144 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. ■ ' 



finding our diversity from the ape . . . There may be no spirit, no 

 soul : there is no proof of their existence. If that is so, let us do 

 •away with shams and hve like animals. If, on the other hand, there 

 is a soul to be looked after, let us all strain our nerves to the task ; 

 there is no use in digging into the sands of time for t\he skeletons of 

 the past : build your man for the future. ' 



"What is the reply of anthropology to this indictment of the states- 

 man? You cannot brush it lightly aside. It is the statement of a 

 good man and a strong man who is willing to spend his life in Ihe service 

 of his fellows. He sees us handling fossils and potsherds and cannot 

 perceive the social utility of our studies. He does not believe any 

 enthusiasm for human progress can lie beneath the spade and callipers 

 of the scientdfic investigator. He has never grasped that the man of 

 to-day is precisely what heredity and his genealogy, his past history 

 and his prehistory, have made him. He does not recognise that it is 

 impossible to build your man for the future until you have studied the 

 origin of his physical and mental constitution. "Whence did he draw 

 his good and evil characteristics — are they the product of his nature or 

 his nurture ? Man has not a plastic mind and body which the enthu- 

 siastic reformer can at will mould to the model of his golden age ideals. 

 He has taken thousands of years to grow into what he is, and only bv 

 like processes of evolution — intensified and speeded up, if we work 

 consciously and with full knowledge of the past — can we build his 

 future. 



It does matter in regard to the gravest problems before mankind 

 -to-day whether our ancestry was hylobatic or troglodyte. For five years 

 the whole world has been a stage for brutality and violence. We have 

 seen a large part of the youth who were best fitted mentally and 

 physically to be parents of future generations perish throughout Europe : 

 the dysgenic effect of this slaughter will show itself each twenty to 

 twenty-five years for centuries to come in the census returns of half 

 the countries of the world. Science undertook work which national 

 feeling bade it do, but on which it will ever look back with a shuddering 

 feeling of distaste, an uneasy consciousness of having soiled its hands. 

 And as aftermath we see in almost every land an orgy of violent crime, 

 a sense of lost security, and at times we dread that our verv civilisation 

 may perish owing to the weakening of the social ties, a deadening of 

 the responsibilities of class to class. This outbreak of violence which 

 has so appalled the thinking world, is it the sporadic appearance of an 

 innate passion for the raw and brutal in mankind, or is it the outcome 

 of economic causes forcing the nations of the world to the combat for 

 limited food and material supplies? I wish we could attribut-e it to 

 the latter source, for then we could eradicate the spirit of violence by 

 changing environmental conditions. But if the spirit of violence be 

 innate in man, if there be times when he not only sees red but rejoices 

 in it — and that was the strong impression T formed when I crossed 

 Germany on August 1, 1914 — then outbreaks of violence will not cease 

 till troglodyte mentality is bred out of man. That is why the question 

 of troglodyte or hylobatic ancestry is not a pursuit of dead bones. It 

 .is ft vital problem on which turns much of folk- psychology. It is a 



