THE SCIENCE OF MAN — PEARSON. 431 



used too often as catchwords without their users being clear about the ideas 

 those words convey. The sad results of our foreign policy, the collapse of all 

 our calculations as to national frames of mind, were based in no small degree 

 on ethnographic ignorance; one has only to take for example the case of the 

 Turks. Ethnology should not embrace only the spears and clubs of the savages, 

 but also the psychology and demography of the white races, the European peo- 

 ples. At this very moment, when the right of self-determination has become 

 a foremost question of the day, the scientific determination of the boundaries 

 of a people and its lands has become a task of the first importance. But our 

 Government of the past knew nothing of the activitiy of the ethnologists, and 

 the universities were not in the condition to come to their aid, for ethnological 

 chairs and institutes were wanting. The foundation of such must be the task 

 of the immediate future.' 



And once more: 



The problems of the military fitness of our people, of the physical constitu- 

 tion of the various social classes, of the influence of the social and material 

 environment upon them, the problems of the biological grounds for the fall in 

 the birth rate and its results, of the racial composition of our people, of the 

 eventual racial differences and the accompanying diverse mental capacities of 

 the individual strata, and finally the racial changes which may take place in a 

 folk under the influences of civilization, and the bearing of all these matters 

 on the fate of a nation, these are problems which can alone be investigated and 

 brought nearer to solution by anthropology. Even now after the war-popula- 

 tion problems stand in the forefront of interest, the question of folk-increase 

 and of the falling birth rate is the vital question of the future. 8 



I must ask your pardon for quoting so much, but it seems so 

 strongly to point the moral of my tale. If you will study what Ger- 

 many is feeling and thinking to-day, do not hope to find it in the 

 newspaper reports; seek it elsewhere in personal communication or 

 in German writings. Then, I think, you will agree with me that 

 rightly or wrongly there is a conviction spreading in Germany that 

 the war arose and that the war was lost because a nation of professed 

 thinkers had studied all sciences but had omitted to study aptly the 

 science of man. And in a certain sense that is an absolutely correct 

 conviction, for if the science of man stood where we may hope it will 

 stand in the dim and distant future, man would from the past and 

 the surrounding present have some grasp of future evolution, and 

 so have a greater chance of guiding its controllable factors. 



We are far indeed from that to-day ; but it befits us none the less 

 to study what this new anthropological movement in Germany con- 

 notes. It means that the material of anthropology is going to change, 

 or rather that its observations will be extended into a study of the 

 mental as well as the physical characters, and these of the white races 

 as well as of the dark. It means that anthropologists will not only 

 study individual psychology, but folk psychology. It means — and 

 this is directly said — that Germany, having lost her colonies, will 



7 Ibid. s. 41. 

 s Ibid. S. 38. 



