Such visible and tangible things as climate, fuel, soils, fruits, grains, wild or domestic animals, and the like have for many a more substantial appearance than ideas or institutions, and they are disposed to lean upon these, or upon some human activity immediately connected with them, as a solid support for their philosophy of life. But after all such things exist _for us_ only as they have interacted with our traditional organism of life and become a part of it. Climate, as it actually touches us, may be said to be a social institution, of which clothes, shelter, artificial heat, and irrigation are obvious aspects. And so with our economic “environment.” What are deposits of iron and coal, or fertility of soil, or navigable waters, or plants and animals capable of domestication, except in conjunction with the traditional arts and customs through which these are utilized? To a people with one inheritance of ideas a coal-field means nothing at all, to a people with another it means a special development of industry. Such conditions owe their importance, like anything else, to the way they work in with the process already going on. Another reason for the popularity of material or economic determinism is the industrial character of our time and of many of our more urgent problems, which has caused our minds to be preoccupied with this class of ideas. A society like ours produces such theories just as a militarist society produces theories that make war the dominating process. It is easy to show that the “_mores_ of maintenance,” the way a people gets its living, exercise an immense influence upon all their ideas and institutions.[9] But what are the “_mores_ of maintenance”? Surely not something external to their history and imposed upon them by their material surroundings, as seems often to be assumed in this connection, but simply their whole mental and social organism, functioning for self-support through its interaction with these surroundings. They are as much the effect as they can possibly be the cause of psychical phenomena, and to argue economic determinism from their importance begs the whole question. Material factors are essential in the organic whole of life, but certainly no more so than the spiritual factors, the ideas, and institutions of the group. Professor W. G. Sumner, probably by way of protest against a merely ideal view of history, said: “We have not made America; America has made us.” Evidently we might turn this around, and it would be just as plausible. “We” have made of America something very different from what the American Indians made of it, or from what the Spaniards would probably have made of it if it had fallen to them. “America” (the United States) is the total outcome of all the complex spiritual and material factors—the former chiefly derived from European sources—which have gone into its development.