We now proceed to study the influence of these different factors.
1. RACE
This factor, race, must be placed in the first rank, for in itself it far surpasses in importance all the others.We have sufficiently studied it in another work; it is therefore needless to deal with it again. We showed, in a previous volume, what an historical race is, and how,its character once formed, it possesses, as the result of the laws of heredity such power that its beliefs,institutions, and arts—in a word, all the elements of its civilisation—are merely the outward expression of its genius. We showed that the power of the race is such that no element can pass from one people to another without undergoing the most profound transformations.[1]