METHOD OF MENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY 593 



cratic ? If it was despotic, how did the despot acquire his power ? 

 by his prowess in war or by his pretensions as a magician ? If 

 the government was oligarchic, was it committed to a troop of 

 warriors or to a junta of old men ? If it was democratic, was 

 it in the hands of all the adult members of the community? 

 or was there a discrimination of classes, and perhaps of sex ? 

 Or are we wrong in postulating any government at all in the 

 primitive group ? May there not have been complete anarchy, 

 every man doing what was right in his own eyes ? Here, again, 

 the questions which the anthropologist has to ask are not 

 altogether alien from some which still agitate the bosoms of our 

 civilised contemporaries. 



Further, the student of social anthropology has to investigate 

 the thorny question of the rise of private property among men. 

 Is the instinct of private property, as some think, shared by the 

 beasts and inherited by us from our animal ancestors ? or did it 

 first develop in the human group ? and was it preceded by a 

 period of unlimited communism ? and when, sooner or later, 

 the institution of private property was first recognised in a 

 community, did the property belong to certain social groups, 

 say to families or clans, or to individuals ? Once more, in in- 

 vestigating these and similar questions the anthropologist can 

 hardly exclude from his mind the heated controversies of his 

 own day. He may even be called in as witness by the disput- 

 ants to say whether gigantic measures for the confiscation — or 

 should I say the socialisation ? — of private property may not be 

 defended by the practice of savages. 



Then, to turn for a moment to the origin of science, it is for 

 mental anthropology to ask how men learned to form and use 

 abstract ideas, in particular the ideas of number, which are the 

 basis of mathematics ; how they came to note the stars and the 

 apparent motion of the heavenly bodies, the observation of 

 which laid the foundation of astronomy ; how they arrived at 

 the idea of measuring dimensions both in space and time, thereby 

 paving the way for geometry and physics ; how by marking the 

 annual changes of the seasons they fashioned for themselves a 

 rudimentary calendar ; how, perhaps, the false sequence of 

 events assumed by magic may have been slowly replaced in 

 the minds of men by a truer conception of natural law. 



Lastly, the student of our science has to consider the question 

 of the origin of religion. How did man come to believe in the 

 existence of gods and spirits ? How did he first suppose that he 

 could propitiate them by prayer and sacrifice and so induce them 

 to direct, or alter, the course of nature for his benefit ? Whatever 

 the origin of these beliefs, it seems certain that they are peculiar 

 to humanity ; we have no reason to assume that they are shared 

 by the beasts. Hence we may safely conclude that they were 



