Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    16/284 (page 4)
    There are the influences upon each population of the physical geography amid which it lives; of the climate and the weather; of the fauna and flora; of the social heritage of race and language, religion and custom; of traditions as to history, national and local, and, by no means least in its effects, of both the past and the contemporaneous economic framework of the community. Ail this may be regarded as forming a sort of social atmosphere in which every man grows up, and in which, all unconscious of its weight, he lives and moves, and his contemporaneous social in¬ stitutions have their being. Changing the metaphor, we may say that all these influences, contributing to make up the particular civilisation or “Kultur” 1 of each community, form, as it were, the matrix in which all its social institutions are embedded. Affect¬ ing all the institutions of each generation, this social matrix is itself perpetually influenced by them—the whole creating and maintaining a constantly chang¬ ing milieu against which individuals may react and even rebel, but from the influence of which no one can escape. Into this social atmosphere, with momentous and almost incalculable effects on the behaviour of men in their various groupings, we see entering successive waves of thoughts and feelings, which spread over entire communities, and, with increasing inter¬ communication, increasingly over the whole world. 1 The German expression “Kultur” (which does not mean “culture”, the German for which is Bildung) is best translated by “particular civilisa¬ tion”, not civilisation in general.