METHOD OF MENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY 581 



but I should prefer to call it by the more general name of mental 

 anthropology. For though man is no doubt pre-eminently a 

 social being and probably owes a large part of his superiority as 

 an animal to the strength of his gregarious instincts, these 

 instincts are only part of his mental endowment, and even when 

 we have abstracted them from our consideration, there still 

 remains in the human mind much that deserves to be carefully 

 studied and that naturally falls under the science of man. It is 

 with mental, as distinguished from physical, anthropology that 

 I shall be exclusively occupied in these lectures. 



But even when, in anthropology, we have limited our 

 inquiries to the mind of man, the subject is still so vast that, if 

 progress is to be made, some further subdivision of it becomes 

 necessary. For the mind of man has for ages been investigated 

 by a whole series of special studies, which, under the various 

 names of psychology, logic, metaphysics, and ethics, sometimes 

 summed up under the general title of philosophy, have made 

 great and noble contributions to a science of man. What place, 

 then, is there for the new study of mental anthropology beside 

 these ancient studies ? Is there room for her in the venerable 

 college ? Can she discharge a function which was not previously 

 performed by her older sisters ? We think that she can, and 

 to determine what that function is, we need only perhaps con- 

 sider the date at which the modern science of anthropology as 

 a whole was first taken up seriously and systematically. The 

 birth of anthropology followed almost immediately the promul- 

 gation of the evolution theory by Darwin and Wallace in 1859. 

 I think I am right in saying that the foundation of anthropo- 

 logical societies at home and abroad has everywhere been 

 subsequent to that date and has followed it often at very short 

 intervals. Be that as it may, the theory of the gradual evolu- 

 tion of man out of a long series of inferior forms of animal life is 

 now generally accepted, though diversity of opinion still pre- 

 vails as to the precise mode in which the evolution has been 

 brought about. It is this conception of evolution which supplies 

 a basis for the modern science of anthropology. 



On the physical side human anatomy had been studied for 

 centuries and was, I take it, firmly established on its main lines 

 long before the appearance of Darwin ; the new idea imported 

 into the science was that the human body, like the bodies of all 

 animals, is not a finished product, a fixed type, struck out by 

 nature or created by God at a blow, but that it is rather a merely 

 temporary effect, the result of a long process of what resembles 

 growth rather than construction or creation, a growth which we 

 have no reason to suppose has been arrested, but is probably 

 still going on and may cause our descendants to differ as far 

 from us as we now differ from our remotest ancestors in the scale 



38 



