THE HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY 471 



which determine them, shook the foundations of the old princi- 

 ples of classification, and knit together groups of facts that hitherto 

 had seemed disconnected. Once clearly enunciated, the historical 

 view of the natural sciences proved irresistible, and the old pro- 

 blems faded away before the new attempts to discover the history 

 of evolution. From the very beginning there has been a strong 

 tendency to combine with the historical aspect a subjective valua- 

 tion of the various phases of development, the present serving as 

 a standard of comparison. The oft-observed change from simple 

 forms to more complex forms, from uniformity to diversity, was 

 interpreted as a change from the less valuable to the more valuable, 

 and thus the historical view assumed in many cases an ill-concealed 

 teleological tinge. The grand picture of nature in which for the 

 first time the universe appears as a unit of ever-changing form and 

 color, each momentary aspect being determined by the past moment 

 and determining the coming changes, is still obscured by a sub- 

 jective element, emotional in its sources, which leads us to ascribe 

 the highest value to that which is near and dear to us. 



The new historical view also came into conflict with the gen- 

 eralizing method of science. It was imposed upon that older view 

 of nature in which the discover}' of general laws was considered 

 the ultimate aim of investigation. According to this view, laws 

 may be exemplified by individual events, which, however, lose 

 their specific interest once the laws are discovered. The actual 

 event possesses no scientific value in itself, but only so far as it 

 leads to the discovery of a general law. This view is, of course, 

 fundamentally opposed to the purely historical view. Here the 

 laws of nature are recognized in each individual event, and the 

 chief interest centres in the event as an incident of the picture of 

 the world. In a way the historic view contains a strong aesthetic 

 element, which finds its satisfaction in the clear conception of the 

 individual event. It is easily intelligible that the combination of 

 these two standpoints led to the subordination of the historical 

 fact under the concept of the law of nature. Indeed, we find all 

 the sciences which took up the historical standpoint for the first 

 time soon engaged in endeavors to discover the laws according 

 to which evolution has taken place. The regularity in the processes 

 of evolution became the centre of attraction even before the pro- 

 cesses of evolution had been observed and understood. All sciences 

 were equally guilty of premature theories of evolution based on 

 observed homologies and supposed similarities. The theories had 

 to be revised again and again, as the slow progress of empirical 

 knowledge of the data of evolution proved their fallacy. 



Anthropology also felt the quickening impulse of the historic 

 point of view, and its development followed the same lines that 



