LARGER PROBLEMS OF ANTHROPOLOGY 463 



a chain of supposititious relationships, and as suggestions of com- 

 mon origin of both devices and devisers; but as observations 

 multiplied, the hypothetic chain broke beneath its own weight, 

 for the few similarities were gainsaid and far outweighed by num- 

 berless dissimilarities of a sort manifestly attesting independent 

 development. About 1880 Powell summarized the observed re- 

 semblances and differences among devices, and showed that the 

 former are to be regarded as coincidences due to the tendency 

 of the human mind to respond to contact with external nature- 

 in a uniform way. A dozen years later Brinton re-summed the 

 growing data and corroborated the Powellian conclusion; and on 

 extending the inquiry to institutions, forms of expression, and types 

 of opinion and belief (in which the coincidences are even more 

 striking than in the material devices), he formulated a theory of 

 "the unity of the human mind," in which he saw a suggestion 

 that the mind was extraneous in origin, i. e., impressed on man- 

 kind from without, a view not unlike that long maintained by 

 Alfred Russell Wallace. With the setting of the old century and 

 the dawn of the new, the ever-multiplying facts were again re- 

 viewed, and the earlier generalizations were again sustained, but 

 found to tell less than the whole story; for it was discovered that, 

 while minds of corresponding culture-grade commonly respond simi- 

 larly to like stimuli, minds of other grades frequently respond 

 differently as when the savage eviscerates an enemy and de- 

 vours his heart as food for courage, or the barbarian immolates 

 a widow on the bier of her spouse, or the budding Christian lends 

 himself to the tortures of the Inquisition, each reveling in his own 

 righteousness and reprobating all the rest, though all are alike 

 ghastly and obnoxious to enlightened thought. The new general- 

 ization rendered it easy to define the limits within which the re- 

 sponses of different minds to similar impressions may be expected 

 to coincide; thereby it cleared away many of the anomalies and 

 apparent incongruities among the observed facts, thus strength- 

 ening the law of activital coincidences as first propounded. The 

 introduction of a limiting term also rendered the law more spe- 

 cific; so that the sum of knowledge concerning the relations be- 

 tween mind and external nature may now be expressed in the 

 proposition: Minds of corresponding culture-grades commonly re- 

 spond similarly to like stimuli. By far the most important effect 

 of the new generalization was the inevitable recognition of a cumu- 

 lative mind-growth in passing from savagery to barbarism, thence 

 to civilization, and on to enlightenment; for, in the first place, 

 this recognition afforded a key to indeed, a full explanation of 

 the sequence of the culture-grades, while, in the second place, 

 it showed forth the course of the world's mental development as 



