614 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
the psychological activities of individuals, as is too commonly assumed, because all 
individuals whose conduct we can possibly observe have themselves been educated 
in some society or other, and presume in all their social acts the assumptions on 
which that society itself proceeds. ‘I take the legal customs of all peoples of the 
earth,’ so he wrote in 1884,'‘ the residual outcome of the living legal consciousness 
of humanity, for the starting-point of my inquiry into the science of law ; and then, 
on this basis, I propound the question, What is law ? If by this road I arrive even- 
tually at an abstract conception of law, or at an ideaof law, then the whole fabric so 
created consists, from base to summit, of flesh and blood,’ It is the same method, 
of course, which had already yielded such remarkable results to Montesquieu, and 
even to Locke. The point of view is no longer that of a Maine or a McLennan, 
students of patriarchal or of matriarchal institutions by themselves. It is that 
of a spectator of human society as a whole; and such a point of view only became 
possible at all when it was already certain that no great section of humanity 
remained altogether unexplored, however fragmentary our knowledge might 
still be of much that we ought to have recorded. And its immediate outcome has 
been to throw into the strongest possible relief the dependence of the form and, 
still more, of the actual content of all human societies on something which is not 
in the human mind at all, but is the infinite variety of that external Nature which 
Society exists to fend off from Man, and algo to let Man dominate if he can. 
This was, of course, already the standpoint of Comte, with his emphasis on 
the monde ambiant. But Comte, the citizen of a State which except in Canada 
had failed to colonise, and therefore had little direct contact with non-European 
types of society, confined himself far too exclusively to European data. His 
strength is precisely where the science of France was so magnificently strong in 
his day, in the domain of pure physics; it is his analogies between politics and 
physics which are so illuminating in his work, as in that of his English compeer, 
Herbert Spencer ;* and it is the weakness of both in the direction of anthropology 
which mainly accounts for the shortness of their respective vogues. 
Friedrich Ratzel ; Anthropo-geography. 
At the point which we have now reached in this rapid survey of our science, 
it was obviously to Geography—the systematic study of those external forces of 
Nature as an ordered whole—that Anthropology stretched out its hands; and it 
did not ask in vain. But while English geography had remained exploratory, 
descriptive, and (like English geology) historical in its outlook, the new German 
science of Erdkunde— earth-knowledge’ in the widest sense of the word—had 
already come into being, on the basis of the labours of Ritter and the two Hum- 
boldts, and under the guidance of such men as Wagner, Richthofen, and Bastian; 
the last named also an anthropologist of the first rank. It was thus to a dis- 
tinguished pupil of Wagner, Friedrich Ratzel, that anthropology owed, more 
than to any other man, the next forward step on these lines. In Ratzel’s mind, 
History and Geography went hand in hand as the precursors of a scientific An- 
thropology.* History to define when, and in what order, Man makes his conquests 
over Nature ; Geography to show where, and within what limits, Nature presents 
a conquerable field for Man. Much of this, of course, was already implicit in the 
teaching of Adolf Bastian, whose monumental volumes on ‘ Man in History’ had 
appeared at Leipzig as early as 1860; his ‘ Contributions to Comparative Psycho- 
logy’ in 1868; and his ‘ Legal Relations among the Different Peoples of the Earth’ 
in 1872*—three years before Post’s first essay. But Bastian, inaccessible for 
years together in Tibet or Polynesia, was rather an inspiration to a few intimate 
colleagues than a great propagandist; and besides, it was not till the appearance 
Post, Die Grundlagen des Rechts (1884). 
* Compare Quetelet’s Lssai de Physique Sociale (1841), as a symptom of the trend 
of French thought at this stage. 
* Ratzel, Anthropo-geographie. Leipzig, vol. i. 1882; ii. 1891. 
* Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte (Leipzig, 1860); Beitrage zur vergleichen- 
den Psychologie (Berlin, 1868); Rechtsverhdltnisse bei verschiedenen Vilkern der Erde 
(Berlin, 1872). 
