H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 145 



word invented by the Poet Laureate, Odtaa. It seems evident that from 

 our present point of view the common faculties of man are recessive rather 

 than dominant. 



That there are mental faculties common to all men is undoubted, and 

 it was in part by the exercise of such faculties that man secured advance- 

 ment. Of the evolution of the human brain we begin to know a little, 

 but we are not able to draw a line of demarcation between the innate and 

 the acquired powers of its cells and tracts. In both mind and body we 

 inherit potentialities which only unfold under certain conditions. For the 

 development of the body we may define what are normal conditions, and 

 they must not depart too widely from natural conditions, but for that of 

 the mind the conditions may be almost wholly artificial. Heredity 

 provides the aptitudes, but the grist is delivered through the sense-organs, 

 and whilst the brain is a natural growth, the mind is a cultural construction. 

 Human thought is compilation — a rehash of the past in the present, with a 

 short-sighted eye on the future — and no satisfactory record has ever been 

 made of the mind of a man whose sole knowledge had been acquired 

 without the tuition of his fellow-men, savage or civilised. 



If it is difficult to identify the common faculties of which we are in 

 search, by enquiring into the mind as we know it, we may ask whether we 

 are entitled to assume that the only such faculties to be efiective are those 

 which had survival value in the final overshadowing by Homo sapiens, not 

 only of his more distant ape-like kin, but of those nearer Hominoid relations 

 whose remains have come to light in recent years ; whether, that is to 

 say, the instincts and aptitudes of Neanthropic man which ensured his 

 predominance, were identical with those which have led us into rivalry 

 with nature. 



The brain of Later Palaeolithic man appears to have been like our own 

 in all essentials, and a Cro-Magnon born to-day might become a skilled 

 mechanic or an able bishop. But man had no more need to become a 

 mechanic than he had to practise as a theologian, though he drifted into 

 both professions. If the mental faculties that had survival value in the 

 prevailing of our species were also those that were active in the initiation 

 and pursuit of cultiiral advance beyond its needs, we are perhaps led to 

 the conclusion that by far the greater part of human culture, material and 

 immaterial alike, is an afterthought of evolution — an embroidering of the 

 fabric. Man was given the means to earn a livelihood, and found himself 

 commanding and inventing luxuries. In producing a new and cunning 

 big-brained animal with hands, nature overshot her mark, and we are 

 struggling with the consequences. 



Time will not permit of more than a glance at this complex subject, 

 and indeed it is one for the psychologist to unravel. Perhaps he has 

 already done so, and I have overlooked it. The essence of my contention 

 — and, of course, not mine alone — is that there are no common faculties 

 of the human mind that are capable of overruling the vagaries of environ- 

 mental and historical compulsions, and of directing man's progress in 

 discovery and invention, in various times and places, along lines that are 

 parallel. Beginning with the primary discoveries of early man, applied 

 for material purposes, the prevailing outcome of his independent and 

 opportunist reactions to the results of his oM'n interference with natural 

 1930 L 



