154 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
an individual human being is largely determined by the culture which 
has been imposed upon him by the society in which he lives. 
The sociologist therefore claims that it is possible and necessary to 
distinguish psychology and sociology as two distinct subjects, just as 
distinct as physics and chemistry. It is only when the two subjects are 
so distinguished that it will be possible to obtain real co-operation and 
co-ordination between them. 
The newer social anthropology then, as I see it, differs from the older 
in several vital respects. It rejects as being no part of its task the hypo- 
thetical reconstruction of the unknown past. It therefore avoids all 
discussion of hypotheses as to historical origins. It rejects all attempts 
to provide psychological explanations of particular social or cultural 
phenomena in favour of an ultimate psychological explanation of general 
sociological laws when these have been demonstrated by purely socio- 
logical inquiries. It endeavours to give precise descriptions of social and 
cultural phenomena in sociological terms, and to this end seeks to establish 
a suitable exact terminology, and seeks at the same time to attain to a 
systematic classification of those phenomena. It looks at any culture as 
an integrated system and studies the functions of social institutions, 
customs and beliefs of all kinds as parts of such a system. It applies to 
human life in society the generalising method of the natural sciences, 
seeking to formulate the general laws that underlie it, and to explain any 
given phenomenon in any culture as a special example of a general or 
universal principle. The newer anthropology is therefore functional, 
generalising and sociological. 
Although the newer anthropology rejects much of the methods of the 
older, and rejects all the theories of origins with the elaboration of which 
the latter was so much concerned, yet the new anthropology has grown 
out of the old, would not be possible without it, and starts with valuable 
knowledge of social phenomena and some insight into their nature which 
were incidentally provided by the earlier anthropologists in their search 
for origins. The work of such men as Tylor, Robertson Smith, Frazer, 
Westermarck, to mention only some of the greatest and of this country 
only, paved the way for the advance that we are now making. In 
rejecting the conclusions they reached by what we regard as an unsound 
method, we do not forget all that we owe to them in the first systematic 
exploration of the regions we now seek to survey more exactly and with 
new instruments. 
Comparative sociology, as I am here calling the newer form of anthro- 
pology, requires a new conception of the aims and methods of field 
investigations amongst non-European peoples. It is not so very long 
ago since for most of our information about the life and customs of such 
peoples we had to rely on the writings of persons who had no training 
for the work of observation and description, travellers and missionaries 
principally. It is now recognised that we can no more rely on such 
information than we could rely on the observations of an untrained person 
in such a science as geology. The first point, therefore, in relation to field 
research is that to have its full value for scientific purposes the description 
