THE SCIENCE OF MAN PEARSON. 433 



existence. If that is so, let us do away with shams and live like 

 animals. If, on the other hand, there is a soul to be looked after, 

 let us all strain our nerves to the task; there is no use in digging into 

 the sands of time for the skeletons of the past ; build your man for 

 the future." 



What is the reply of anthropology to this indictment of the states- 

 man? You can not brush it lightly aside. It is the statement of a 

 good man and a strong man who is willing to spend his life in the 

 service of bis fellows. He sees us handling fossils and potsherds and 

 can not perceive the social utility of our studies. He does not believe 

 any enthusiasm for human progress can lie beneath the spade and 

 callipers of the scientific investigator. He has never grasped that the 

 man of to-day is precisely what heredity and his genealogy, his past 

 history and his prehistory, have made him. He does not recognise 

 that it is impossible to build your man for the future until you have 

 studied the origin of his physical and mental constitution. Whence 

 did he draw his good and evil characteristics — are they the product 

 of his nature or his nurture? Man has not a plastic mind and body 

 which the enthusiastic reformer can at will mould to the model 

 of his golden age ideals. He has taken thousands of years to grow 

 into what he is, and only by like processes of evolution — intensified 

 and speeded up, if we work consciously and with full knowledge of 

 the past — can we build his future. 



It does matter in regard to the gravest problems before mankind 

 to-day whether our ancestry was hylobatic or troglodyte. For five 

 years the whole world has been a stage for brutality and violence. 

 We have seen a large part of the youth of Europe who were best 

 fitted mentally and physically to be parents of future generations 

 perish: the dysgenic effect of this slaughter will show itself each 

 20 to 25 years for centuries to come in the census returns of half 

 the countries of the world. Science undertook work which na- 

 tional feeling bade it do, but on which it will ever look back with 

 a shuddering feeling of distaste, an uneasy consciousness of having 

 soiled its hands. And as aftermath we see in almost every land an 

 orgy of violent crime, a sense of lost security, and at times we dread 

 that our very civilization may perish owing to the weakening of the 

 social ties, the deadening of the responsibilities of class to class. This 

 outbreak of violence which has so appalled the thinking world, is 

 it the sporadic appearance of an innate pas ion for the raw and 

 brutal in mankind, or is it the outcome of economic causes forcing 

 the nations of the world to the combat for limited food and material 

 supplies? I wish we could attribute it to the latter source, for then 

 we could eradicate the spirit of violence by changing environmental 

 conditions. But if the spirit of violence be innate in man, if there 



