144 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



preventing the decay of animal or human flesh, and of the means and 

 methods of prevention ; and finally, in so far as there is agreement in 

 different parts of the world in the technique of preparing the body for the 

 embalming process, there must be assumed still more coincidences, some 

 of them significantly trivial. Whatever the ultimate decision, there is 

 clearly no justification for the a priori assumption that man, directed by 

 his common faculties, naturally and inevitably deduced the means and 

 methods of mummification from the bare fact of desiccation. He made 

 his way by a zig-zag opportunist route to an end which only came in 

 view when he got near to it, and such routes do not run parallel one with 

 another to the same destination. 



Man's Common Faculties. 



The question as to the nature and importance of the common faculties 

 of the human mind — the components of the psychic unity — is one which 

 demands more attention than it has yet received from anthropologists, 

 Bastian notwithstanding. This is especially the case in relation to the 

 subject of independent evolution. For our purposes it would not only be 

 needful to isolate the common faculties, but also to identify those which 

 have a bearing on the progress of discovery and invention. Here we 

 should meet with the primary and well-known difficulty of distinguishing 

 between an inborn human faculty, and a traditional or inculcated mode of 

 thought — an acquired type of reaction. Assuming we had progressed so 

 far in the comparative psychology of Homo sapiens, we should still be 

 left with the problem of determining which — if any — of the common 

 faculties are directive in their nature. It is not a question of deciding 

 which faculties are permissive, enabling man to react in a similar way to 

 similar external stimuli, but of determining which of them give him the 

 power, whoever and wherever he may be, to over-ride deflecting influences. 

 Two environments may be similar, but only when they are the same are 

 they identical, and our broad generalisations as to the cultural effect of 

 surroundings such as deserts, mountains, forests, river-valleys, have a 

 bearing upon the general mode of life they encourage or permit, and 

 therefore upon a portion of the field which is open to the discoverer and 

 inventor, but they ignore the differences in the details of any two environ- 

 ments of one general character ; and it is discrepancies in detail that 

 produce divergencies in end-results. The human mind is very prone to 

 skid on trifles. Moreover, even on the assumption that two similar natural 

 environments are so nearly identical as to lead to similar reactions, under 

 the guidance of the common faculties of the human mind, there still 

 remains the most important factor of them all — that of the artificial 

 environment, in gross and in detail, which formed the starting point of 

 two peoples whose artefacts and general culture are compared. Taking 

 all these difficulties into account, we see that the common faculties of man, 

 if they are to be powerful enough to keep his independent lines of progress 

 parallel, must be of an initiating and controlling character. If they are 

 of such a character, history should reveal a wealth of instances of their 

 power to keep man steadily progressing on his course, in all grades and 

 aspects of his culture. But history has no such tale to tell, since it is merely 

 a story of one provisional expedient following on another — or, to use a 



