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'Of burns that thundered in a Winter spate,

Questing a quarry that forever fled

Beyond the further fell-top, until fate

Tripped me and tumbled me among the dead:

'And I at last knew peace and slept secure

Within my quiet little house of stones.

Must I another doom of life endure?

Why have you waked the hunger in my bones?'

I dropped the slab, and took the hafts and turned
My team and made back homeward with my plough,
Leaving the hunter to the peace he'd earned
Beneath the windy bent of Dead Man's Brow.

HISTORIC DETERMINISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL

BY JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS

IN considering the life of man in history or in contemporary social relations there are two hypotheses open to us. We may postulate that, from the largest sweep of the historic process down to the most insignificant details of an individual's daily life, man's assumed control over his own action and destiny is an illusion, that he is in truth as powerless to alter his present or his future as the moat eddying in the sunbeam, troubled with no such illusory self-consciousness as mocks the highest of created beings. Or, on the other hand, we may postulate that man's personal destiny and that of society are to some extent, and

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within certain limits, subject to human control, consciously directed.

If the first of these hypotheses be true, then it is evident that it will make no difference whether man takes thought for himself or not. As well might a drop of water from the ocean, rising and falling in the waves, raised to the clouds by the sun, dropped as rain on the land, attempt to change that inevitable series. What shall be, shall be, and it is useless for man to try to alter a stream of tendency and action which is merely part of the inextricable, eternal, cosmic process. But if, on the contrary, there should be any sphere in which his independent, free will

may become effective for good or evil, then it becomes a matter of importance to him and to the human race whether he exerts that will or no and in what direction.

And this exertion becomes increasingly important to society in proportion to the share which the individual has in the formation and guidance of his own government and other institutions. It must be confessed that in many quarters there has been growing for the past generation a feeling of the impotence of the individual, a pessimistic fatalism as to the inevitability of the social and political drift, a relaxation of individual effort from the belief that, after all, it is of little or no avail. This may be due partly to an inevitable reaction from the too buoyant optimism of the humanitarian, social, and scientific philosophy of the Victorian era. It may also be attributed partially to the enormous increases in populations which have occurred since the industrial revolution. The deThe depression of the effectiveness of the individual will, by the increase in the number of directing wills and minds in the great modern democracies, may also be considered a factor. Another may be found in the influence of the scientific concept of universal natural law, with its implied determinism, which has been carried over into the fields of history and social endeavor. But whatever the causes may be which tend to deaden the belief in the value of individual effort, it must be conceded that if there is any sphere for the effective and right willing of individuals in the historic and social processes, it is important that the wills of such individuals be energized rather than allowed to atrophy. It may be well, therefore, to consider whether we have as yet any valid reason to doubt the effectiveness of the individual, and in this article we shall

do so from the standpoint of historic determinism.

One of the commonest, as well as the earliest, forms of determinism in history is the theological - the belief that the whole process is determined and controlled by a god, or supernatural power. However, in the Western world, at least, this doctrine has never prevented man from actively trying to control and modify his personal and social life. In our own history there were no stouter strugglers for a new order, no more determined opponents of the established one, than those who believed most strongly in predestination, infant damnation, and the constant interference of the Deity. As exerting any influence toward fatalistic inertia or political pacifism, this form of historic determinism may be discarded, certainly at the present time.

The historic process may also be considered as being determined by forces or conditions within nature but outside man, such as the geographic, climatic, and other elements of his environment, or, thirdly, by conditions partly within and partly without society and the individual. Among these are man's economic needs and urges, from which we have derived the doctrine of economic determinism, and his physical structure and functioning, from which other forms of determinism have been derived.

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There has been no more fascinating subject developed in recent years than that of anthropogeography, or the influence of man's physical surroundings upon his development and that of his various types of civilization. That these factors modify both man's physical structure and temperament, and have exerted a vast influence upon his

settlements, migrations, industrial and other activities, no longer admits of doubt. The various climates of different sections of the earth's surface, as well as the great climatic changes in any one of them, have influenced man directly and notably. The abundance, paucity, and character of the natural resources, and the nature of the country as to coast lines, rivers, plains, mountain barriers, and other features have also greatly modified man's efforts.

In the sixty years since the publication of Buckle's History of Civilization in England, a whole literature has grown up tracing these modifications in detail upon various types of peoples in relation to their environments. As usually happens, the opening of a new field for thought tended among some thinkers to overemphasize its exclusive importance, and among a certain school 'geographic determinism' overshadowed all other factors in human development. As an extreme example we may refer to Grant Allen, a disciple of Herbert Spencer, who wrote in 1878 that 'the differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect, commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend . . . simply and solely upon the physical circumstances to which they are exposed.

The differentiating agency must be sought in the great permanent geographical features of land and sea. these have necessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories of every nation upon the earth. ... We cannot regard any nation as an active agent in differentiating itself. Only the surrounding circumstances can have any effect in such a direction.' Of the marvelous period of the highest Greek culture he says that 'it was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated

Aryan brain.' Even at present and to minds with wider scientific training, the subject seems to be unusually tempting to dogmatic statement as to geographic influences in particular

cases.

Thus, in a recent textbook we find such statements as that 'Germany has turned especially to chemistry because of the presence of rich deposits of unusual minerals,' and that the English have been the 'chief investigators of the science of oceanography' because of their use of the sea, with no qualifying conditions. The development of skyscrapers in New York City, according to this writer, would seem to be merely a 'response to the water barrier' of the city with the resultant high cost of land, ignoring all the other factors, physical and spiritual, which went to the development of that new type of architecture in the case of that particular bit of high-priced real estate. Indeed, so fascinating and absorbing is this game of studying the correlation between physical environment and type of civilization, so exclusive does it become in the minds of some of its less well-balanced professors, that in reading their unguarded statements one has the same feeling as, in a different metaphysical atmosphere, in reading Mather's Special Providences and learning that when a mouse in Congregational New England destroyed some books in an attic it was found that he had annihilated only Episcopalian Prayer Books. I do not mean at all to imply that the leading scientific geographers of America or Europe are to be classed with such extremists, but the extreme statements are naturally the sensational and arresting ones and those which make the most impression upon the lay mind of the public.

Buckle himself was far more conservative in his exposition of the doctrine of geographic influence than

many of his later disciples. This was also true in one point, as we shall note later, of Karl Marx who, writing a few years earlier than Buckle, may be considered as the founder of the doctrine of economic determinism, though not the first to point to the importance of economic factors in social evolution. For him, man was almost wholly a function of nature and, even when he had modified natural conditions by inventions, he yet remained merely 'the tool of the tool,' as one commentator has expressed it. The most succinct and fairest expression of the economic doctrine still remains that given by Professor Seligman in the introduction to his volume on The Economic Interpretation of History. "The existence of man,' he says, 'depends upon his ability to sustain himself; the economic life is therefore the fundamental condition of all life. Since human life, however, is the life of man in society, individual existence moves within the framework of the social structure and is modified by it. What the conditions of maintenance are to the individual, the similar relations of production and consumption are to the community. To economic causes, therefore, must be traced in the last instance those transformations in the structure of society which themselves condition the relations of social classes and the various manifestations of social life.' As will be noted presently, Professor Seligman qualifies this statement to a very great degree later, but the economic interpretation, which has received somewhat scant application in America as yet, is rapidly growing in appeal and may be pushed by some here, as it has been by some of the wilder extremists in Europe, to the same degree of exclusive extravagance as the theory of geographic determinism. The few important studies based upon the economic doctrine which have appeared in recent years in the

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United States are of great value and suggestiveness. Professor Beard, for example, in his extremely interesting volume, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, attempts merely to trace, by legitimate methods and inference, the overshadowing economic influence with reference to that political question.

Certain European and American writers in the past, however, have been far more extravagant in their claims for the exclusive determinism of the economic factors. Indeed, the whole of Greek intellectual life and philosophy have been deduced as necessary resultants from economic determinants precisely, and as illogically, as the extremist geographer, Allen, deduced them from the environmental. Not only the whole of man's social and political institutions, but even the Christian religion, has been found by some to have been the inevitable outcome of human economic needs and their satisfactions without consideration of other elements.

Here, again, I wish to emphasize that such extremists do not represent the sounder historical and economic scholars, but their unbalanced pronouncements impress that part of the public which reacts more easily to startling generalities than to cautious investigation.

As Henry Adams once said, those who read Buckle's first volume in 1857 and, two years later, Darwin's Origin of Species could not then doubt that 'historians would follow until they had exhausted every possible hypothesis to create a science of history.' As new sciences or pseudo-sciences have developed, one or another historian, enamored of some one of them, has endeavored to make it the controlling or determining factor in the historic process as envisaged by himself. Even the Freudian psychology has seriously attempted to recast the American

Revolution in terms of an obscure neuroticism on the part of Samuel Adams, and the rending of an empire has been traced to the inferiority complex and 'dream world' of that astute if not always immaculate politician.

Of a different type of determinism has been the search for the general laws, rather than merely a determining cause, which may rule over the historic process. In his brilliant presidential address made at the last meeting of the American Historical Association, Professor Cheyney attempted, modestly and tentatively, to arrive at certain historical laws which, he said, he did not conceive of as 'principles which it would be well for us to accept, or as ideals which we may hope to attain, but as natural laws, which we must accept whether we want to or not. . . laws to be accepted and reckoned with as much as the laws of gravitation, or of chemical affinity, or of human evolution, or of human psychology.' He finds these to be the law of continuity- the impossibility of any sudden break with the past; the law of impermanence the inevitable rise, growth, and decline of social groups or nations; the law of interdependence — that no part of the human race can progress by the injury of another; the law of democracy — the tendency for all government to come under the control of all the people; the law of necessity for free human consent; and the law of moral progress the slow but measurable increase in the influence of morals upon human affairs. Quite different was Henry Adams's attempt to discover a mathematical law of progress and decline in his application of the physical concept of 'phase' to the domain of history.

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It is evident from these brief notes on certain recent tendencies in histori

cal work that we are drifting far from the idea of man as a thinking, selfconscious being, determining by his own thoughts and acts the destiny of himself and his fellows. It is true that man has ever felt that his acts are subject to the veto of a higher power, whether expressed in terms of theology or of science. As Professor Cheyney pointed out in the address to which we have referred, we find this thought in one of the earliest written documents of any section of the human race, the papyrus of Ptah Hotep. There it is written that 'never hath that which men have prepared for come to pass; for what the deity hath commanded, even that thing cometh to pass.' But it may be noted that the scribe thought of men as self-consciously and freely struggling for something, however their efforts might be brought to naught by a higher power. It is at least the stimulating conception of two wills clashing, even though man's might always prove the weaker. That conception is of a quite different order from those of the geographic, economic, and other determinists of the extremist groups, who find that man's thoughts, motives, and deceptive belief in his own will and self-direction are in reality all moulded and determined by the forces of nature.

Indeed, according to them, human society merges into nature and becomes as inevitably a part of the cosmic process as the gathering of star dust into nebulæ. If that is the case are we not theoretically justified in giving up all effort and allowing ourselves to become the mere sport of the forces concerned? If the theories are correct, have we any will in the matter at all? If Phidias or Aristotle or Pericles was merely the product of geographic Hellas may not a New Yorker shift all responsibility to Manhattan Island, content himself with murmuring 'God is great,' and cease from

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