complete account of the classes characterized above, would be a work of years; and there would have to be added many environing conditions not yet indicated.

Effects of differences in degree and distribution of light, as illustrated by the domesticity and culture which the Arctic night causes among the Icelanders, would have to be treated; as also the minor effects due to greater or less brilliancy of ordinary daylight in sunny and cloudy climates on the mental states, and therefore on the actions, of the inhabitants. The familiar fact that habitual fineness of weather and habitual inclemency, lead respectively to out-door social intercourse and in-door family-life, and so influence the characters of citizens, would have to be taken into account. So, too, would the modifications of ideas and feelings wrought by imposing meteorologic and geologic phenomena. And beyond the effects, made much of by Mr. Buckle, which these produce on men's imaginations, and consequently on their behaviour, there would have to be noted their effects of other orders: as, for instance, those which frequent earthquakes have on the type of architecture – causing a preference for houses that are low and slight; and so modifying both the domestic arrangements and the aesthetic culture. Again, the character of the fuel which a locality yields has consequences that ramify in various directions; as we see in the contrast between our own coal-burning London, with its blackened gloomy streets, and the wood-burning cities of the continent, where general lightness and bright colours induce a different state of feeling having different results. How the mineralogy of a region acts, scarcely needs pointing out. Entire absence of metals may cause local persistence of the stone-age; presence of copper may initiate advance; presence or proximity of tin, rendering bronze possible, may cause a further step; and if there are iron-ores, a still further step may presently be taken. So, too, the supply or lack of lime for mortar, affects the sizes and types of buildings, private and public; and thus influences domestic and social habits, as well as art-progress. Even down to such a minor peculiarity as the presence of hot springs, which in ancient Central America initiated a local manufacture of pottery, there would have to be traced the influence of each physical condition in determining the prevailing industry, and therefore, in part, the social organization.

But a detailed account of the original external factors, whether of the more important kinds outlined in the preceding pages or of the less important kinds just exemplified, pertains to Special Sociology. Any one who, carrying with him the general principles of the science, undertook to interpret the evolution of each society, would have to describe completely these many local causes in their various kinds and degrees. Such an undertaking must be left for the sociologists of the future.

§ 21.