Chapter II 



THE PROSPECTS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 

 by Frank H. Hankins 



ONE of the most striking features of the evolution of 

 culture is the sluggish conservatism of thought. This 

 is true even of our very modern culture, which is doubtless 

 the most rapidly changing the world has ever known. As 

 Robert Briffault^ says: "We are living in a phase of evolu- 

 tion which is known as the twentieth century and stands 

 for a certain achieved growth of the human mind. But the 

 enormous majority of the human race do not belong to that 

 phase at all . . . Twentieth century civilization is clut- 

 tered up with living fossils surviving from every barbaric 

 phase of the past, and masquerading as twentieth century 

 people because no attempt has yet been made to ensure 

 that human beings shall wear modern minds as well as 

 modern clothes, and every care has, on the contrary, been 

 taken to provide them with superannuated misfits." Man 

 changes his traditional conceptions of himself and the 

 world with extreme reluctance. This is not entirely due to 

 his stupidity, though the candid student of his tedious 

 climb from animality to modernity finds convincing proof 

 that man is far from being guided by a clear-sighted reason. 

 When one observes that it took our human forebears some 

 hundreds of thousands of years, even by conservative 

 calculation, to emerge from the rough-stone age, and still 

 additional thousands to discover the first use of metals, one 



^ Briffault, Robert, "Rational Evolution," The Macmillan Gjmpany, New 

 York, 1930. 



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