A CLASSIFICATION OF ENVIRONMENTS

L. L. BERNARD
University of Minnesota

ABSTRACT

(1) The scientific study of environment has been delayed, due to a lack of emphasis upon the human or social-science aspect of general science. It is now developing in all the sciences. (2) Science is itself in large measure an analysis of environmental conditions and pressures. Especially is this true of the social sciences. (3) The environments of man may be classified from two standpoints: (a) the types of pressures exerted upon man and his social organization; (b) the order of development (the relative primariness and derivativeness) of the environments. (4) The psycho-social and derivative control environments are of the greatest importance for man. (5) These, and all other social forms of environment, have been produced as a result of man's coadaptive or co-operative adjustment to nature and the antecedent social environments. (6) The future social-control activities of man will probably be undertaken with a view to perfecting the psycho-social and derivative control environments.

The scientific study of environment has just begun to be undertaken seriously.' Scholars have followed the popular precedent in paying more attention to inheritance than to environment, because the superficial facts of what appears to be heredity are more patent than the major principles of environmental influence. It is easy enough to see that horses breed true to type and that children resemble their parents. Stockbreeding and human reproduction have long been of central interest to human consciousness. But most of the causal relationships between environment and organic traits are either indirect and abstract in character or the results produced by environmental pressures have generally been so unlike their causes that the relationships were not immediately and di

1

Three recent volumes which emphasize the importance of environment as a control factor are C. M. Child, Physiological Foundations of Behavior, C. J. Herrick, Neurological Foundations of Animal Behavior, and L. L. Bernard, Instinct: A Study in Social Psychology. See also the author's paper, "The Influence of Environment as a Social Factor" in Publications of American Sociological Society, Vol. XVI (1921). Two other studies in environment of first-rate importance have appeared since this article was written. They are, R. D. McKenzie, "The Ecological Approach to the study of the Human Community," American Journal of Sociology, November 1924; and Franklin Thomas, The Environmental Basis of Society.

rectly visible and could be recognized only by a process of abstract analysis and synthesis. Only relatively recently have we learned how to recognize these unobvious connections and build up a methodology of tracing events back to their environmental causes. Such a technique first developed in some degree of detail with reference to the physico-geographic environment, where the causative processes operated on a larger scale and with more nearly visible mechanisms. Thus Aristotle spoke of the influence of climate and geographic position upon the location of cities and upon the character of their inhabitants. Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century produced something of a philosophy of history, based on geographic analysis, and Bodin and Montesquieu began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to consider in considerable detail the effect of climate and surface contour upon human customs and institutions. Buckle and Ratzel and the modern anthropogeographers, such as Semple and Huntington, have refined-the earlier ones philosophically and the later ones more scientifically—the processes of estimation and measurement of physico-geographic factors. The botanists and the zoölogists have also come into the field latterly with their studies in ecology and symbiosis. In these fields the assumption of environmental influence has been supported by the collection of a vast number of data. But the social sciences have not perhaps as yet so conspicuously enriched themselves with professed environmental studies, partly because the statement of environmental causation in the sphere of social relationships has involved greater abstractness of analysis, and partly because the social processes themselves have not been so clearly determined as a basis for environmental study. However, much work in tracing environmental factors has been accomplished in connection with sociological studies, especially in the more pathological fields of criminology and dependency, as well as in hygiene and social psychology, and it is probably these studies involving statements of environmental causation which, more than any other set of causes, have forced emphasis to be placed upon the study and analysis of environment as a method of scientific investigation comparable to the study of inheritance.

Another reason why an analysis of environmental causation

came late in the social and mental sciences is the fact that the approach to a causal analysis in these fields had been through the metaphysical concepts of natural law, reason, and intuition. Under the old metaphysical theory of natural-law causation it was held that natural law influenced the behavior of men, individually and collectively, through an extension into the personality through the mechanisms of reason and impulse, which were conceived of as subjective aspects of the objective fact of natural law. Reason in this terminology did not signify the logic of individual and selfactive judgment, as it does with us, but rather the concept was one of infiltration of an outside essence into the personality, more nearly what Lotze and his followers understood by intuition. This theory of intelligence as an extension of natural law into the personality easily lent itself to the inheritance concept on the supposition that the subjective extensions of natural law, such as reason or intuition, impulse or instinct, conscience, the soul, etc., came into the organism at the point of birth or at some time previous thereto. Remnants of these old mystical beliefs still survive in some of the vaguer forms of inheritance theory of the present day. We have a tradition of looking at all processes of psychic causation within ourselves or as collectively organized in society as subjective and as inherited, or at least as of prenatal origin; and in the minds of the older biologists and social scientists the prenatal is still practically equivalent to the inherited.

The sciences deal with the analysis of objects; and objects are the material of the environments, whether they be physical, organic, or mental and social. Consequently the growth of science in the last few centuries has been a sine qua non to the development of a dependable theory of environmental causation. It might perhaps be truthfully urged that the chief content of the sciences is environmental processes. As the sciences have developed the analysis of objective or environmental processes has proceeded, with the result that we are enabled to see environment in ever greater detail and to divide it up into its constituent factors and processes. This analysis took place first in the physical and biological worlds, and already some decades ago the analysis of environment in these

fields had been split up into numerous subdivisions2 because the older sciences had already reached that stage of maturity at which they called for an extensive analysis and classification of the objective phenomena with which they deal. The social sciences have been slower in developing and consequently the corresponding objective or environmental analyses have been somewhat retarded. But this difficulty is now being overcome by a rapid development of the social sciences, which calls for a correspondingly detailed analysis of the social environment.

The implication here is that there is a close functional correspondence between the complexity of any science and the degree of environmental analysis which has occurred in that field, and I believe this is true. The function of each science as an organized body of tested knowledge in the hands of the social administrators is to control the organization of the objective phenomena with which that science deals analytically and conceptually. The science is merely the description of phenomena and the conceptualization of the relationships of phenomena, and it stands as a control body between the facts or phenomena themselves on the one hand and the thinkers (scientists) and administrators (reformers, exploiters, engineers, industrialists, etc.) on the other hand, who aim at transforming these phenomena for purposes of social control in the service of certain objectives of which they are more or less definitely aware. There is, therefore, of necessity a close relationship between the phenomena and their interpretation (description and classification) which constitutes the content of science. The logical arrangement of this description of the objective phenomena, in such a way as to emphasize their causal relationships to human and social behavior, that is, to classify them in the category of environmental pressures, is the thing which places them effectively in the category of environmental objects. Along with this expansion of science and the correlative expansion of our conceptualizations of environments and of the classification of environments has gone an expansion of human experience. Consequently modern social life is as complex and as intricate as the sciences themselves *See, for example, E. R. A. Seligman, Principles of Economics, for such a treat

ment.

which organize and in part at least provide a method of control of life or adjustment processes. In order that we may simplify the structures of social life and get order out of this complexity for purposes of control, it is necessary to see distributively the environmental pressures which mold social organization and behavior through the channels of applied science. The following partial classification of the environments is a tentative proposal of such a scheme.

This classification may be presented in brief outline as follows:* I. The physical environments

1. Cosmic, including such factors as the sun's heat, possible electric or other disturbances due to the relationship of the sun and other heavenly bodies upon the earth, the falling of meteors, the effect of moonlight and of the moon's attraction upon the tides, possible cosmic causes of radical changes in climate, such as the glacial epochs, due to cosmic changes.*

2. Physico-geographic, especially such factors as contour and surface configuration (mountains, coast lines, valleys, rivers, mountain passes, etc.), altitude.

3. Soil, especially in relation to the supply and distribution of plant foods, particularly nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous; the physics of the soils.

4. Climate, including especially temperature relations, humidity, and the succession of the seasons.

5. The inorganic resources, especially the minerals and metals, such as the natural fuels (coal, petroleum, natural gas), the structural materials (iron, copper, tin, zinc, lead, etc.), and the rarer industrial metals. Under this heading might be included the chemical properties of the soil.

6. Natural agencies, especially falling water, the winds, the tides and the sun's rays, which may be used to some extent as power sources. 7. Natural mechanical processes (combustion, radiation, gravity, etc.)

II. The biological or organic environments (plants and animals)

1. Micro-organisms. The various forms of germ life, including pathogenic and saphrophytic bacteria, bacilli, and amoebae, and possibly even more minute forms of life.

For more detail on some of these categories see paper cited above, in Publications of American Sociological Society, Vol. XVI.

'For a tentative, though doubtless not a final statement of such possible cosmic influences in the field of climate, see Huntington and Visher, Climatic Change.