x8o 



NA TURE 



[SErXEMBER 2.-^, I909 



this set thum tliinking, and comparing, and collecting 

 -more and more data, from trader and traveller, for an 

 -answer to perennial problems, alike of their anthropology 

 and 01 ours. Can climate alter character or change 

 physique, and if so, how? Does the mode of life or the 

 ■diet of a people affect that people's real self, or its value 

 for us? Is the father, as the Greeks believed, or the 

 mother who bore them, the natural owner and guardian 

 of children ? Is the Heracles whom they worship in 

 Thasos the same god as he whose temple is in 

 lyre? Because the Colchians wear linen, and practise 

 circumcision, are they to be regarded as colonists of the 

 Egyptians? or can similar customs spring up independently 

 on the Nile and on the Phasis? Here, in fact, are all 

 the great problems of modern anthropology, flung out 

 for good and all, as soon as ever human reflective reason 

 found itself face to face with the facts of other human 

 societies, even within so limited a region as the old 

 Mediterranean world. 



And I would have you note that these old Greek 

 problems, like all the supreme problems of science old 

 and new, were not theoretical problems merely. Each of 

 them stood in direct relation to life. To take only cases 

 such as I quoted just now from the Father of History— 

 is there, for example, among all the various regions and 

 aspects of the world, any real earthly paradise, any delect- 

 able country, where without let or hindrance the good 

 man may lead the good life? Is there an ideal diet, an 

 ideal social structure, or in general, an ideal way of life 

 for men ; or are all the good things of this world wholly 

 relative to the persons, the places, "and the seasons where 

 they occur? I do not mean that the ancient Greeks ever 

 found out any of these things, for all their searching ; 

 or even that all ancient seekers after marvels and 

 travellers' tales were engaged consciously in anthropo- 

 logical research at all. I mean only this : that the ex- 

 periences, and the problem?, and the practical end of it 

 all, were as certainly present to the minds of men like 

 Herodotus and Hippocrates, as they have been in all great 

 scientific work that the world had seen. 



In the same way it has for some while been clear to 

 me that neither Plato nor Aristotle, the great outstanding 

 figures of fourth-century Greece, was constructing theories 

 of human nature entirely in the air. Their conceptions 

 toth of the ideal state of society, and of the elements 

 which were fundamental and essential in actual societies 

 as they knew them, were determined to a very large 

 extent by their observation of real men in Sparta,' Persia, 

 or Scythia. But it is also clear that much that had been 

 familiar to the historians of the fifth century, and par- 

 ticularly to Herodotus, had fallen out of vogue with the 

 philosophers of the fourth. Systematic clearness had been 

 attained only by the sacrifice of historic accuracy. 

 Thucydides, in fact, standing right in the parting of tlie 

 ways between history and rhetoric, might fairly have ex- 

 tended his warnings to a dissociation of history from 

 political philosophy, \vhich was just as imminent. 



Anthropology and the Renaissance. 



-At the Revival of Learning it was the same as in the 

 great days of Greece. New vistas of the world were being 

 opened up by the voyagers ; new types of men, of modes 

 of hfe, of societies and states, were discovered and de- 

 scribed ; new comparisons were forced upon men by new 

 kno\yledge crowding thick into their minds; and new 

 questions, which were nevertheless old as the hills, made 

 €ddies and rapids in the swift current of thought, and 

 cried out for an answer. Take the central political 

 problems, for example : What constitutes the right to 

 govern, and what is the origin of law? In medifeval 

 Europe this was simple enough. The duke, or the king, 

 or the bishop governed by authority of the emperor, or 

 the pope; and pope and emperor ruled (like Edward VII.) 



by the Grace of God." Yet here, in Guinea, in Mono- 

 motapa, in Cathay, and in Peru, were great absolute 

 monarchies which knew nothing of the pope or the 

 emperor, and were mighty hazy about God. Yet their 

 subjects obeyed them, and gave good reasons for their 

 obedience, and chiefest of their reasons (as in all times 

 and places) was this ; " We should be much worse off if 

 •we didn't." 



NO. 2082, VOL. 81] 



Unsocial Man and tlie Pre-Social State. 

 It would take me very far afield if I were to try to 

 show how this universal answer came to change its ground 

 from politics to anthropology, so that to the question — 

 how men knew that they would be much worse off if they 

 didn't — the answer came, that " once upon a time they 

 had been much worse off, because they didn't." For my 

 present purpose it is enough to note that, in all ages, 

 philosophers who set out to define the nature of the State, 

 have become involved in speculations about its origin ; that 

 historians in their researches into its origin, have been 

 forced into conclusions as to its nature ; and that in both 

 cases every belief about the Nature of the State has been 

 found to involve a belief about a State of Nature ; ah 

 answer of some kind, that is, to the question whether 

 man was originally and naturally a social animal, or 

 whether at some early period of his history he became 

 social and domestic. In the latter event, how was domesti- 

 cation effected, and what sort of thing was undomesticated 

 man? In the ancient world, after long controversy, 

 .Aristotle's definition of man as the " social animal " had 

 carried the day, and ruled that question out of court. 

 But at the Revival of Learning, the unnatural behaviour 

 of certain actual societies towards their individual members 

 had revived irresistibly the whole question whether society 

 was part of the natural order at all, and not a " device 

 of the heathen," a mistake or a pis aller ; and whether, 

 if society was not thus " natural," men would not really 

 be better off if they returned to their natural, pre-social, 

 unsocial state, and began again at the beginning, to work 

 out their own salvation. This belief in a pre-social state 

 played a large part in the political philosophy of the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries ; and conversely it was 

 the very fact that the pre-social state as a philosophical 

 conception fell out of vogue at the beginning of the nine- 

 teenth, which has distinguished modern political philosophy 

 so markedly from its predecessors. 



The Patriarchal Theory. 



All theories of a Social Contract as the starting-point of 

 human societies presupposed that mankind had actually 

 passed through a Pre-Social State ; and the proof which 

 had been offered of this supposition, though partly theo- 

 retical and a priori, had partly also been inductive and 

 based on experience. Further, the experience of " primitive 

 Man " which was actually open to the philosophers of the 

 seventeenth and earh- eighteenth centuries had been, in 

 fact, such as to force the conclusion not merely that a 

 I're-.Social State had once existed, but that some barbarous 

 peoples had not yet emerged from it. It was a sad error 

 of observation, as we now know, which led to that con- 

 clusion ; but given the travellers' tales, in the form in 

 which we can read them in the " Cosmographies " and 

 " Voyages " of the time, I do not see how that conclusion 

 could have been avoided without culpable neglect of such 

 evidence as there was. If blame is to be assigned in this 

 phase of inquiry at all, it is to be assigned to the travellers 

 and traders, for making such poor use of their eyes and 

 ears. -■MI, however, that I am concerned to establish at 

 present is this, that one of the most important and far- 

 reaching speculations of modern political philosophy, the 

 speculation as to a Pre-Social Condition of Mankind, and 

 a Social Contract which ended it and brought in Society 

 and the State, arose directly and inevitably from the new- 

 information as .to what primitive man was and did, when 

 he was studied in the seventeenth century at Tombutuni, 

 or Saldanha Bay, or the " backwoods of America," or the 

 " bank of the Orinoco river." 



But the Social Contract Theory has long since passed 

 out of vogue. Its political consequences are with us to- 

 day, like the political consequences of the belief in the 

 Divine Right of Kings ; but the theories themselves are 

 dead, and likely to remain so. Plato and Aristotle, with 

 their belief in Man as a Naturally Social Animal, have 

 come by their own again, for most of us, if not for all : 

 and the search for an ideal State, which shall realise and 

 fulfil Man's social instincts, is again in full cp.'. 



^^'hat nart. if any, has the direct study of barbarous 

 people played at this fresh turn of the wheel? Let us 

 look once again at the state of geographical knowledge, 

 and more particularly, as before, at the regions in which 



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