ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 63 



V. 



There remains in man another power or instinct which works o-ut 

 historical results, and is one of the elementary forces in civilization. 

 It is the religious nature or faculty — that power within which pushes 

 man to a recognition and worship of the divine. Efforts have been 

 made to find the origin of this feeling in man in the reverence for 

 great men, or in the superstitious fear of the powers of nature ; but 

 our inquiry is not with the origin of the faculty. We find it in its 

 full grown state, and gathered around it we find the various institu- 

 tions of religion, the schemes of faith and of morals, and coming 

 from these, the most important and influential body of usages and 

 opinions known to civilization. Whatever philosophers and men 

 of science may think of this element in civilization, few have the au- 

 dacity to propose its overthrow without an effort to replace it with 

 some substitute which may give to society the moral support and 

 regulation that religion affords. 



This enumeration of the elements of modern civilization is ex- 

 haustive. Under one or another of these five fundamental facts 

 all constant phenomena of civilization may be classed. In no civ- 

 ilization are they absent, though they enter into different civilizations 

 not only in different forms but also in different degrees of strength 

 and domination. 



Some of the results of these five primal factors become in time 

 prominent forces or factors in civilization. Thus the wealth which 

 comes from the arts becomes in turn a great economic power ; and 

 the governments which arise out of the social needs end by becom- 

 ing social forces of enormous strength. So to the external influences 

 which press upon social growths — the physical environments and the 

 political distributions and organizations to which they give rise, may 

 easily be taken for new and independent factors, they are at most 

 only secondary and modifying forces and not true original elements, 

 at least in the restricted study of civilization as it presents itself in 

 historic time. 



DISCUSSION. 



Mr. Ward remarked that he had long ago felt the need of a fresh 

 method for the study of social science. The current method 

 dealt with the facts objectively considered, whereas a truly scientific 

 method must discover and recognize the forces by which social 



