The concept of “environment” is certainly difficult and may even be misunderstood; but we have no handy substitute. It seems simple enough to distinguish between the organism and the surrounding environment and to separate forces acting on an organism into those that are internal and biological and those that are external and environmental. But in actual practice this system breaks down in many ways, because the organism and the environment are constantly interacting so that the environment is modified by the organism and vice versa.
“环境”的概念当然很难理解，甚至可能被误解；但我们没有合适的替代。区分生物体和周围环境，并将作用在生物体上的力分为内部的生物的力，外部的环境的力，似乎足够简单。但在实际实践中，这个系统在很多方面都会崩溃，因为生物体和环境不断地相互作用，因此环境会被生物体改变，反之亦然。
In the case of man, the difficulties with the environmental concept are even more complicated because we have to deal with man as an animal and with man as a bearer of culture. If we look at man as an animal and try to analyze the environmental forces that are acting on the organism, we find that we have to deal with things like climate, soil, plants and such-like factors common to all biological situations; but we also find, always, very important environmental influences that we can only class as “cultural”, which modify the physical and biological factors. But man, as we know him, is always a bearer of culture; and if we study human culture, we find that it, in turn, is modified by the environmental factors of climate and geography. We thus easily get into great difficulties from the necessity of viewing culture, at one moment, as a part of the man and, at another moment, as a part of the environment.
就人类而言，环境概念的困难更为复杂，因为我们必须把人当作动物，把人当作文化持有者。如果我们把人看作一种动物，并试图分析作用在生物体上的环境力，我们会发现我们必须处理气候、土壤、植物等所有生物情况下常见的因素；但我们也总是发现，非常重要的环境影响，我们只能将其归类为“文化”，它改变了物理和生物因素。但是，正如我们所知，人永远是文化的载体；如果我们研究人类文化，我们会发现它反过来又会受到气候和地理环境因素的影响。因此，我们很容易陷入巨大的困难，因为我们必须将文化视为人的一部分，而将其视为环境的一部分。
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