lO MCGEE 



Divested of immaterial qualifications, and interpreted in the 

 light of other propositions in the same book, this aphorism is a 

 specific affirmation that man's mind is a mirror of Nature, re- 

 flecting observations of Nature and nothing more — i. e., it is 

 an explicit definition of the platform implicitly accepted by 

 Lavoisier and Joule and Darwin and Huxley in their epoch- 

 making researches. True, these men made little acknowledg- 

 ment to Bacon, and at least one of them mildly decried his work ; 

 yet the Novum Organum was one of the most notable treatises 

 of its time, and must have been read widely and at least measur- 

 ably assimilated into the common knowledge of succeeding cen- 

 turies ; so it seems evident that the Baconian concept lay ger- 

 minant, much as did the Greek concept of indestructibility, 

 though for a lesser period — and hence that the framers of the 

 four cardinal principles were debtors to Bacon none the less 

 that the debt was not consciously recognized. 



Long after Bacon, and even after the biotic and geologic 

 sciences bore fruit in cardinal principles, the Science of Man 

 began to take shape. As in other sciences, the observations 

 began with the rare, the remote, and the abnormal, and grad- 

 ually passed toward the near and the normal ; and as the obser- 

 vations became chaotic by reason of their number, they were 

 from time to time integrated in such manner as to raise the sys- 

 tem to successively higher and higher planes. A quarter-cen- 

 tury ago the leaders of Anthropology were beginning to classify 

 mankind in terms of mind-shaped activities and activital prod- 

 ucts — arts and industries, social institutions, languages, and 

 beliefs with their attendant ceremonies and symbols. One of 

 the consequences of this classification was the discovery that 

 the human activities and their products are so frequently alike 

 in widely separated regions as to indicate that they must have 

 arisen spontaneously and independently among unrelated peo- 

 ples ; and twenty years ago Powell formulated this discovery 

 into a law of ' activital similarities' — or a law of cultural coinci- 

 dences, as it might now be called. Further observations 

 supported the first discover}', and iinally gave warrant for the 

 inference that the human mind, wheresoever placed, reflects its 

 environment with striking fidelity. Brinton held that this par- 



