THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGY 155
austere, and rationally conscientious. 40 Ratzenhofer regards only congenital differences which he assorts into nine subdivisions of three great classes the normal, abnormal, and defective. 41 The differentiating influence of social institutions and occupations has been analyzed in a suggestive way by many investigators and students. While most of these essays are merely tentative, they are full of promise. The individual as today conceived by soci- ologists is a far cry from the abstraction who with inalienable rights, a preternatural rationality, and an unhampered will stalked out of the " social contract " into the nineteenth century.
The influence of physical environment on social organization * and activity has long been a mooted question. The contrast between materialism and idealism is as old as the Politics and the Republic. Is man the creature of contou^ soil, and climate; or is he the master of his fate? The Physiocrats and Montesquieu gave materialism an impetus which brought it well into the cen- tury. Comte's interest in the subjective phase of social evolu- tion diverted his attention largely from the objective. The rapid development of natural science toward the middle of the century again brought to the fore the naturalistic interpretation of social and individual differences. Buckle, Guyot, and Draper pushed this view to an extreme which seemed to make the continuity of natural forces from beginning to end not only complete, but rela- tively direct. Buckle, for example, represented the "aspect of nature " as stamping its effect upon a people in an immediate and easily perceptible way. 42 The careful researches and inductions of geographers like Ratzel and Ripley, and the contributions of the Le Play school in France, have led a reaction against the theories of the direct influence of nature on society. Le Play and his followers insist. that environmental influence is mediated in an indirect and complex way through a long hierarchy of condi- tions, activities, and institutions, beginning with place and ending with the rank of the society in the scale of civilization. Vignes
'"GIDDINGS, Inductive Sociology (New York, 1901), pp. 82 f. " RATZENHOFER, Die sociologische Erkenntniss, pp. 260-71.
"BUCKLE, History of Civilization in England, ad ed. (New York, 1863), Vol. I, pp. 85 f.
