I. THE DEFINITION OF SOCIETY
(1) Kistiakowski, Dr. Th. _Gesellschaft und Einselwesen; eine
methodologische Studie._ Berlin, 1899. [A review and criticism of the
principal conceptions of society with reference to their value for a
natural science of society.]
(2) Barth, Paul. _Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Sociologie._
Leipzig, 1897. [A comparison of the different schools and an attempt to
interpret them as essays in the philosophy of history.]
(3) Espinas, Alfred. _Des sociétés animales._ Paris, 1877. [A definition
of society based upon a comparative study of animal associations,
communities, and societies.]
(4) Spencer, Herbert. "The Social Organism," _Essays, Scientific,
Political and Speculative_. I, 265-307. New York, 1892. [First published
in _The Westminster Review_ for January, 1860.]
(5) Lazarus, M., and Steinthal, H. "Einleitende Gedanken zur
Völkerpsychologie als Einladung zu einer Zeitschrift für
Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft," _Zeitschrift für
Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft_, I (1860), 1-73. [This is the
most important early attempt to interpret social phenomena from a social
psychological point of view. See p. 35 for definition of _Volk_ "the
people."]
(6) Knapp, G. Friedrich. "Quételet als Theoretiker," _Jahrbücher für
Nationalökonomie und Statistik_, XVIII (1872), 89-124.
(7) Lazarus, M. _Das Leben der Seele in Monographien über seine
Erscheinungen und Gesetze._ Berlin, 1876.
(8) Durkheim, Émile. "Représentations individuelles et représentations
collectives," _Revue de métaphysique et de morale_, VI (1898), 273-302.
(9) Simmel, Georg. _Über sociale Differenzierung._ Sociologische und
psychologische Untersuchungen. Leipzig, 1890.
[See also in Bibliography, chap. i, volumes listed under Systematic
Treatises.]
II. PLANT COMMUNITIES AND ANIMAL SOCIETIES
(1) Clements, Frederic E. _Plant Succession._ An analysis of the
development of vegetation. Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916.
(2) Wheeler, W. M. "The Ant-Colony as an Organism," _Journal of
Morphology_, XXII (1911), 307-25.
(3) Parmelee, Maurice. _The Science of Human Behavior._ Biological and
Psychological Foundations. New York, 1913. [Bibliography.]
(4) Massart, J., and Vandervelde, É. _Parasitism, Organic and Social._
2d ed. Translated by W. Macdonald. Revised by J. Arthur Thomson. London,
1907.
(5) Warming, Eug. _Oecology of Plants._ An introduction to the study of
plant communities. Oxford, 1909. [Bibliography.]
(6) Adams, Charles C. _Guide to the Study of Animal Ecology._ New York,
1913. [Bibliography.]
(7) Waxweiler, E. "Esquisse d'une sociologie," _Travaux de l'Institut de
Sociologie (Solvay), Notes et mémoires_, Fasc. 2. Bruxelles, 1906.
(8) Reinheimer, H. _Symbiosis._ A socio-physiological study of
evolution. London, 1920.
III. THE CLASSIFICATION OF SOCIAL GROUPS
A. _Types of Social Group_
1. Non-territorial Groups:
(1) Le Bon, Gustave. _The Crowd._ A study of the popular mind. London,
1897.
(2) Sighele, S. _Psychologie des sectes._ Paris, 1898.
(3) Tarde, G. _L'opinion et la foule._ Paris, 1901.
(4) Fahlbeck, Pontus. _Klasserna och Samhallet._ Stockholm, 1920. (Book
review in _American Journal of Sociology_, XXVI [1920-21], 633-34.)
(5) Nesfield, John C. _Brief View of the Caste System of the
North-western Provinces and Oudh_. Allahabad, 1885.
2. Territorial Groups:
(1) Simmel, Georg. "Die Grossstädte und das Geistesleben," _Die
Grossstadt_, Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, von K. Bücher,
F. Ratzel, G. v. Mayr, H. Waentig, G. Simmel, Th. Peterman, und D.
Schäfer. Dresden, 1903.
(2) Galpin, C. J. _The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community._
Madison, Wis., 1915. (Agricultural experiment station of the University
of Wisconsin. Research Bulletin 34.) [See also _Rural Life_, New York,
1918.]
(3) Aronovici, Carol. _The Social Survey._ Philadelphia, 1916.
(4) McKenzie, R. D. _The Neighborhood._ A study of local life in
Columbus, Ohio. Chicago, 1921 [in press].
(5) Park, Robert E. "The City. Suggestions for the Investigation of
Human Behavior in the City Environment," _American Journal of
Sociology_, XX (1914-15), 577-612.
(6) Sims, Newell L. _The Rural Community, Ancient and Modern._ New York,
1920.
B. _Studies of Individual Communities:_
(1) Maine, Sir Henry. _Village-Communities in the East and West._
London, 1871.
(2) Baden-Powell, H. _The Indian Village Community._ Examined with
reference to the physical, ethnographic, and historical conditions of
the provinces. London, 1896.
(3) Seebohm, Frederic. _The English Village Community._ Examined in its
relations to the manorial and tribal systems and to the common or open
field system of husbandry. An essay in economic history. London, 1883.
(4) McGee, W. J. "The Seri Indians," _Bureau of American Ethnology 17th
Annual Report 1895-96._ Washington, 1898.
(5) Rivers, W. H. R. _The Todas._ London and New York, 1906.
(6) Jenks, Albert. _The Bontoc Igorot._ Manila, 1905.
(7) Stow, John. _A Survey of London._ Reprinted from the text of 1603
with introduction and notes by C. L. Kingsford. Oxford, 1908.
(8) Booth, Charles. _Life and Labour of the People in London_, 9 vols.
London and New York, 1892-97. 8 additional volumes, 1902.
(9) Kellogg, P. U., ed. _The Pittsburgh Survey._ Findings in 6 vols.
Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1909-14.
(10) Woods, Robert. _The City Wilderness._ A settlement study, south end
of Boston. Boston, 1898. ----. _Americans in Process._ A settlement
study, north and west ends of Boston. Boston, 1902.
(11) Kenngott, G. F. _The Record of a City._ A social survey of Lowell,
Massachusetts. New York, 1912.
(12) Harrison, Shelby M., ed. _The Springfield Survey._ A study of
social conditions in an American city. Findings in 3 vols. Russell Sage
Foundation. New York, 1918.
(13) Roberts, Peter. _Anthracite Coal Communities._ A study of the
demography, the social, educational, and moral life of the anthracite
regions. New York and London, 1904.
(14) Williams, J. M. _An American Town._ A sociological study. New York,
1906.
(15) Wilson, Warren H. _Quaker Hill._ A sociological study. New York,
1907.
(16) Taylor, Graham R. _Satellite Cities._ A study of industrial
suburbs. New York and London, 1915.
(17) Lewis, Sinclair. _Main Street._ New York, 1920.
(18) Kobrin, Leon. _A Lithuanian Village._ Translated from the Yiddish
by Isaac Goldberg. New York, 1920.
IV. THE STUDY OF THE FAMILY
A. _The Primitive Family_
1. The Natural History of Marriage:
(1) Bachofen, J. J. _Das Mutterrecht._ Eine Untersuchung über die
Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen
Natur. Stuttgart, 1861.
(2) Westermarck, E. _The History of Human Marriage._ London, 1891.
(3) McLennan, J. F. _Primitive Marriage._ An inquiry into the origin of
the form of capture in marriage ceremonies. Edinburgh, 1865.
(4) Tylor, E. B. "The Matriarchal Family System," _Nineteenth Century_,
XL (1896), 81-96.
(5) Dargun, L. von. _Mutterrecht und Vaterrecht._ Leipzig, 1892.
(6) Maine, Sir Henry. _Dissertations on Early Law and Custom._ Chap.
vii. London, 1883.
(7) Letourneau, C. _The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family._
(Trans.) New York, 1891.
(8) Kovalevsky, M. _Tableau des origines et de l'évolution de la famille
et de la propriété._ Stockholm, 1890.
(9) Lowie, Robert H. _Primitive Society._ New York, 1920.
(10) Starcke, C. N. _The Primitive Family in Its Origin and
Development._ New York, 1889.
(11) Hobhouse, L. T., Wheeler, G. C., and Ginsberg, M. _The Material
Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples._ London, 1915.
(12) Parsons, Elsie Clews. _The Family._ An ethnographical and
historical outline. New York and London, 1906.
2. Studies of Family Life in Different Cultural Areas:
(1) Spencer, B., and Gillen, F. J. _The Native Tribes of Central
Australia._ Chap. iii, "Certain Ceremonies Concerned with Marriage," pp.
92-111. London and New York, 1899.
(2) Rivers, W. H. R. _Kinship and Social Organization._ "Studies in
Economics and Political Science," No. 36. In the series of monographs by
writers connected with the London School of Economics and Political
Science. London, 1914.
(3) Rivers, W. H. R. "Kinship," _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to
Torres Straits, Report._ V, 129-47, VI, 92-125.
(4) Kovalevsky, M. "La famille matriarcale au Caucase,"
_L'Anthropologie_, IV (1893), 259-78.
(5) Thomas, N. W. _Kinship Organizations and Group Marriage in
Australia._ Cambridge, 1906.
(6) Malinowski, Bronislaw. _The Family among the Australian Aborigines._
A sociological study. London, 1913.
B. _Materials for the Study of Familial Attitudes and Sentiments_
(1) Frazer, J. G. _Totemism and Exogamy._ A treatise on certain early
forms of superstition and society. London, 1910.
(2) Durkheim, É. "La prohibition de l'inceste et ses origines," _L'année
sociologique._ I (1896-97), 1-70.
(3) Ploss, H. _Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde._ Leipzig, 1902.
(4) Lasch, R. "Der Selbstmord aus erotischen Motiven bei den primitiven
Völkern," _Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft_, II (1899), 578-85.
(5) Jacobowski, L. "Das Weib in der Poesie der Hottentotten," _Globus_,
LXX (1896), 173-76.
(6) Stoll, O. _Das Geschlechtsleben in der Völkerpsychologie._ Leipzig,
1908.
(7) Crawley, A. E. "Sexual Taboo: A Study in the Relations of the
Sexes," _The Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, XXIV (1894-95),
116-25; 219-35; 430-46.
(8) Simmel, G. "Zur Psychologie der Frauen," _Zeitschrift für
Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft_, XX, 6-46.
(9) Finck, Henry T. _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty._ Their
development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities.
London and New York, 1887.
(10) ----. _Primitive Love and Love Stories_. New York, 1899.
(11) Kline, L. W. "The Migratory Impulse versus Love of Home," _American
Journal of Psychology_, X (1898-99), 1-81.
(12) Key, Ellen. _Love and Marriage._ Translated from the Swedish by A.
G. Chater; with a critical and biographical introduction by Havelock
Ellis. New York and London, 1912.
(13) Meisel-Hess, Grete. _The Sexual Crisis._ A critique of our sex
life. Translated from the German by E. and C. Paul. New York, 1917.
(14) Bloch, Iwan. _The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relation to Modern
Civilization._ Translated from the 6th German ed. by M. Eden Paul. Chap.
viii, "The Individualization of Love," pp. 159-76. London, 1908.
C. _Economics of the Family_
(1) Grosse, Ernst. _Die Formen der Familie und die Formen der
Wirtschaft._ Freiburg, 1896.
(2) Le Play, P. G. Frédéric. _Les ouvriers européens._ Études sur les
travaux, la vie domestique, et la condition morale des populations
ouvrières de l'Europe. Précédées d'un exposé de la méthode
d'observation. Paris, 1855. [Comprises a series of 36 monographs on the
budgets of typical families selected from the most diverse industries.]
(3) Le Play, P. G. Frédéric. _L'organisation de la famille._ Selon le
vrai modèle signalé par l'histoire de toutes les races et de tous les
temps. Paris, 1871.
(4) Engel, Ernst. _Die Lebenskosten belgischer Arbeiter-Familien früher
und jetzt._ Ermittelt aus Familien-Haushaltrechnungen und vergleichend
zusammengestellt. Dresden, 1895.
(5) Chapin, Robert C. _The Standard of Living among Workingmen's
Families in New York City._ Russell Sage Foundation. New York, 1909.
(6) Talbot, Marion, and Breckinridge, Sophonisba P. _The Modern
Household._ Rev. ed. Boston, 1919. [Bibliography at the end of each
chapter.]
(7) Nesbitt, Florence. _Household Management._ Preface by Mary E.
Richmond. Russell Sage Foundation. New York, 1918.
D. _The Sociology of the Family_
1. Studies in Family Organization:
(1) Bosanquet, Helen. _The Family._ London and New York, 1906.
(2) Durkheim, É. "Introduction à la sociologie de la famille." _Annales
de la faculté des lettres de Bordeaux_ (1888), 257-81.
(3) ----. "La famille conjugale," _Revue philosophique_, XLI (1921),
1-14.
(4) Howard, G. E. _A History of Matrimonial Institutions Chiefly in
England and the United States._ With an introductory analysis of the
literature and theories of primitive marriage and the family. 3 vols.
Chicago, 1904.
(5) Thwing, Charles F. and Carrie F. B. _The Family._ A historical and
social study. Boston, 1887.
(6) Goodsell, Willystine. _A History of the Family as a Social and
Educational Institution._ New York, 1915.
(7) Dealey, J. Q. _The Family in Its Sociological Aspects._ Boston,
1912.
(8) Calhoun, Arthur W. _A Social History of the American Family from
Colonial Times to the Present._ 3 vols. Cleveland, 1917-19.
[Bibliography.]
(9) Thomas, W. I., and Znaniecki, F. _The Polish Peasant in Europe and
America._ "Primary-Group Organization," I, 87-524, II. Boston, 1918. [A
study based on correspondence between members of the family in America
and Poland.]
(10) Du Bois, W. E. B. _The Negro American Family._ Atlanta, 1908.
[Bibliography.]
(11) Williams, James M. "Outline of a Theory of Social Motives,"
_American Journal of Sociology_, XV (1909-10), 741-80. [Theory of
motives based upon observation of rural and urban families.]
2. Materials for the Study of Family Disorganization:
(1) Willcox, Walter F. _The Divorce Problem._ A study in statistics.
("Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law,"
Vol. I. New York, 1891.)
(2) Lichtenberger, J. P. _Divorce._ A study in social causation. New
York, 1909.
(3) United States Bureau of the Census. _Marriage and Divorce_,
1867-1906. 2 vols. Washington, 1908-09. [Results of two federal
investigations.]
(4) ----. _Marriage and Divorce 1916._ Washington, 1919.
(5) Eubank, Earle E. _A Study in Family Desertion._ Department of Public
Welfare. Chicago, 1916. [Bibliography.]
(6) Breckinridge, Sophonisba P., and Abbott, Edith. _The Delinquent
Child and the Home._ A study of the delinquent wards of the Juvenile
Court of Chicago. Russell Sage Foundation. New York, 1912.
(7) Colcord, Joanna. _Broken Homes._ A study of family desertion and its
social treatment. Russell Sage Foundation. New York, 1919.
(8) Kammerer, Percy G. _The Unmarried Mother._ A study of five hundred
cases. Boston, 1918.
(9) Ellis, Havelock. _The Task of Social Hygiene._ Boston, 1912.
(10) Myerson, Abraham. "Psychiatric Family Studies," _American Journal
of Insanity_, LXXIV (April, 1918), 497-555.
(11) Morrow, Prince A. _Social Diseases and Marriage._ Social
prophylaxis. New York, 1904.
(12) Periodicals on Social Hygiene:
_Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Bd. 1, April, 1914-, Bonn [1915-].
_Social Hygiene_, Vol. I, December, 1914-, New York [1915-].
_Die Neuere Generation_, Bd. I, 1908-Berlin [1908-]. Preceded by
_Mutterschutz_, Vols. I-III.
TOPICS FOR WRITTEN THEMES
1. Society and the Individual: The Cardinal Problem of Sociology.
2. Historic Conceptions of Society: Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, etc.
3. Plant Communities.
4. Animal Societies: The Ant Colony, the Bee Hive.
5. Animal Communities, or Studies in Animal Ecology.
6. Human Communities, Human Ecology, and Economics.
7. The Natural Areas of the City.
8. Studies in Group Consciousness: National, Sectional, State, Civic.
9. Co-operation versus Consensus.
10. Taming as a Form of Social Control.
11. Domestication among Plants, Animals, and Man.
12. Group Unity and the Different Forms of Consensus: _Esprit de corps_,
Morale, Collective Representations.
13. The Social Nature of Concepts.
14. Conduct and Behavior.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What, in your opinion, are the essential elements in Espinas'
definition of society?
2. In what sense does society differ from association?
3. According to Espinas' definition, which of the following social
relations would constitute society: robber and robbed; beggar and
almsgiver; charity organization and recipients of relief; master and
slave; employer and employee?
4. What illustrations of symbiosis in human society occur to you?
5. Are changes resulting from human symbiosis changes (a) of
structure, or (b) of function?
6. What are the likenesses and the differences between social symbiosis
in human and in ant society?
7. What is the difference between taming and domestication?
8. What is the relation of domestication to society?
9. Is man a _tamed_ or a _domesticated_ animal?
10. What are the likenesses between a plant and a human community? What
are the differences?
11. What is the fundamental difference between a plant community and an
ant society?
12. What are the differences between human and animal societies?
13. Does the ant have customs? ceremonies?
14. Do you think that there is anything akin to public sentiment in ant
society?
15. What is the relation of education to social heredity?
16. In what way do you differentiate between the characteristic behavior
of machines and human beings?
17. "Society not only continues to exist _by_ transmission, _by_
communication, but it may fairly be said to exist _in_ transmission,
_in_ communication." Interpret.
18. How does Dewey's definition of society differ from that of Espinas?
Which do you prefer? Why?
19. Is consensus synonymous with co-operation?
20. Under what conditions would Dewey characterize the following social
relations as society: master and slave; employer and employee; parent
and child; teacher and student?
21. In what sense does the communication of an experience to another
person change the experience itself?
22. In what sense are concepts _social_ in contrast with sensations
which are _individual_? Would it be possible to have concepts outside of
group life?
23. How does Park distinguish between behavior and conduct?
24. In what ways is human society in its origin and continuity based on
conduct?
25. To what extent does "the animal nature of man" (Hobhouse) provide a
basis for the social organization of life?
26. What, according to Hobhouse, are the _differentia_ of human morality
from animal behavior?
27. What do you understand by a collective representation?
28. How do you distinguish between the terms society, social community,
and group? Can you name a society that could not be considered as a
community? Can you name a community that is not a society?
29. In what, fundamentally, does the unity of the group consist?
30. What groups are omitted in Le Bon's classification of social groups?
Make a list of all the groups, formal and informal, of which you are a
member. Arrange these groups under the classification given in the
General Introduction (p. 50). Compare this classification with that made
by Le Bon.
31. How do you distinguish between _esprit de corps_, morale, and
collective representation as forms of consensus?
32. Classify under _esprit de corps_, morale, or collective
representation the following aspects of group behavior: rooting at a
football game; army discipline; the flag; college spirit; the so-called
"war psychosis"; the fourteen points of President Wilson; "the English
never know when they are beaten"; slogans; "Paris refrains from
exultation"; crowd enthusiasm; the Golden Rule; "where there's a will
there's a way"; Grant's determination, "I'll fight it out this way if it
takes all summer"; ideals.
33. "The human mind has a large capacity for adopting beliefs that fit
the trends of its habits and feelings." Give concrete illustrations
outside of army life.
34. What is the importance of the study of the family as a social
group?
FOOTNOTES:
[80] See _supra_, chap. i, pp. 50-51.
[81] Translated from Alfred Espinas, _Des sociétés animales_ (1878), pp.
157-60.
[82] Adapted from William M. Wheeler, _Ants, Their Structure,
Development, Behavior_, pp. 339-424. (Columbia University Press, 1910.)
[83] Adapted from P. Chalmers Mitchell, _The Childhood of Animals_, pp.
204-21. (Frederick A. Stokes & Co., 1912.)
[84] Adapted from Eugenius Warming, _Oecology of Plants_, pp. 12-13,
91-95. (Oxford University Press, 1909.)
[85] Adapted from William E. Wheeler, _Ants, Their Structure,
Development, and Behavior_, pp. 5-7. (Columbia University Press, 1910.)
[86] From John Dewey, _Democracy and Education_, pp. 1-7. (Published by
The Macmillan Co., 1916. Reprinted by permission.)
[87] From Robert E. Park, _Principles of Human Behavior_, pp. 1-9. (The
Zalaz Corporation, 1915.)
[88] Adapted from L. T. Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_, pp. 1-2, 10-12.
(Henry Holt & Co., 1915.)
[89] Adapted from Émile Durkheim, _Elementary Forms of Religious Life_,
pp. 432-37. (Allen & Unwin, 1915.)
[90] From Albion W. Small, _General Sociology_, pp. 495-97. (The
University of Chicago Press, 1905.)
[91] From R. E. Park, "Education in Its Relation to the Conflict and
Fusion of Cultures," in the _Publications of the American Sociological
Society_, VIII (1918), 38-40.
[92] Translated from S. Sighele, _Psychologie des Sectes_, pp. 42-51.
(M. Giard et Cie., 1898.)
[93] Adapted from William E. Hocking, _Morale and Its Enemies_, pp.
3-37. (Yale University Press, 1918.)
CHAPTER IV
I. INTRODUCTION
1. Geological and Biological Conceptions of Isolation
Relations of persons with persons, and of groups with groups, may be
either those of isolation or those of contact. The emphasis in this
chapter is placed upon _isolation_, in the next chapter upon _contact_
in a comparison of their effects upon personal conduct and group
behavior.
Absolute isolation of the person from the members of his group is
unthinkable. Even biologically, two individuals of the higher animal
species are the precondition to a new individual existence. In man,
postnatal care by the parent for five or six years is necessary even for
the physiological survival of the offspring. Not only biologically but
sociologically complete isolation is a contradiction in terms.
Sociologists following Aristotle have agreed with him that human nature
develops within and decays outside of social relations. Isolation, then,
in the social as well as the biological sense is _relative_, not
_absolute_.
The term "isolation" was first employed in anthropogeography, the study
of the relation of man to his physical environment. To natural barriers,
as mountains, oceans, and deserts, was attributed an influence upon the
location of races and the movements of peoples and the kind and the
degree of cultural contact. The nature and the extent of separation of
persons and groups was considered by geographers as a reflex of the
physical environment.
In biology, isolation as a factor in the evolution and the life of the
species, is studied from the standpoint of the animal group more than
from that of the environment. Consequently, the separation of species
from each other is regarded as the outcome not only of a sheer physical
impossibility of contact, but even more of other factors as differences
in physical structure, in habits of life, and in the instincts of the
animal groups. J. Arthur Thomson in his work on "Heredity" presents the
following compact and illuminating statement of isolation as a factor in
inheritance.
The only other directive evolution-factor that biologists are
at all agreed about, besides selection, is isolation--a general
term for all the varied ways in which the radius of possible
intercrossing is narrowed. As expounded by Wagner, Weismann,
Romanes, Gulick, and others, isolation takes many
forms--spatial, structural, habitudinal, and psychical--and it
has various results.
It tends to the segregation of species into subspecies, it
makes it easier for new variations to establish themselves, it
promotes prepotency, or what the breeders call "transmitting
power," it fixes characters. One of the most successful breeds
of cattle (Polled Angus) seems to have had its source in one
farmsteading; its early history is one of close inbreeding, its
prepotency is remarkable, its success from our point of view
has been great. It is difficult to get secure data as to the
results of isolation in nature, but Gulick's recent volume on
the subject abounds in concrete illustrations, and we seem
warranted in believing that conditions of isolation have been
and are of frequent occurrence.
Reibmayr has collected from human history a wealth of
illustrations of various forms of isolation, and there seems
much to be said for his thesis that the establishment of a
successful race or stock requires the alternation of periods of
inbreeding (endogamy) in which characters are fixed, and
periods of outbreeding (exogamy) in which, by the introduction
of fresh blood, new variations are promoted. Perhaps the Jews
may serve to illustrate the influence of isolation in promoting
stability of type and prepotency; perhaps the Americans may
serve to illustrate the variability which a mixture of
different stocks tends to bring about. In historical inquiry
into the difficult problem of the origin of distinct races, it
seems legitimate to think of periods of "mutation"--of
discontinuous sporting--which led to numerous offshoots from
the main stock, of the migration of these variants into new
environments where in relative isolation they became prepotent
and stable.[94]
The biological use of the term "isolation" introduces a new emphasis.
Separation may be spatial, but its effects are increasingly structural
and functional. Indeed, spatial isolation was a factor in the origin of
species because of specialized organic adaptation to varied geographic
conditions. In other words, the structure of the species, its habits of
life, and its original and acquired responses, tend to isolate it from
other species.
Man as an animal species in his historical development has attempted
with fair success to destroy the barriers separating him from other
animals. Through domestication and taming he has changed the original
nature and habits of life of many animals. The dog, the companion of
man, is the summit of human achievement in association with animals.
Nevertheless, the barriers that separate the dog and his master are
insurmountable. Even if "a candidate for humanity," the dog is forever
debarred from any share in human tradition and culture.
2. Isolation and Segregation
In geography, isolation denotes separation in space. In sociology, the
essential characteristic of isolation is found in exclusion from
communication.
Geographical forms of isolation are sociologically significant in so far
as they prevent communication. The isolation of the mountain whites in
the southern states, even if based on spatial separation, consisted in
the absence of contacts and competition, participation in the
progressive currents of civilization.
Biological differences, whether physical or mental, between the
different races are sociologically important to the extent to which they
affect communication. Of themselves, differences in skin color between
races would not prevent intercommunication of ideas. But the physical
marks of racial differences have invariably become the symbols of racial
solidarity and racial exclusiveness. The problems of humanity are
altogether different from what they would have been were all races of
one complexion as they are of one blood.
Certain physical and mental defects and differences in and of themselves
tend to separate the individual from his group. The deaf-mute and the
blind are deprived of normal avenues to communication. "My deafness,"
wrote Beethoven, "forces me to live in exile." The physically
handicapped are frequently unable to participate in certain human
activities on equal terms with their fellows. Minor physical defects and
marked physical variations from the normal tend to become the basis of
social discrimination.
Mental differences frequently offer still greater obstacles to social
contacts. The idiot and the imbecile are obviously debarred from normal
communication with their intelligent associates. The "dunce" was
isolated by village ridicule and contempt long before the term "moron"
was coined, or the feeble-minded segregated in institutions and
colonies. The individual with the highest native endowments, the genius,
and the talented enjoy or suffer from a more subtle type of isolation
from their fellows, that is, the isolation of eminence. "The reason of
isolation," says Thoreau, a lover of solitude, "is not that we love to
be alone, but that we love to soar; and when we soar, the company grows
thinner and thinner until there is none left."
So far, isolation as a tool of social analysis has been treated as an
effect of geographical separation or of structural differentiation
resulting in limitation of communication. Social distances are
frequently based on other subtler forms of isolation.
The study of cultural differences between groups has revealed barriers
quite as real and as effective as those of physical space and structure.
Variations in language, folkways, mores, conventions, and ideals
separate individuals and peoples from each other as widely as oceans and
deserts. Communication between England and Australia is far closer and
freer than between Germany and France.
Conflict groups, like sects and parties, and accommodation groups like
castes and classes depend for survival upon isolation. Free intercourse
of opposing parties is always a menace to their morale. Fraternization
between soldiers of contending armies, or between ministers of rival
denominations is fraught with peril to the fighting efficiency of the
organizations they represent. The solidarity of the group, like the
integrity of the individual, implies a measure at least of isolation
from other groups and persons as a necessary condition of its existence.
The life-history of any group when analyzed is found to incorporate
within it elements of isolation as well as of social contact. Membership
in a group makes for increasing contacts within the circle of
participants, but decreasing contacts with persons without. Isolation is
for this reason a factor in the preservation of individuality and unity.
The _esprit de corps_ and morale of the group is in large part
maintained by the fixation of attention upon certain collective
representations to the exclusion of others. The memories and sentiments
of the members have their source in common experiences of the past from
which non-members are isolated. This natural tendency toward exclusive
experiences is often reinforced by conscious emphasis upon secrecy.
Primitive and modern secret societies, sororities, and fraternities have
been organized around the principle of isolation. Secrecy in a society,
like reserve in an individual, protects it from a disintegrating
publicity. The family has its "skeleton in the closet," social groups
avoid the public "washing of dirty linen"; the community banishes from
consciousness, if it can, its slums, and parades its parks and
boulevards. Every individual who has any personality at all maintains
some region of privacy.
A morphological survey of group formation in any society discloses the
fact that there are lateral as well as vertical divisions in the social
structure. Groups are arranged in strata of relative superiority and
inferiority. In a stratified society the separation into castes is rigid
and quite unalterable. In a free society competition tends to destroy
classes and castes. New devices come into use to keep aspiring and
insurgent individuals and groups at the proper social level. If
"familiarity breeds contempt" respect may be secured by reserve. In the
army the prestige of the officer is largely a matter of "distance." The
"divinity that doth hedge the king" is due in large part to the hedge of
ceremonial separating him from his subjects. Condescension and pity,
while they denote external contact, involve an assumption of spiritual
eminence not to be found in consensus and sympathy. As protection
against the penetration of the inner precincts of personality and the
group individuality, there are the defenses of suspicion and aversion,
of reticence and reserve, designed to insure the proper social distance.
3. Classification of the Materials
The materials in the present chapter are intended to illustrate the fact
that individuality of the person and of the group is both an effect of
and a cause of isolation.
The first selections under the heading "Isolation and Personal
Individuality" bring out the point that the function of isolation in
personal development lies not so much in sheer physical separation from
other persons as in freedom from the control of external social
contacts. Thus Rousseau constructs an ideal society in the solitude of
his forest retreat. The lonely child enjoys the companionship of his
imaginary comrade. George Eliot aspires to join the choir invisible. The
mystic seeks communion with divinity.
This form of isolation within the realm of social contacts is known as
privacy. Indeed privacy may be defined as withdrawal from the group,
with, at the same time, ready access to it. It is in solitude that the
creative mind organizes the materials appropriated from the group in
order to make novel and fruitful innovations. Privacy affords
opportunity for the individual to reflect, to anticipate, to recast, and
to originate. Practical recognition of the human demand for privacy has
been realized in the study of the minister, the office of the business
man, and the den of the boy. Monasteries and universities are
institutions providing leisure and withdrawal from the world as the
basis for personal development and preparation for life's work. Other
values of privacy are related to the growth of self-consciousness,
self-respect, and personal ideals of conduct.
Many forms of isolation, unlike privacy, prevent access to stimulating
social contact. Selections under the heading "Isolation and Retardation"
indicate conditions responsible for the arrest of mental and personal
growth.
The cases of feral men, in the absence of contradictory evidence, seem
adequate in support of Aristotle's point that social contacts are
indispensable for human development. The story by Helen Keller, the
talented and celebrated blind deaf-mute, of her emergence from the
imprisonment of sense deprivation into the free life of communication is
a most significant sociological document. With all of us the change from
the animal-like isolation of the child at birth to personal
participation in the fullest human life is gradual. In Helen Keller's
case the transformation of months was telescoped into minutes. The
"miracle" of communication when sociologically analyzed seems to consist
in the transition from the experience of _sensations_ and _sense
perceptions_ which man shares in common with animals to the development
of _ideas_ and _self-consciousness_ which are the unique attributes of
human beings.
The remaining selections upon isolation and retardation illustrate the
different types of situations in which isolation makes for retardation
and retardation in turn emphasizes the isolation. The reversion of a
man of scientific training in the solitudes of Patagonia to the animal
level of mentality suggests that the low intelligence of the savage, the
peasant, and the backward races is probably due more to the absence of
stimulating contacts than to original mental inferiority. So the
individuality and conservatism of the farmer, his failure to keep pace
with the inhabitant of the town and city, Galpin assigns to deficiency
in social contacts. Then, too, the subtler forms of handicap in personal
development and achievement result from social types of isolation, as
race prejudice, the sheltered life of woman, exclusiveness of social
classes, and make for increased isolation.
Up to this point, isolation has been treated statically as a cause.
Under the heading, "Isolation and Segregation" it is conceived as an
effect, an effect of competition, and the consequent selection and
segregation.
The first effect of the introduction of competition in any society is to
break up all types of isolation and provincialism based upon lack of
communication and contact. But as competition continues, natural and
social selection comes into play. Successful types emerge in the process
of competitive struggle while variant individuals who fail to maintain
the pace or conform to standard withdraw or are ejected from the group.
Exiled variants from several groups under auspicious circumstances may
in turn form a community where the process of selection will be directly
opposite to that in their native groups. In the new community the
process of selection naturally accentuates and perfects the traits
originally responsible for exclusion. The outcome of segregation is the
creation of specialized social types with the maximum of isolation. The
circle of isolation is then complete.
This circular effect of the processes of competition, selection, and
segregation, from isolation to isolation, may be found everywhere in
modern western society. Individual variants with criminalistic
tendencies exiled from villages and towns through the process of
selection form a segregated group in city areas popularly called
"breeding places of crime." The tribe of Pineys, Tin Town, The Village
of a Thousand Souls, are communities made up by adverse selection of
feeble-minded individuals, outcasts of the competitive struggle of
intelligent, "high-minded" communities. The result is the formation of a
criminal type and of a feeble-minded caste. These slums and outcast
groups are in turn isolated from full and free communication with the
progressive outside world.
National individuality in the past, as indicated in the selections upon
"Isolation and National Individuality," has been in large degree the
result of a cultural process based upon isolation. The historical
nations of Europe, biologically hybrid, are united by common language,
folkways, and mores. This unity of mother tongue and culture is the
product of historical and cultural processes circumscribed, as Shaler
points out, by separated geographical areas.
A closer examination of the cultural process in the life of progressive
historical peoples reveals the interplay of isolation and social
contacts. Grote gives a penetrating analysis of Grecian achievement in
terms of the individuality based on small isolated land areas and the
contacts resulting from maritime communication. The world-hegemony of
English-speaking peoples today rests not only upon naval supremacy and
material resources but even more upon the combination of individual
development in diversified areas with large freedom in international
contacts.
II. MATERIALS
A. ISOLATION AND PERSONAL INDIVIDUALITY
1. Society and Solitude[95]
It had been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and
untruth together in few words than in that speech: "Whosoever is
delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god." For it is most
true that a natural and secret hatred and aversation towards society in
any man hath somewhat of the savage beast; but it is most untrue that it
should have any character at all of the divine nature except it proceed,
not out of a pleasure in solitude, but out of a love and desire to
sequester a man's self for a higher conversation, such as is found to
have been falsely and feignedly in some of the heathen, as Epimenides
the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and Apollonius of
Tyana; and truly and really in divers of the ancient hermits and Holy
Fathers of the Church. But little do men perceive what solitude is, and
how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a
gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no
love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little: _Magna civitas magna
solitudo_ ("A great town is a great solitude"), because in a great town
friends are scattered, so that there is not that fellowship, for the
most part, which is in less neighborhoods. But we may go further, and
affirm most truly that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true
friends, without which the world is but a wilderness; and, even in this
sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and
affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast and not
from humanity.
2. Society in Solitude[96]
What period do you think, sir, I recall most frequently and most
willingly in my dreams? Not the pleasures of my youth: they were too
rare, too much mingled with bitterness, and are now too distant. I
recall the period of my seclusion, of my solitary walks, of the fleeting
but delicious days that I have passed entirely by myself, with my good
and simple housekeeper, with my beloved dog, my old cat, with the birds
of the field, the hinds of the forest, with all nature, and her
inconceivable Author.
But what, then, did I enjoy when I was alone? Myself; the entire
universe; all that is; all that can be; all that is beautiful in the
world of sense; all that is imaginable in the world of intellect. I
gathered around me all that could delight my heart; my desires were the
limit of my pleasures. No, never have the voluptuous known such
enjoyments; and I have derived a hundred times more happiness from my
chimeras than they from their realities.
The wild spot of the forest [selected by Rousseau for his solitary walks
and meditations] could not long remain a desert to my imagination. I
soon peopled it with beings after my own heart, and, dismissing opinion,
prejudice, and all factitious passions, I brought to these sanctuaries
of nature men worthy of inhabiting them. I formed with these a charming
society, of which I did not feel myself unworthy. I made a golden age
according to my fancy, and, filling up these bright days with all the
scenes of my life that had left the tenderest recollections, and with
all that my heart still longed for, I affected myself to tears over the
true pleasures of humanity--pleasure so delicious, so pure, and yet so
far from men! Oh, if in these moments any ideas of Paris, of the age,
and of my little author vanity, disturbed my reveries, with what
contempt I drove them instantly away, to give myself up entirely to the
exquisite sentiments with which my soul was filled. Yet, in the midst of
all this, I confess the nothingness of my chimeras would sometimes
appear, and sadden me in a moment.
3. Prayer as a Form of Isolation[97]
He who prays begins his prayer with some idea of God, generally one that
he has received from instruction or from current traditions. He commonly
retires to a quiet place, or to a place having mental associations of
religious cast, in order to "shut out the world." This beginning of
concentration is followed by closing the eyes, which excludes a mass of
irrelevant impressions. The body bows, kneels, or assumes some other
posture that requires little muscular tension and that may favor
extensive relaxation. Memory now provides the language of prayer or of
hallowed scripture, or makes vivid some earlier experiences of one's
own. The worshiper represents to himself his needs, or the interests
(some of them happy ones) that seem most important, and he brings them
into relation to God by thinking how God regards them. The
presupposition of the whole procedure is that God's way of looking at
the matters in question is the true and important one. Around God, then,
the interests of the individual are now freshly organized. Certain ones
that looked large before the prayer began, now look small because of
their relation to the organizing idea upon which attention has focused.
On the other hand, interests that express this organizing idea gain
emotional quality by this release from competing, inhibiting
considerations. To say that the will now becomes organized toward unity
and that it acquires fresh power thereby is simply to name another
aspect of the one movement. This movement is ideational, emotional, and
volitional concentration, all in one, achieved by fixation of attention
upon the idea of God.
Persons who have been troubled with insomnia, or wakefulness or
disturbing dreams, have been enabled to secure sound sleep by merely
relaxing the muscles and repeating mechanically, without effort at
anything more, some formula descriptive of what is desired. The main
point is that attention should fix upon the appropriate organizing idea.
When this happens in a revival meeting one may find one's self
unexpectedly converted. When it happens in prayer one may be surprised
to find one's whole mood changed from discouragement to courage, from
liking something to hating it (as in the case of alcoholic drinks, or
tobacco), or from loneliness to the feeling of companionship with God.
This analysis of the structure of prayer has already touched upon some
of its functions. It is a way of getting one's self together, of
mobilizing and concentrating one's dispersed capacities, of begetting
the confidence that tends toward victory over difficulties. It produces
in a distracted mind the repose that is power. It freshens a mind
deadened by routine. It reveals new truth, because the mind is made more
elastic and more capable of sustained attention. Thus does it remove
mountains in the individual, and, through him, in the world beyond.
The values of prayer in sickness, distress, and doubt are by no means
measurable by the degree to which the primary causes thereof are made to
disappear. There is a real conquest of trouble, even while trouble
remains. It is sometimes a great source of strength, also, merely to
realize that one is fully understood. The value of having some friend or
helper from whom I reserve no secrets has been rendered more impressive
than ever by the Freud-Jung methods of relieving mental disorders
through (in part) a sort of mental house-cleaning, or bringing into the
open the patient's hidden distresses and even his most intimate and
reticent desires. Into the psychology of the healings that are brought
about by this psychoanalysis we need not go, except to note that one
constant factor appears to be the turning of a private possession into a
social possession, and particularly the consciousness that another
understands. I surmise that we shall not be far from the truth here if
we hold that, as normal experience has the _ego-alter_ form, so the
continuing possession of one's self in one's developing experience
requires development of this relation. We may, perhaps, go as far as to
believe that the bottling up of any experience as merely private is
morbid. But, however this may be, there are plenty of occasions when the
road to poise, freedom, and joy is that of social sharing. Hence the
prayer of confession, not only because it helps us to see ourselves as
we are, but also because it shares our secrets with another, has great
value for organizing the self. In this way we get relief from the
misjudgments of others, also, and from the mystery that we are to
ourselves, for we lay our case, as it were, before a judge who does not
err. Thus prayer has value in that it develops the essentially social
form of personal self-realization.
To complete this functional view of prayer we must not fail to secure
the evolutionary perspective. If we glance at the remote beginnings, and
then at the hither end, of the evolution of prayer we discover that an
immense change has taken place. It is a correlate of the transformed
character of the gods, and of the parallel disciplining of men's
valuations. In the words of Fosdick, prayer may be considered as
dominant desire. But it is also a way of securing domination over
desire. It is indeed self-assertion; sometimes it is the making of one's
supreme claim, as when life reaches its most tragic crisis; yet it is,
even in the same act, submission to an over-self. Here, then, is our
greater problem as to the function of prayer. It starts as the assertion
of any desire; it ends as _the organization of one's own desires into a
system of desires recognized as superior and then made one's own_.
4. Isolation, Originality, and Erudition[98]
The question as to how far the world's leaders in thought and action
were great readers is not quite an easy one to answer, partly because
the sources of information are sometimes scanty, and partly because
books themselves have been few in number. If we could prove that since
the days of Caxton the world's total of original thought declined in
proportion to the increase of published works, we should stand on firm
ground, and might give orders for a holocaust such as that which
Hawthorne once imagined. But no such proof is either possible or
probable. We can only be impressed by the fact that the finest
intellectual epoch of history was marked by a comparative absence of the
manuscripts which were books to the Greeks, and if a further analysis of
the lives of men of light and leading in all ages should show that
their devotion to the books of the period was slight, it will only
accentuate the suspicion that even today we are still minus the right
perspective between the printed volume and the thinking mind.
Buddha, Christ, St. Paul, Mohammed--these are names of men who changed
the course of history. But do they suggest vast scholarship, or a
profound acquaintance with books in any sense whatever? They were great
originators, even though they built on other men's foundations, but
their originality was not inspired by libraries. Can we imagine Mohammed
poring over ancient manuscripts in order to obtain the required
knowledge and impetus for his new religion? With Buddha was it not 1 per
cent papyrus roll and 99 per cent meditation? When St. Paul was struck
down on the way to Damascus, he did not repair to the nearest Jewish
seminary to read up prophecy. He says: "I went into Arabia." The desert
solitude was the only place in which to find a rationale of his new
experience. And was it not in a similar life of solitude that
Jesus--Essene-like--came to self-realization? Deane's _Pseudepigrapha:
Books that Influenced our Lord and His Apostles_ does not suggest that
the Messiah obtained his ideas from the literature of the Rabbis, much
less from Greek or other sources; indeed, the New Testament suggests
that in the earliest years he showed a genius for divine things.
It will be urged that to restrict this inquiry to great names in
religion would be unfair because such leaders are confessedly
independent of literature; indeed, they are often the creators of it.
True; but that fact alone is suggestive. If great literature can come
from meditation alone, are we not compelled to ask: "Where shall wisdom
be found and where is the place of understanding?" Is enlightenment to
be found only in the printed wisdom of the past? We know it is not, but
we also know it is useless to set one source of truth over against
another, as if they were enemies. The soul has its place and so has the
book; but need it be said that the soul has done more wonderful things
than the book? Language is merely the symbol; the soul is the reality.
But let us take other names with different associations--e.g., Plato,
Charlemagne, Caesar, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Bismarck. Can it be said of
any one of these that he owed one-third of his distinction to what he
learned from manuscripts or books? We do know, indeed, that Bismarck
was a wide reader, but it was on the selective principle as a student of
history and affairs. His library grew under the influence of the
controlling purpose of his life--i.e., the unification of Germany, so
that there was no vague distribution of energy. Of Shakespeare's reading
we know less, but there is no evidence that he was a collector of books
or that he was a student after the manner of the men of letters of his
day. The best way to estimate him as a reader is to judge him by the
references in his plays, and these do not show an acquaintance with
literature so extensive as it is intensive. The impression he made on
Ben Johnson, an all-round scholar, was not one of learning--quite
otherwise. The qualities that impressed the author of _Timber, or
Discoveries upon Men and Matter_, were Shakespeare's "open and free
nature," his "excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions
wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he
should be stopped." And, true to himself, Ben Jonson immediately adds:
"_Sufflaminandus erat_, as Augustus said of Haterius." Shakespeare, when
in the company of kindred spirits, showed precisely the kind of talk we
should expect--not Latin and Greek or French and Italian quotations, not
a commentary on books past or present, but a stream of conversation
marked by brilliant fancy, startling comparison, unique contrast, and
searching pathos, wherein life, not literature, was the chief subject.
B. ISOLATION AND RETARDATION
1. Feral Men[99]
What would the results be if children born with a normal organism and
given food and light sufficient to sustain life were deprived of the
usual advantage of human intercourse? What psychic growth would be
possible?
Perhaps no character ever aroused greater interest than Caspar Hauser.
More than a thousand articles of varying merit have been written
concerning him. In the theaters of England, France, Germany, Hungary,
and Austria, plays were founded on his strange story and many able men
have figured in the history of his case.
According to a letter which he bore when found at Nürnberg one afternoon
in 1828, he was born in 1812, left on the doorstep of a Hungarian
peasant's hut, adopted by him, and reared in strict seclusion.
At the time of his appearance in Nürnberg, he could walk only with
difficulty. He knew no German, understood but little that was said to
him, paid no heed to what went on about him, and was ignorant of social
customs. When taken to a stable, he at once fell asleep on a heap of
straw. In time it was learned that he had been kept in a low dark cell
on the ground; that he had never seen the face of the man who brought
him food, that sometimes he went to sleep after the man gave him a
drink; that on awakening he found his nails cut and clean clothing on
his body; and that his only playthings had been two wooden horses with
red ribbons.
When first found, he suffered much pain from the light, but he could see
well at night. He could distinguish fruit from leaves on a tree, and
read the name on a doorplate where others could see nothing in the
darkness. He had no visual idea of distance and would grasp at remote
objects as though they were near. He called both men and women _Bua_ and
all animals _Rosz_. His memory span for names was marvelous. Drawing
upon the pages of Von Kolb and Stanhope, a writer in _The Living Age_
says that he burned his hand in the first flame that he saw and that he
had no fear of being struck with swords, but that the noise of a drum
threw him into convulsions. He thought that pictures and statuary were
alive, as were plants and trees, bits of paper, and anything that
chanced to be in motion. He delighted in whistles and glittering
objects, but disliked the odor of paint, fabrics, and most flowers. His
hearing was acute and his touch sensitive at first, but after interest
in him had lessened, all his senses showed evidence of rapid
deterioration. He seemed to be wanting in sex instinct and to be unable
to understand the meaning of religious ceremonies. Merker, who observed
him secretly during the early days which he spent in jail, declared that
he was "in all respects like a child." Meyer, of the school at Ansbach,
found him "idle, stupid, and vain." Dr. Osterhausen found a deviation
from the normal in the shape of his legs, which made walking difficult,
but Caspar never wearied of riding on horseback.
His autopsy revealed a small brain without abnormalities. It simply gave
evidence of a lack of development.
To speak of children who have made the struggle for life with only
animals for nurses and instructors is to recall the rearing of Cyrus in
a kennel and the fabulous story of the founding of Rome. Yet Rauber has
collected many cases of wild men and some of them, taken as they are
from municipal chronicles and guaranteed by trustworthy writers, must be
accepted as authentic.
a) The Hessian Boy. Was discovered by hunters in 1341, running on all
fours with wolves; was captured and turned over to the landgrave. Was
always restless, could not adapt himself to civilized life, and died
untamed. The case is recorded in the Hessian chronicles by Wilhelm
Dilich. Rousseau refers to it in his _Discours sur l'origine et les
fondements de Pinégalité parmi les hommes_.
b) The Irish Boy. Studied and described by Dr. Tulp, curator of the
gymnasium at Amsterdam; features animal, body covered with hair; lived
with sheep and bleated like them; stolid, unconscious of self; did not
notice people; fierce, untamable, and indocible; skin thick, sense of
touch blunted so that thorns and stones were unnoticed. Age about
sixteen. (Rauber.)
c) The Lithuanian Boys. Three are described. The first was found with
bears in 1657; face not repulsive nor beastlike; hair thick and white;
skin dry and insensitive; voice a growl; great physical strength. He was
carefully instructed and learned to obey his trainer to some degree but
always kept the bear habit; ate vegetable food, raw flesh, and anything
not containing oils; had a habit of rolling up in secluded places and
taking long naps. The second, said to have been captured in 1669, is not
so well described as the third, which Dr. Connor, in the _History of
Poland_, says was found in 1694. This one learned to walk erect with
difficulty, but was always leaping restlessly about; he learned to eat
from a table, but mastered only a few words, which he spoke in a voice
harsh and inhuman. He showed great sagacity in wood life.
d) The Girl of Cranenburg. Born in 1700; lost when sixteen months old;
skin dark, rough, hard; understood but little that was said to her;
spoke little and stammeringly; food--roots, leaves, and milk. (Rauber.)
e) Clemens of Overdyke. This boy was brought to Count von der Ricke's
Asylum after the German struggle with Napoleon. He knew little and said
little. After careful training it was gathered that his parents were
dead and that a peasant had adopted him and set him to herd pigs. Little
food was given him, and he learned to suck a cow and eat grass with the
pigs. At Overdyke he would get down on his hands and knees and pull up
vegetables with his teeth. He was of low intelligence, subject to fits
of passion, and fonder of pigs than of men.[100]
f) Jean de Liége. Lost at five; lived in the woods for sixteen years;
food--roots, plants, and wild fruit; sense of smell extraordinarily
keen; could distinguish people by odor as a dog would recognize his
master; restless in manner, and always trying to escape. (Rauber.)
g) The Savage of Aveyron. After capture, was given into the care of
Dr. Itard by Abbé Sicard. Dermal sense duller than in animals; gaze
wandering; language wanting and ideas few; food--raw potatoes, acorns,
and fruit; would eagerly tear open a bird and eat it raw; indolent,
secretive; would hide in the garden until hunger drove him to the
kitchen; rolled in new snow like an animal; paid no heed to the firing
of a gun, but became alert at the cracking of a nut; sometimes grew
wildly angry; all his powers were then enlarged; was delighted with
hills and woods, and always tried to escape after being taken to them;
when angry would gnaw clothing and hurl furniture about; feared to look
from a height, and Itard cured him of spasms of rage by holding his head
out of a window; met all efforts to teach him with apathy, and learned
but little of language.[101]
h) The Wolf Children of India. The two cases described by a writer in
_Chambers' Journal_ and by Rauber were boys of about ten years. Both ate
raw food but refused cooked food; one never spoke, smiled, or laughed;
both shunned human beings of both sexes, but would permit a dog to eat
with them; they pined in captivity, and lived but a short time.[102]
i) Peter of Hanover. Found in the woods of Hanover; food--buds, barks,
roots, frogs, eggs of birds, and anything else that he could get out of
doors; had a habit of wandering away in the spring; always went to bed
as soon as he had his supper; was unable to walk in shoes at first, and
it was long before he would tolerate a covering for his head. Although
Queen Caroline furnished him a teacher, he could never learn to speak;
he became docile, but remained stoical in manner; he learned to do farm
work willingly unless he was compelled to do it; his sense of hearing
and of smell was acute, and before changes in the weather he was sullen
and irritable; he lived to be nearly seventy years old.[103]
j) The Savage of Kronstadt. Of middle size, wild-eyed, deep-jawed, and
thick-throated; elbows and knees thick; cuticle insensitive; unable to
understand words or gestures perfectly; generally indifferent; found
1784.[104]
k) The Girl of Songi. According to Rauber, this is one of the most
frequently quoted of feral cases. The girl came out of the forest near
Chalons in 1731. She was thought to be nine years old. She carried a
club in her hand, with which she killed a dog that attacked her. She
climbed trees easily, and made niches on walls and roofs, over which she
ran like a squirrel. She caught fish and ate them raw; a cry served for
speech. She showed an instinct for decorating herself with leaves and
flowers. She found it difficult to adapt herself to the customs of
civilized life and suffered many fits of sickness. In 1747 she was put
into a convent at Chalons. She learned something of the French language,
of domestic science, and embroidery. She readily understood what was
pointed out to her but always had certain sounds which were not
understood. She claimed to have first begun to reflect after the
beginning of her education. In her wild life she thought only of her own
needs. She believed that the earth and the trees produced her, and her
earliest memory of shelter was of holes in the ground.[105]
2. From Solitude to Society[106]
The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my
teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder
when I consider the immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it
connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was
seven years old.
The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a
doll. The little blind children at the Perkins Institution had sent it
and Laura Bridgman had dressed it; but I did not know this until
afterward. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan
slowly spelled into my hand the word "d-o-l-l." I was at once interested
in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in
making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and
pride. Running downstairs to my mother I held up my hand and made the
letters for doll. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that
words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like
imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this
uncomprehending way a great many words, among them _pin_, _hat_, _cup_
and a few verbs like _sit_, _stand_, and _walk_. But my teacher had been
with me several weeks before I understood that everything has a name.
One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big
rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-o-l-l" and tried to make me
understand that "d-o-l-l" applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had
a tussle over the words "m-u-g" and "w-a-t-e-r." Miss Sullivan had tried
to impress it upon me that "m-u-g" is _mug_ and that "w-a-t-e-r" is
_water_, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had
dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first
opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing
the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I
felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor
regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the
still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or
tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the
hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my
discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going
out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be
called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure.
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of
the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water
and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed
over one hand she spelled into the other the word _water_, first slowly,
then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions
of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something
forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of
language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the
wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word
awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were
barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept
away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each
name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every
object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I
saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On
entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to
the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them
together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had
done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.
I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they
all were; but I do know that _mother_, _father_, _sister_, _teacher_,
were among them--words that were to make the world blossom for me, "like
Aaron's rod, with flowers." It would have been difficult to find a
happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that
eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the
first time longed for a new day to come.
3. Mental Effects of Solitude[107]
I spent the greater part of one winter at a point on the Rio Negro,
seventy or eighty miles from the sea. It was my custom to go out every
morning on horseback with my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away
from the valley; and no sooner would I climb the terrace and plunge into
the gray universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone
as if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the
valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray
waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and
where the wild animals are so few that they have made no discoverable
path in the wilderness of thorns.
Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned to this
solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and
leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled
me. And yet I had no object in going--no motive which could be put into
words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot--the
shooting was all left behind in the valley. Sometimes I would pass an
entire day without seeing one mammal and perhaps not more than a dozen
birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally
with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often
cold enough to make my bridle hand quite numb. At a slow pace, which
would have seemed intolerable in other circumstances, I would ride about
for hours at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to
its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every side it
stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular. How gray it all
was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the haze-wrapped horizon, where
the hills were dim and the outline blurred by distance. Descending from
my outlook, I would take up my aimless wanderings again, and visit other
elevations to gaze on the same landscape from another point; and so on
for hours; and at noon I would dismount and sit or lie on my folded
poncho for an hour or longer. One day, in these rambles, I discovered a
small grove composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient
distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to by a herd of deer or
other wild animals. This grove was on a hill differing in shape from
other hills in its neighborhood; and after a time I made a point of
finding and using it as a resting-place every day at noon. I did not ask
myself why I made choice of that one spot, sometimes going miles out of
my way to sit there, instead of sitting down under any one of the
millions of trees and bushes on any other hillside. I thought nothing at
all about it, but acted unconsciously. Only afterward it seemed to me
that, after having rested there once, each time I wished to rest again
the wish came associated with the image of that particular clump of
trees, with polished stems and clean bed of sand beneath; and in a short
time I formed a habit of returning, animal-like, to repose at that same
spot.
It was perhaps a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest, since I
was never tired: and yet, without being tired, that noonday pause,
during which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely grateful.
All day there would be no sound, not even the rustle of a leaf. One day
while _listening_ to the silence, it occurred to my mind to wonder what
the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This seemed at the time a
horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder; but during those
solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross my mind. In
the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible. My state was
one of _suspense_ and _watchfulness_; yet I had no expectation of
meeting with an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I feel
now when sitting in a room in London. The state seemed familiar rather
than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; and I did
not know that something had come between me and my intellect until I
returned to my former self--to thinking, and the old insipid existence.
I had undoubtedly _gone back_, and that state of intense watchfulness,
or alertness rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual
faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks
little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his instincts; he is in
perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level, mentally, with
the wild animals he preys on, and which in their turn sometimes prey on
him.
4. Isolation, and the Rural Mind[108]
As an occupation farming has dealt largely, if not exclusively, with the
growth and care of plant and animal life. Broadly speaking, the farmer
has been engaged in a struggle with nature to produce certain staple
traditional raw foods and human comfort materials in bulk. He has been
excused, on the whole, from the delicate situations arising from the
demands of an infinite variety of human wishes, whims, and fashions,
perhaps because the primary grains, fruits, vegetables, fibers, animals,
and animal products, have afforded small opportunity for manipulation to
satisfy the varying forms of human taste and caprice. This exemption of
the farmer in the greater part of his activity from direct work upon and
with persons and from strenuous attempts to please persons, will
doubtless account very largely, perhaps more largely than mere isolation
on the land, for the strong individualism of the country man.
In striking contrast, the villager and city worker have always been
occupied in making things or parts of things out of such impressionable
materials as iron, wood, clay, cloth, leather, gold, and the like, to
fit, suit, and satisfy a various and increasingly complex set of human
desires; or they have been dealing direct with a kaleidoscopic human
mind, either in regard to things or in regard to troubles and ideals of
the mind itself. This constant dealing with persons in business will
account even more than mere congestion of population for the complex
organization of city life. The highly organized social institutions of
the city, moreover, have reinforced the already keen-edged insight of
the city man of business, so that he is doubly equipped to win his
struggles. The city worker knows men, the farmer knows nature. Each has
reward for his deeper knowledge, and each suffers some penalty for his
circle of ignorance.
Modern conditions underlying successful farm practice and profit-making
require of the farmer a wider and more frequent contact with men than at
any time in the past. His materials, too, have become more plastic,
subject to rapid change by selection and breeding.
The social problem of the farmer seems to be how to overcome the
inevitable handicap of a social deficiency in the very nature of his
occupation, so as to extend his acquaintance with men; and secondly, how
to erect social institutions on the land adequate to reinforce his
individual personality so as to enable him to cope with his
perplexities.
Occasions must be created, plans must be made, to bring people together
in a wholesale manner so as to facilitate this interchange of community
acquaintance. Especially is it necessary for rural children to know many
more children. The one-room district school has proved its value in
making the children of the neighborhood acquainted with one another. One
of the large reasons for the consolidated and centralized school is the
increased size of territorial unit, with more children to know one
another and mingle together. Intervisiting of district schools--one
school, teachers and pupils, playing host to a half-dozen other schools,
with some regularity, using plays and games, children's readiest means
of getting acquainted--is a successful means of extending acquaintance
under good auspices.
If large-scale acquaintance--men with men, women with women, children
with children--in a rural community once becomes a fact, the initial
step will have been taken for assuring the rise of appropriate social
institutions on the land of that community.
5. The Subtler Effects of Isolation[109]
The mechanics of modern culture is complicated. The individual has
access to materials outside his group, from the world at large. His
consciousness is built up not only by word of mouth but by the printed
page. He may live as much in German books as in fireside conversation.
Much more mail is handled every day in the New York post-office than was
sent out by all the thirteen states in a year at the close of the
eighteenth century. But by reason of poverty, geographical isolation,
caste feeling, or "pathos," individuals, communities, and races may be
excluded from some of the stimulations and copies which enter into a
high grade of mind. The savage, the Negro, the peasant, the slum
dwellers, and the white woman are notable sufferers by exclusion.
Easy communication of ideas favors differentiation of a
rational and functional sort, as distinguished from the random
variations fostered by isolation. And it must be remembered
that any sort is rational and functional that really commends
itself to the human spirit. Even revolt from an ascendant type
is easier now than formerly because the rebel can fortify
himself with the triumphant records of the non-conformers of
the past.
The peasant [at the middle of the nineteenth century], limited
in a cultural respect to his village life, thinks, feels, and
acts solely in the bounds of his native village; his thought
never goes beyond his farm and his neighbor; toward the
political, economic, or national events taking place outside of
his village, be they of his own or of a foreign country, he is
completely indifferent, and even if he has learned something of
them, this is described by him in a fantastic, mythological
way, and only in this adopted form is it added to his cultural
condition and transmitted to his descendants. Every peasant
farm produced almost exclusively for itself, only to the most
limited extent for exchange; every village formed an economic
unit, which stood in only a loose economic connection with the
outer world. Outwardly complete isolation of the village
settlements and their inhabitants from each other and from the
rest of the country and other classes of society; inwardly
complete homogeneity, one and the same economic, social, and
cultural equality of the peasant mass, no possibility of
advance for the more gifted and capable individuals, everyone
pressed down to a flat level. The peasant of one village holds
himself, if not directly hostile, at least as a rule not
cordial to the peasants of another village. The nobles living
in the same village territory even wanted to force upon the
peasants an entirely different origin, in that with the
assistance of the Biblical legend they wished to trace him from
the accursed Ham (from this the curse and insult _Ty chamie_,
"Thou Ham"), but themselves from Japhet, of better repute in
the Bible, while they attributed to the Jews, Shem as an
ancestor.
The pathetic effect of isolation on the state of knowledge is recorded
in many of the stories of runaway slaves:
With two more boys, I started for the free states. We did not
know where they were, but went to try to find them. We crossed
the Potomac and hunted round and round and round. Some one
showed us the way to Washington; but we missed it, and wandered
all night; then we found ourselves where we set out.
For our purposes race prejudice may be regarded as a form of isolation.
And in the case of the American Negro this situation is aggravated by
the fact that the white man has developed a determination to keep him in
isolation--"in his place." Now, when the isolation is willed and has at
the same time the emotional nature of a tabu, the handicap is very grave
indeed. It is a fact that the most intelligent Negroes are usually half
or more than half white, but it is still a subject for investigation
whether this is due to mixed blood or to the fact that they have been
more successful in violating the tabu.
The humblest white employee knows that the better he does his
work, the more chance there is for him to rise in the business.
The black employee knows that the better he does his work, the
longer he may do it; he cannot often hope for promotion.
All these careers are at the very outset closed to the Negro on
account of his color; what lawyer would give even a minor case
to a Negro assistant? Or what university would appoint a
promising young Negro as tutor? Thus the white young man starts
in life knowing that within some limits and barring accidents,
talent and application will tell. The young Negro starts
knowing that on all sides his advance is made doubly difficult,
if not wholly shut off, by his color.
In all walks of life the Negro is liable to meet some objection
to his presence or some discourteous treatment. If an
invitation is issued to the public for any occasion, the Negro
can never know whether he would be welcomed or not; if he goes
he is liable to have his feelings hurt and get into unpleasant
altercation; if he stays away, he is blamed for indifference.
If he meet a lifelong white friend on the street, he is in a
dilemma; if he does not greet the friend he is put down as
boorish and impolite; if he does greet the friend he is liable
to be flatly snubbed. If by chance he is introduced to a white
woman or man, he expects to be ignored on the next meeting, and
usually is. White friends may call on him, but he is scarcely
expected to call on them, save for strictly business matters.
If he gain the affections of a white woman and marry her he may
invariably expect that slurs will be thrown on her reputation
and on his, and that both his and her race will shun their
company. When he dies he cannot be buried beside white corpses.
Kelly Miller, himself a full-blooded black (for which the Negroes have
expressed their gratitude), refers to the backwardness of the negro in
the following terms:
To expect the Negroes of Georgia to produce a great general
like Napoleon when they are not even allowed to carry arms, or
to deride them for not producing scholars like those of the
Renaissance when a few years ago they were forbidden the use of
letters, verges closely upon the outer rim of absurdity. Do you
look for great Negro statesmen in states where black men are
not allowed to vote? Above all, for southern white men to
berate the Negro for failing to gain the highest rounds of
distinction reaches the climax of cruel inconsistency. One is
reminded of the barbarous Teutons in _Titus Andronicus_, who,
after cutting out the tongue and hacking off the hands of the
lovely Lavinia, ghoulishly chided her for not calling for sweet
water with which to wash her delicate hands.
It is not too much to say that no Negro and no mulatto, in America at
least, has ever been fully in the white man's world. But we must
recognize that their backwardness is not wholly due to prejudice. A race
with an adequate technique can live in the midst of prejudice and even
receive some stimulation from it. But the Negro has lost many of the
occupations which were particularly his own, and is outclassed in
others--not through prejudice but through the faster pace of his
competitors.
Obviously obstacles which discourage one race may stimulate another.
Even the extreme measures in Russia and Roumania against the Jew have
not isolated him. He has resources and traditions and technique of his
own, and we have even been borrowers from him.
C. ISOLATION AND SEGREGATION
1. Segregation as a Process[110]
Within the limitations prescribed, however, the inevitable processes of
human nature proceed to give these regions and these buildings a
character which it is less easy to control. Under our system of
individual ownership, for instance, it is not possible to determine in
advance the extent of concentration of population in any given area. The
city cannot fix land values, and we leave to private enterprise, for the
most part, the task of determining the city's limits and the location of
its residential and industrial districts. Personal tastes and
convenience, vocational and economic interests, infallibly tend to
segregate and thus to classify the populations of great cities. In this
way the city acquires an organization which is neither designed nor
controlled.
Physical geography, natural advantages, and the means of transportation
determine in advance the general outlines of the urban plan. As the city
increases in population, the subtler influences of sympathy, rivalry,
and economic necessity tend to control the distribution of population.
Business and manufacturing seek advantageous locations and draw around
them a certain portion of the population. There spring up fashionable
residence quarters from which the poorer classes are excluded because of
the increased value of the land. Then there grow up slums which are
inhabited by great numbers of the poorer classes who are unable to
defend themselves from association with the derelict and vicious. In the
course of time every section and quarter of the city takes on something
of the character and qualities of its inhabitants. Each separate part of
the city is inevitably stained with the peculiar sentiments of its
population. The effect of this is to convert what was at first a mere
geographical expression into a neighborhood, that is to say, a locality
with sentiments, traditions, and a history of its own. Within this
neighborhood the continuity of the historical processes is somehow
maintained. The past imposes itself upon the present and the life of
every locality moves on with a certain momentum of its own, more or less
independent of the larger circle of life and interests about it.
In the city environment the neighborhood tends to lose much of the
significance which it possessed in simpler and more primitive forms of
society. The easy means of communication and of transportation, which
enables individuals to distribute their attention and to live at the
same time in several different worlds, tends to destroy the permanency
and intimacy of the neighborhood. Further than that, where individuals
of the same race or of the same vocation live together in segregated
groups, neighborhood sentiment tends to fuse together with racial
antagonisms and class interests.
In this way physical and sentimental distances reinforce each other, and
the influences of local distribution of the population participate with
the influences of class and race in the evolution of the social
organization. Every great city has its racial colonies, like the
Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York, the Little Sicily of Chicago,
and various other less pronounced types. In addition to these, most
cities have their segregated vice districts, like that which until
recently existed in Chicago, and their rendezvous for criminals of
various sorts. Every large city has its occupational suburbs like the
Stockyards in Chicago, and its residence suburbs like Brookline in
Boston, each of which has the size and the character of a complete
separate town, village, or city, except that its population is a
selected one. Undoubtedly the most remarkable of these cities within
cities, of which the most interesting characteristic is that they are
composed of persons of the same race, or of persons of different races
but of the same social class, is East London, with a population of
2,000,000 laborers.
The people of the original East London have now overflowed and
crossed the Lea, and spread themselves over the marshes and
meadows beyond. This population has created new towns which
were formerly rural villages, West Ham, with a population of
nearly 300,000; East Ham, with 90,000; Stratford, with its
"daughters," 150,000; and other "hamlets" similarly overgrown.
Including these new populations we have an aggregate of nearly
two millions of people. The population is greater than that of
Berlin or Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or Philadelphia.
It is a city full of churches and places of worship, yet there
are no cathedrals, either Anglican or Roman; it has a
sufficient supply of elementary schools, but it has no public
or high school, and it has no colleges for the higher
education, and no university; the people all read newspapers,
yet there is no East London paper except of the smaller and
local kind.... In the streets there are never seen any private
carriages; there is no fashionable quarter ... one meets no
ladies in the principal thoroughfares. People, shops, houses,
conveyances--all together are stamped with the unmistakable
seal of the working class.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all is this: in a city of two
millions of people there are no hotels! That means, of course,
that there are no visitors.
In the older cities of Europe, where the processes of segregation have
gone farther, neighborhood distinctions are likely to be more marked
than they are in America. East London is a city of a single class, but
within the limits of that city the population is segregated again and
again by racial and vocational interests. Neighborhood sentiment, deeply
rooted in local tradition and in local custom, exercises a decisive
selective influence upon city population and shows itself ultimately in
a marked way in the characteristics of the inhabitants.
2. Isolation as a Result of Segregation[111]
There is the observed tendency of mental defectives to congregate in
localized centers, with resulting inbreeding. Feeble-mindedness is a
social level and the members of this level, like those in other levels,
are affected by social and biological tendencies, such as the
congregation of like personalities and the natural selection in matings
of persons of similar mental capacities. These are general tendencies
and not subject to invariable laws. The feeble-minded are primarily
quantitatively different from normals in mental and social qualities,
and do not constitute a separate species. The borderline types of
high-grade feeble-minded and low-grade normals may therefore prove
exceptions to the general rule. But such studies as Davenport and
Danielson's "Hill Folk," Davenport and Estabrook's "Nams," Dugdale's
"Jukes," Kostir's "Sam Sixty," Goddard's "Kallikaks," Key's "Vennams"
and "Fale-Anwals," Kite's "Pineys," and many others emphatically prove
that mental defectives show a tendency to drift together, intermarry,
and isolate themselves from the rest of the community, just as the rich
live in exclusive suburbs. Consequently they preponderate in certain
localities, counties, and cities. In a large measure this segregation is
not so much an expression of voluntary desire as it is a situation
forced upon mental defectives through those natural intellectual and
social deficiencies which restrict them to environments economically and
otherwise less desirable to normal people. This phenomenon is most
conspicuous in rural communities where such migratory movements as the
modern city-drift have exercised a certain natural selection, but it is
also plainly evident in the slums and poorer sections of the cities,
both large and small, as any field worker will testify. Closely related
to this factor of isolation are the varying percentages of mental
defectives found in different states and in different sections of the
same state, city or community. It is therefore likely that the
percentages of mental defectives among different groups of juvenile
delinquents will vary according to the particular ward, city, county, or
state, whence the delinquents come. For this reason it is essential to
any study of the number of mental defectives in a group of juvenile
delinquents coming from a particular locality, that some idea should be
available as to the probable or approximate number of mental defectives
in that community. If more mental defectives are found among the
population in the slum quarter of a city than in the residential
quarter, it is to be expected that there will be more mental defectives
in groups of juvenile delinquents from the slum quarter, because, in the
first place, they constitute a larger proportion of the population, and
because, secondly, of their greater proneness to social offenses.
Moreover, the prevalence of the feeble-minded in certain localities may
affect the attitude of the law-enforcing machinery toward the children
of that community.
A further result of the innate characteristics and tendencies of the
feeble-minded is to be found in the effect upon them of the biological
law of natural selection, resulting from the universal struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest. We need not discuss here its
profound influences, economic and otherwise, upon the lives of the
mentally defective in general, but it will be profitable to review
briefly the effect of natural selection upon the juvenile delinquent
group.
Any group of delinquents is subject to this selection from the times of
offenses to final commitment. It undergoes a constant sifting process
whose operation is mainly determined by the natural consequences of the
group members; a large proportion of the "lucky," the intelligent, or
the socially favored individuals escape from the group, so that the
remaining members of the group are the least fit socially and
intellectually. The mentally defective delinquents constitute an undue
proportion of this unfit residue, for although they may receive as many
favors of chance as do their intellectually normal fellow-delinquents,
they cannot, like them, by reason of intelligence or social status,
escape the consequences of their delinquent acts. Furthermore, the
feeble-minded offender is caught oftener than are his more clever and
energetic companions of normal endowments, and after apprehension he is
less likely to receive the benefits of police and court prejudices, or
the advantages of family wealth and social influence. If placed on
probation he is more likely to fail, because of his own weaknesses and
his unfavorable environment. Hence the feeble-minded delinquent is much
more likely to come before the court and also to be committed to a
reformatory, jail, or industrial school than is his companion of normal
mind. Therefore practically every group of juvenile delinquents which
ultimately reaches commitment will have a very different aspect with
regard to its proportion of mental defectives from that larger group of
offenders, apprehended or non-apprehended, of which it was once a part.
In fact, it is doubtful if any group of apprehended, detained, or
probationed offenders can be said to be representative, or at least to
be exactly representative, of the true proportion of mental defectives
among all delinquents. Except where specific types of legal procedure
bring about the elimination of the defectives, it seems as if it must
inevitably result that the operation of natural selection will
continually increase the proportion of mental defectives above that
existing in the original group.
This factor of natural selection has not to our knowledge been given
adequate consideration in any published investigation on delinquency.
But if our estimate of its effects is at all justified, then most
examinations of juvenile delinquents, especially in reform and
industrial schools, have disclosed proportions of mental defectives
distinctly in excess of the original proportion previously existent
among the entire mass of all offenders. The reports of these
examinations have given rise to quite erroneous impressions concerning
the extent of criminality among the feeble-minded and its relation to
the whole volume of crime, and have consequently led to inaccurate
deductions. The feeble-minded are undoubtedly more prone to commit crime
than are the average normals; but through disregard of the influences of
this factor of natural selection, as well as of others, both the
proportion of crime committed by mental defectives and the true
proportion of mental defectives among delinquents and criminals have
very often been exaggerated.
D. ISOLATION AND NATIONAL INDIVIDUALITY
1. Historical Races as Products of Isolation[112]
The continent of Europe differs from the other great land-masses in the
fact that it is a singular aggregation of peninsulas and islands,
originating in separate centers of mountain growth, and of enclosed
valleys walled about from the outer world by elevated summits. Other
continents are somewhat peninsulated; Asia approaches Europe in that
respect; North America has a few great dependencies in its larger
islands and considerable promontories; but Africa, South America, and
Australia are singularly united lands.
The highly divided state of Europe has greatly favored the development
within its area of isolated fields, each fitted for the growth of a
separate state, adapted even in this day for local life although
commerce in our time binds lands together in a way which it did not of
old. These separated areas were marvelously suited to be the cradles of
peoples; and if we look over the map of Europe we readily note the
geographic insulations which that remarkably varied land affords.
Beginning with the eastern Mediterranean, we have the peninsula on which
Constantinople stands--a region only partly protected from assault by
its geographic peculiarities; and yet it owes to its partial separation
from the mainlands on either side a large measure of local historic
development. Next, we have Greece and its associated islands, which--a
safe stronghold for centuries--permitted the nurture of the most
marvelous life the world has ever known. Farther to the west the Italian
peninsula, where during three thousand years the protecting envelope of
the sea and the walls of Alps and Apennines have enabled a score of
states to attain a development; where the Roman nation, absorbing, with
its singular power of taking in other life, a number of primitive
centers of civilization, grew to power which made it dominant in the
ancient world. Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, have each profited by their
isolation, and have bred diverse qualities in man and contributed
motives which have interacted in the earth's history. Again, in Spain we
have a region well fitted to be the cradle of a great people; to its
geographic position it owed the fact that it became the seat of the most
cultivated Mahometanism the world has ever known. To the Pyrenees, the
mountain wall of the north, we owe in good part the limitation of that
Mussulman invasion and the protection of central Europe from its forward
movement, until luxury and half-faith had sapped its energies. Going
northward, we find in the region of Normandy the place of growth of that
fierce but strong folk, the ancient Scandinavians, who, transplanted
there, held their ground, and grew until they were strong enough to
conquer Britain and give it a large share of the quality which belongs
to our own state.
To a trifling geographic accident we owe the isolation of Great Britain
from the European continent; and all the marvelous history of the
English folk, as we all know, hangs upon the existence of that narrow
strip of sea between the Devon coast and the kindred lowlands of
northern France.
East of Britain lie two peninsulas which have been the cradle of very
important peoples. That of Sweden and Norway is the result of mountain
development; that of Denmark appears to be in the main the product of
glacial and marine erosion, differing in its non-mountainous origin from
all the other peninsulas and islands of the European border. Thus on the
periphery of Europe we have at least a dozen geographical isolated
areas, sufficiently large and well separated from the rest of the world
to make them the seats of independent social life. The interior of the
country has several similarly, though less perfectly, detached areas. Of
these the most important lie fenced within the highlands of the Alps. In
that extensive system of mountain disturbances we have the geographical
conditions which most favor the development of peculiar divisions of
men, and which guard such cradled peoples from the destruction which so
often awaits them on the plains. Thus, while the folk of the European
lowlands have been overrun by the successive tides of invasion, their
qualities confused, and their succession of social life interrupted,
Switzerland has to a great extent, by its mountain walls, protected its
people from the troubles to which their lowland neighbors have been
subjected. The result is that within an area not twice as large as
Massachusetts we find a marvelous diversity of folk, as is shown by the
variety in physical aspect, moral quality, language, and creed in the
several important valleys and other divisions of that complicated
topography.
After a race has been formed and bred to certain qualities within a
limited field, after it has come to possess a certain body of
characteristics which gives it its particular stamp, the importance of
the original cradle passes away. There is something very curious in the
permanence of race conditions after they have been fixed for a thousand
years or so in a people. When the assemblage of physical and mental
motives are combined in a body of country folk, they may endure under
circumstances in which they could not have originated; thus, even in our
domesticated animals and plants, we find that varieties created under
favorable conditions, obtaining their inheritances in suitable
conditions, may then flourish in many conditions of environment in which
they could not by any chance have originated. The barnyard creatures of
Europe, with their established qualities, may be taken to Australia, and
there retain their nature for many generations; even where the form
falls away from the parent stock, the decline is generally slow and may
not for a great time become apparent.
This fixity of race characteristics has enabled the several national
varieties of men to go forth from their nurseries, carrying the
qualities bred in their earlier conditions through centuries of life in
other climes. The Gothic blood of Italy and of Spain still keeps much of
its parent strength; the Aryan's of India, though a world apart in its
conditions from those which gave it character in its cradle, is still,
in many of its qualities, distinctly akin to that of the home people.
Moor, Hun and Turk--all the numerous folk we find in the present
condition of the world so far from their cradle-lands--are still to a
great extent what their primitive nurture made them. On this rigidity
which comes to mature races in the lower life as well as in man, depends
the vigor with which they do their appointed work.
2. Geographical Isolation and Maritime Contact[113]
Greece, considering its limited total extent, offers but little motive,
and still less of convenient means, for internal communication among its
various inhabitants. Each village or township occupying its plain with
the inclosing mountains, supplied its own main wants, whilst the
transport of commodities by land was sufficiently difficult to
discourage greatly any regular commerce with neighbors. In so far as the
face of the interior country was concerned, it seemed as if nature had
been disposed from the beginning to keep the population of Greece
socially and politically disunited by providing so many hedges of
separation and so many boundaries, generally hard, sometimes impossible,
to overleap. One special motive to intercourse, however, arose out of
this very geographical constitution of the country, and its endless
alternation of mountain and valley. The difference of climate and
temperature between the high and low grounds is very great; the harvest
is secured in one place before it is ripe in another, and the cattle
find during the heat of summer shelter and pasture on the hills, at a
time when the plains are burnt up. The practice of transferring them
from the mountains to the plain according to the change of season, which
subsists still as it did in ancient times, is intimately connected with
the structure of the country, and must from the earliest period have
brought about communication among the otherwise disunited villages.
Such difficulties, however, in the internal transit by land were to a
great extent counteracted by the large proportion of coast and the
accessibility of the country by sea. The prominences and indentations in
the line of Grecian coast are hardly less remarkable than the
multiplicity of elevations and depressions which everywhere mark the
surface. There was no part of Greece proper which could be considered as
out of reach of the sea, while most parts of it were convenient and easy
of access. As the only communication between them was maritime, so the
sea, important even if we look to Greece proper exclusively, was the
sole channel for transmitting ideas and improvements, as well as for
maintaining sympathies--social, political, religious, and
literary--throughout these outlying members of the Hellenic aggregate.
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 or 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. This distinction stands
prominent in the many comparisons instituted between the Athens of
Periclês and the Athens of the earlier times down to Solon. Both Plato
and Aristotle dwell upon it emphatically--and the former especially,
whose genius conceived the comprehensive scheme of prescribing
beforehand and insuring in practice the whole course of individual
thought and feeling in his imaginary community, treats maritime
communication, if pushed beyond the narrowest limits, as fatal to the
success and permanence of any wise scheme of education. Certain it is
that a great difference of character existed between those Greeks who
mingled much in maritime affairs and those who did not. The Arcadian may
stand as a type of the pure Grecian landsman, with his rustic and
illiterate habits--his diet of sweet chestnuts, barley cakes, and pork
(as contrasted with the fish which formed the chief seasoning for the
bread of an Athenian)--his superior courage and endurance--his reverence
for Lacedaemonian headship as an old and customary influence--his
sterility of intellect and imagination as well as his slackness in
enterprise--his unchangeable rudeness of relations with the gods, which
led him to scourge and prick Pan if he came back empty-handed from the
chase; while the inhabitant of Phokaea or Miletus exemplifies the
Grecian mariner, eager in search of gain--active, skilful, and daring at
sea, but inferior in steadfast bravery on land--more excitable in
imagination as well as more mutable in character--full of pomp and
expense in religious manifestations toward the Ephesian Artemis or the
Apollo of Branchidae: with a mind more open to the varieties of Grecian
energy and to the refining influences of Grecian civilization.
The configuration of the Grecian territory, so like in many respects to
that of Switzerland, produced two effects of great moment upon the
character and history of the people. In the first place, it materially
strengthened their powers of defense: it shut up the country against
those invasions from the interior which successively subjugated all
their continental colonies; and it at the same time rendered each
fraction more difficult to be attacked by the rest, so as to exercise a
certain conservative influence in assuring the tenure of actual
possessors: for the pass of Thermopylae between Thessaly and Phokis,
that of Kithaeron between Boeotia and Attica, or the mountainous range
of Oneion and Geraneia along the Isthmus of Corinth, were positions
which an inferior number of brave men could hold against a much greater
force of assailants. But, in the next place, while it tended to protect
each section of Greeks from being conquered, it also kept them
politically disunited and perpetuated their separate autonomy. It
fostered that powerful principle of repulsion, which disposed even the
smallest township to constitute itself a political unit apart from the
rest, and to resist all idea of coalescence with others, either amicable
or compulsory. To a modern reader, accustomed to large political
aggregations, and securities for good government through the
representative system, it requires a certain mental effort to transport
himself back to a time when even the smallest town clung so tenaciously
to its right of self-legislation. Nevertheless, such was the general
habit and feeling of the ancient world, throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain,
and Gaul. Among the Hellens it stands out more conspicuously, for
several reasons--first, because they seem to have pushed the
multiplication of autonomous units to an extreme point, seeing that even
islands not larger than Peparethos and Amorgos had two or three separate
city communities; secondly, because they produced, for the first time in
the history of mankind, acute systematic thinkers on matters of
government, amongst all of whom the idea of the autonomous city was
accepted as the indispensable basis of political speculation; thirdly,
because this incurable subdivision proved finally the cause of their
ruin, in spite of pronounced intellectual superiority over their
conquerors; and lastly, because incapacity of political coalescence did
not preclude a powerful and extensive sympathy between the inhabitants
of all the separate cities, with a constant tendency to fraternize for
numerous purposes, social, religious, recreative, intellectual, and
aesthetical. For these reasons, the indefinite multiplication of
self-governing towns, though in truth a phenomenon common to ancient
Europe as contrasted with the large monarchies of Asia, appears more
marked among the ancient Greeks than elsewhere; and there cannot be any
doubt that they owe it, in a considerable degree, to the multitude of
insulating boundaries which the configuration of their country
presented.
Nor is it rash to suppose that the same causes may have tended to
promote that unborrowed intellectual development for which they stand so
conspicuous. General propositions respecting the working of climate and
physical agencies upon character are indeed treacherous; for our
knowledge of the globe is now sufficient to teach us that heat and cold,
mountain and plain, sea and land, moist and dry atmosphere, are all
consistent with the greatest diversities of resident men: moreover, the
contrast between the population of Greece itself, for the seven
centuries preceding the Christian era, and the Greeks of more modern
times, is alone enough to inculcate reserve in such speculations.
Nevertheless we may venture to note certain improving influences,
connected with their geographical position, at a time when they had no
books to study, and no more advanced predecessors to imitate.
We may remark, first, that their position made them at once mountaineers
and mariners, thus supplying them with great variety of objects,
sensations, and adventures; next, that each petty community, nestled
apart amidst its own rocks, was sufficiently severed from the rest to
possess an individual life and attributes of its own, yet not so far as
to subtract it from the sympathies of the remainder; so that an
observant Greek, commercing with a great diversity of half-countrymen,
whose language he understood, and whose idiosyncrasies he could
appreciate, had access to a larger mass of social and political
experience than any other man in so unadvanced an age could personally
obtain. The Phoenician, superior to the Greek on shipboard, traversed
wider distances and saw a greater number of strangers, but had not the
same means of intimate communion with a multiplicity of fellows in blood
and language. His relations, confined to purchase and sale, did not
comprise that mutuality of action and reaction which pervaded the crowd
at a Grecian festival. The scene which here presented itself was a
mixture of uniformity and variety highly stimulating to the observant
faculties of a man of genius--who at the same time, if he sought to
communicate his own impressions, or to act upon this mingled and diverse
audience, was forced to shake off what was peculiar to his own town or
community, and to put forth matter in harmony with the feelings of all.
It is thus that we may explain, in part, that penetrating apprehension
of human life and character, and that power of touching sympathies
common to all ages and nations, which surprises us so much in the
unlettered authors of the old epic. Such periodical intercommunion of
brethren habitually isolated from each other was the only means then
open of procuring for the bard a diversified range of experience and a
many-colored audience; and it was to a great degree the result of
geographical causes. Perhaps among other nations such facilitating
causes might have been found, yet without producing any results
comparable to the Iliad and Odyssey. But Homer was nevertheless
dependent upon the conditions of his age, and we can at least point out
those peculiarities in early Grecian society without which Homeric
excellence would never have existed--the geographical position is one,
the language another.
3. Isolation as an Explanation of National Differences[114]
To decide between race and environment as the efficient cause of any
social phenomenon is a matter of singular interest at this time. A
school of sociological writers, dazzled by the recent brilliant
discoveries in European ethnology, show a decided inclination to sink
the racial explanation up to the handle in every possible phase of
social life in Europe. It must be confessed that there is provocation
for it. So persistent have the physical characteristics of the people
shown themselves that it is not surprising to find theories of a
corresponding inheritance of mental attributes in great favor.
This racial school of social philosophers derives much of its data from
French sources. For this reason, and also because our anthropological
knowledge of that country is more complete than for any other part of
Europe, we shall confine our attention primarily to France. In the
unattractive upland areas of isolation is the Alpine broad-headed race
common to central Europe. At the north, extending down in a broad belt
diagonally as far as Limoges and along the coast of Brittany, there is
intermixture with the blond, long-headed Teutonic race; while along the
southern coast, penetrating up the Rhone Valley, is found the extension
of the equally long-headed but brunet Mediterranean stock. These ethnic
facts correspond to physical ones; three areas of geographical isolation
are distinct centers of distribution of the Alpine race.
The organization of the family is the surest criterion of the stage of
social evolution attained by a people. No other phase of human
association is so many-sided, so fundamental, so pregnant for the
future. For this reason we may properly begin our study by an
examination of a phenomenon which directly concerns the stability of the
domestic institution--viz., divorce. What are the facts as to its
distribution in France? Marked variations between different districts
occur. Paris is at one extreme; Corsica, as always, at the other. Of
singular interest to us is the parallel which at once appears between
this distribution of divorce and that of head form. The areas of
isolation peopled by the Alpine race are characterized by almost
complete absence of legal severance of domestic relations between
husband and wife.
Do the facts instanced above have any ethnic significance? Do they mean
that the Alpine type, as a race, holds more tenaciously than does the
Teuton to its family traditions, resenting thereby the interference of
the state in its domestic institutions? A foremost statistical
authority, Jacques Bertillon, has devoted considerable space to proving
that some relation between the two exists. Confronted by the preceding
facts, his explanation is this: that the people of the southern
departments, inconstant perhaps and fickle, nevertheless are quickly
pacified after a passionate outbreak of any kind. Husband and wife may
quarrel, but the estrangement is dissipated before recourse to the law
can take place. On the other hand, the Norman peasant, Teutonic by race,
cold and reserved, nurses his grievances for a long time; they abide
with him, smoldering but persistent. "Words and even blows terminate
quarrels quickly in the south; in the north they are settled by the
judge." From similar comparisons in other European countries, M.
Bertillon draws the final conclusion that the Teutonic race betrays a
singular preference for this remedy for domestic ills. It becomes for
him an ethnic trait.
Another social phenomenon has been laid at the door of the Teutonic race
of northern Europe; one which even more than divorce is directly the
concomitant of modern intellectual and economic progress. We refer to
suicide. Morselli devotes a chapter of his interesting treatise upon
this subject to proving that "the purer the German race--that is to say,
the stronger the Germanism (e.g., Teutonism) of a country--the more it
reveals in its psychical character an extraordinary propensity to
self-destruction."
Consider for a moment the relative frequency of suicide with reference
to the ethnic composition of France. The parallel between the two is
almost exact in every detail. There are again our three areas of Alpine
racial occupation--Savoy, Auvergne, and Brittany--in which suicide falls
annually below seventy-five per million inhabitants. There, again, is
the Rhone Valley and the broad diagonal strip from Paris to Bordeaux,
characterized alike by strong infusion of Teutonic traits and relative
frequency of the same social phenomenon.
Divorce and suicide will serve as examples of the mode of proof adopted
for tracing a number of other social phenomena to an ethnic origin. Thus
Lapouge attributes the notorious depopulation of large areas in France
to the sterility incident upon intermixture between the several racial
types of which the population is constituted. This he seeks to prove
from the occurrence of a decreasing birth-rate in all the open, fertile
districts where the Teutonic element has intermingled with the native
population. Because wealth happens to be concentrated in the fertile
areas of Teutonic occupation, it is again assumed that this coincidence
demonstrates either a peculiar acquisitive aptitude in this race or else
a superior measure of frugality.
By this time our suspicions are aroused. The argument is too simple. Its
conclusions are too far-reaching. By this we do not mean to deny the
facts of geographical distribution in the least. It is only the validity
of the ethnic explanation which we deny. We can do better for our races
than even its best friends along such lines of proof. With the data at
our disposition there is no end to the racial attributes which we might
saddle upon our ethnic types. Thus, it would appear that the Alpine type
in its sterile areas of isolation was the land-hungry one described by
Zola in his powerful novels. For, roughly speaking, individual
land-holdings are larger in them on the average than among the Teutonic
populations. Peasant proprietorship is more common also; there are fewer
tenant farmers. Crime in the two areas assumes a different aspect. We
find that among populations of Alpine type, in the isolated uplands,
offenses against the person predominate in the criminal calendar. In the
Seine basin, along the Rhone Valley, wherever the Teuton is in evidence,
on the other hand, there is less respect for property; so that offenses
against the person, such as assault, murder, and rape, give place to
embezzlements, burglary, and arson. It might just as well be argued that
the Teuton shows a predilection for offenses against property; the
native Celt an equal propensity for crimes against the person.
Appeal to the social geography of other countries, wherein the ethnic
balance of power is differently distributed, may be directed against
almost any of the phenomena we have instanced in France as seemingly of
racial derivation. In the case either of suicide or divorce, if we turn
from France to Italy or Germany, we instantly perceive all sorts of
contradictions. The ethnic type, which is so immune from propensity to
self-destruction or domestic disruption in France, becomes in Italy most
prone to either mode of escape from temporary earthly ills. For each
phenomenon culminates in frequency in the northern half of the latter
country, stronghold of the Alpine race. Nor is there an appreciable
infusion of Teutonism, physically speaking, herein, to account for the
change of heart. Of course, it might be urged that this merely shows
that the Mediterranean race of southern Italy is as much less inclined
to the phenomenon than the Alpine race in these respects, as it in turn
lags behind the Teuton. For it must be confessed that even in Italy
neither divorce nor suicide is so frequent anywhere as in Teutonic
northern France. Well, then, turn to Germany. Compare its two halves in
these respects again. The northern half of the empire is most purely
Teutonic by race; the southern is not distinguishable ethnically, as we
have sought to prove, from central France. Bavaria, Baden, and
Würtemberg are scarcely more Teutonic by race than Auvergne. Do we find
differences in suicide, for example, following racial boundaries here?
Far from it; for Saxony is its culminating center; and Saxony, as we
know, is really half-Slavic at heart, as is also eastern Prussia.
Suicide should be most frequent in Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover, if
racial causes were appreciably operative. The argument, in fact, falls
to pieces of its own weight, as Durkheim has shown. His conclusion is
thus stated:
"If the Germans are more addicted to suicide, it is not because of the
blood in their veins, but of the civilization in which they have been
raised."
A summary view of the class of social phenomena seemingly characteristic
of the distinct races in France, if we extend our field of vision to
cover all Europe, suggests an explanation for the curious coincidences
and parallelisms noted above, which is the exact opposite of the racial
one.
Our theory, then, is this: that most of the social phenomena we have
noted as peculiar to the areas occupied by the Alpine type are the
necessary outcome, not of racial proclivities but rather of the
geographical and social isolation characteristic of the habitat of this
race. The ethnic type is still pure for the very same reason that social
phenomena are primitive. Wooden ploughs pointed with stone, blood
revenge, an undiminished birth-rate, and relative purity of physical
type are all alike derivatives from a common cause, isolation, directly
physical and coincidently social. We discover, primarily, an influence
of environment where others perceive phenomena of ethnic inheritance.
4. Natural versus Vicinal Location in National Development[115]
In contradistinction to continental and intercontinental location,
anthropogeography recognizes two other narrower meanings of the term.
The innate mobility of the human race, due primarily to the eternal
food-quest and increase of numbers, leads a people to spread out over a
territory till they reach the barriers which nature has set up, or meet
the frontiers of other tribes and nations. Their habitat or their
specific geographic location is thus defined by natural features of
mountain, desert, and sea, or by the neighbors whom they are unable to
displace, or more often by both.
A people has, therefore, a twofold location, an immediate one, based
upon their actual territory, and a mediate or vicinal one, growing out
of its relations to the countries nearest them. The first is a question
of the land under their feet; the other, of the neighbors about them.
The first or natural location embodies the complex of local geographic
conditions which furnish the basis for their tribal or national
existence. This basis may be a peninsula, island, archipelago, an
oasis, an arid steppe, a mountain system, or a fertile lowland. The
stronger the vicinal location, the more dependent is the people upon the
neighboring states, but the more potent the influence which it can,
under certain circumstances, exert upon them. Witness Germany in
relation to Holland, France, Austria, and Poland. The stronger the
natural location, on the other hand, the more independent is the people
and the more strongly marked is the national character. This is
exemplified in the people of mountain lands like Switzerland, Abyssinia,
and Nepal; of peninsulas like Korea, Spain, and Scandinavia; and of
islands like England and Japan. Today we stand amazed at that strong
primordial brand of the Japanese character which nothing can blur or
erase.
Clearly defined natural locations, in which barriers of mountains and
sea draw the boundaries and guarantee some degree of isolation, tend to
hold their people in a calm embrace, to guard them against outside
interference and infusion of foreign blood, and thus to make them
develop the national genius in such direction as the local geographic
conditions permit. In the unceasing movements which have made up most of
the historic and prehistoric life of the human race, in their migrations
and counter-migrations, their incursions, retreats, and expansions over
the face of the earth, vast unfenced areas, like the open lowlands of
Russia and the grasslands of Africa, present the picture of a great
thoroughfare swept by pressing throngs. Other regions, more secluded,
appear as quiet nooks, made for a temporary halt or a permanent rest.
Here some part of the passing human flow is caught as in a vessel and
held till it crystallizes into a nation. These are the conspicuous areas
of race characterization. The development of the various ethnic and
political offspring of the Roman Empire in the naturally defined areas
of Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and France illustrates the process of
national differentiation which goes on in such secluded-locations.
III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS
1. Isolation in Anthropogeography and Biology
A systematic treatise upon isolation as a sociological concept remains
to be written. The idea of isolation as a tool of investigation has been
fashioned with more precision in geography and in biology than in
sociology.
Research in human geography has as its object the study of man in his
relations to the earth. Students of civilization, like Montesquieu and
Buckle, sought to explain the culture and behavior of peoples as the
direct result of the physical environment. Friedrich Ratzel with his
"thorough training as a naturalist, broad reading, and travel" and above
all, his comprehensive knowledge of ethnology, recognized the importance
of direct effects, such as cultural isolation. Jean Brunhes, by the
selection of small natural units, his so-called "islands," has made
intensive studies of isolated groups in the oases of the deserts of the
Sub and of the Mzab, and in the high mountains of the central Andes.
Biology indicates isolation as one of the factors in the origin of the
species. Anthropology derives the great races of mankind--the Caucasian,
the Ethiopian, the Malay, the Mongolian, and the Indian--from
geographical separation following an assumed prehistoric dispersion. A
German scholar, Dr. Georg Gerland, has prepared an atlas which plots
differences in physical traits, such as skin color and hair texture, as
indicating the geographical distribution of races.