86. Cultural Factors
Such cultural causes constitute the third set or kind of factors by which civilization is explainable. If the example just discussed is representative, it is clear that cultural factors ordinarily interpret more phenomena of civilization, and interpret them more fully, than factors either of racial heredity or physical environment.
It is different in zoölogy and botany. The forms and behavior of animals and plants are explainable in terms of heredity and environment because animals and plants have no culture. It is true that the forms and behavior are determined also by other animals and plants, their characteristics, habits, and abundance, but these factors are in a larger sense part of the environment. They are at any rate sub-cultural. But since anthropology deals with beings whose distinctive trait in social relations is the possession of the thing that we call culture, the factors which biology employs are insufficient. It is not that heredity and natural environment fail to apply to man, but that they apply only indirectly and remotely to his civilization. This fundamental fact has often been overlooked, especially in modern times, because the biological sciences having achieved successful increases of knowledge and understanding, the temptation was great to borrow their method outright and apply it without serious modification to the human material of anthropology. This procedure simplified the situation, but yielded inadequate and illusory results. For a very long time the idea that man possessed and animals lacked a soul influenced people’s thought to such a degree that they scarcely thought of human beings in terms of biological causality, of heredity and environment. Then when a reaction began to set in, less than two centuries ago, and it became more generally recognized that man was an animal, the pendulum swung to the other extreme and the tendency grew of seeing in him only the animal, the cultureless being, and of either ignoring his culture or thinking that it could be explained away by resolving it into the factors familiar from biology. The just and wise course lies between. The biological aspects of man must be interpreted in terms of biological causation, his cultural aspects in terms first of all of cultural causation. After they have been thus resolved, the cultural causes may reduce to ultimate factors of heredity and natural environment.