consequences
furnish a justification, so to speak, of group life, but they disclose
neither its nature nor its cause. And most certainly they do not bring
us into touch with the fundamental qualities of _human_ society. The
need for food, shelter, or protection will not differentiate the
gregarious from the non-gregarious forms of life, nor the social from
the merely gregarious. All forms of life require food, protection, and
shelter; they are part of animal economics. There is nothing
specifically human about them.

We may reach what I conceive to be the truth in another way. Environment
is to-day almost a cant word. It is very largely used, and, as one might
expect, largely misunderstood. Without actually saying it in so many
words, a vast number of people seem to conceive the environment as
consisting of the purely material surroundings of man. This is to
overlook a most important fact. Even in the lowest stages of human
society, where man's power over natural forces is of the poorest kind,
it is not an exact statement of the case, and it is profoundly untrue
when we take society in its higher developments. If we take the lowest
existing savage race we find that its attitude towards life, what it
does, and what it refrains from doing, is the product of a certain
mental attitude, which is itself the outcome of a number of inherited
ideas and customs. A number of white people, placed in exactly the same
material environment and faced with exactly the same external
circumstances, bring a different psychological inheritance into play,
and act in an entirely different manner. If we transport a Chinaman into
England, or an Englishman into China, we find that both of them possess
the same biological and material needs whether in their native country
or elsewhere. Yet this community of needs does not make the Chinaman a
member of English society, nor an Englishman a member of Chinese
society. They are one in virtue of certain broad human characteristics;
they are divided by certain qualities characteristic of their special
groups. Each society is marked by the possession of certain
psychological characteristics--a number of specific beliefs and
emotional developments--without which its distinctive group character
disappears. This is true of groups within the State; it is true of the
State as a whole; it is true, on the most general scale of all, of the
race.

In other words, the distinguishing feature of human society is