652 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
own group. Where social preferment depended upon physical prowess, the inherited clubfoot would be an element of social unfitness. In the fact of what is called physical " presence," probably largely a matter of posture and vitality, we all recog- nize an easy substitute in many social positions for brains, culture, or oratorical gifts. Yet these things are not in them- selves social ; nor can they by any manipulation become social. The influence they have is entirely through the psychological states of which they are the conditions. A man with the illusion of a clubfoot would be as helpless as if it were real. And where is the hero so commonplace that his " presence " is not lordly to some love-sick maid ?
4. Then there are the v[\\xz\\-\.2W.e.A-oi physical conditio7is, "the broken earth and the vaulted sky," the canal and the river- course, the mountain and the meadow. These, we are told, determine social development. They do ; but by conditioning it, by intrusion upon it, by limiting it, not by being themselves social. That they are never. Let a race of animals that cannot think, nor recognize a social situation, nor know one another as reciprocating and fulfilling social give-and-take, run over the meadows and swim in the rivers, under a sky never so blue — and what effect of a social kind would these physical things have upon them ? But given the psychological traits, make them men — and then what would not the human race do even on the levelest plain ? Here again we have extra-social conditions. The land and water condition separation and segregation, com- petition and mutual defense, toleration and alliance, commerce and confederation ; but the essentials of social matter and pro- cess must be there, and it is they that work under these conditions or those. Again, an illustration from recent biological theory, a case which often turns upon the effects of such physical dif- ferences as those mentioned : Isolation has been said to be a biological force, since, when animals are isolated from each other, the race is prevented from having the in-mixture of their hereditary strains, and so the heredity of the race is pre-limited. True, as a fact ; but why make an abstraction do justice for a force ? Isolation is always accomplished by some real force —
