Regionalism and Permanent Peace

Abstract

ditions and behavior. Culture, accordingly, is anz historico-psychological product. So, also, is every tradition, every custom, and every institution. There is no need, therefore, of any conflict between the historical and functional methods of studying culture. Both are necessary if there is to be any scientific understanding. On the other hand, the methods of experiment and of exact measurement employed in the natural sciences give little promise in the study of cultural development. Anyone who thoroughly understands the relativity of all cultural and social forms to processes of learning and environmental conditions would hardly argue that quantitative measurements can do much more in the study of culture than help us to determine tendencies of various phases of culture at a given time and place. However, many things in human life can be studied only as tendencies. We can record facts here and there, over perhaps long periods of time, and thus get the direction of movements, even though we cannot observe their beginnings or their ends. This study of trends, or tendenvcies, in culture is surely a legitimate study in both cultural anthropology and in sociology and constitutes one of the most interesting phases of those sciences; for the development of the culture of any human group will largely determine the direction of its social evolution. The development of culture is, accordingly, not only the differential trait of human society; but as it is the human phase of social evolution, it is the controlling factor in the development and in most of the behavior of human groups. On the practical side, moreover, the social sciences as sciences of social adjustment will no longer study human society as if it were a machine of the gods which we can only describe but not control. For if social forms and institutions have been made by culture, they have been made by man, and the human sciences will show how they can be modified by man to human advantage.