Читать книгу Principles of Sociology - Spencer Herbert - Страница 16

A COMPLETE outline of the original external factors implies a knowledge of the past which we have not got, and are not likely to get. Now that geologists and archaeologists are uniting to prove that human existence goes back to a time so remote that «pre-historic» scarcely expresses it, we are shown that the effects of external conditions on social evolution cannot be fully traced. Remembering that the 20,000 years, or so, during which man has lived in the Nile-valley, is made to seem a relatively-small period by the evidence that he coexisted with the extinct mammals of the drift – remembering that England had human inhabitants at an epoch which good judges think was glacial – remembering that in America, along with the bones of a Mastodon imbedded, in the alluvium of the Bourbense, were found arrowheads and other traces of the savages who had killed this member of an order no longer represented in that part of the world – remembering that, judging from the evidence as interpreted by Professor Huxley, those vast subsidences which changed a continent into the Eastern Archipelago, took place after the Negro-race was established as a distinct variety of man; we must infer that it is hopeless to trace back the external factors of social phenomena to anything like their first forms.

One important truth only, implied by the evidence thus glanced at, must be noted. Geological changes and meteorological changes, as well as the consequent changes of Floras and Faunas, must have been causing, over all parts of the Earth, perpetual emigrations and immigrations. From each locality made less habitable by increasing inclemency, a wave of diffusion must have spread; into each locality made more favourable to human existence by amelioration of climate, or increase of indigenous food, or both, a wave of concentration must have been set up; and by great geological changes, here sinking areas of land and there raising areas, other redistributions of mankind must have been produced. Accumulating facts show that these enforced ebbings and flowings have, in some localities, and probably in most, taken place time after time. And such waves of emigration and immigration must have been ever bringing the dispersed groups of the race into contact with conditions more or less new.

Carrying with us this conception of the way in which the external factors, original in the widest sense, have cooperated throughout all past time, we must limit our attention to such effects of them as we have now before us.