March 9, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



243 



amongst most intelligent men until Waitz, Bas- 

 tian, Tylor, and their innumerable recent dis- 

 ciples, obscured the clear meaning of the facts 

 by a cloud of empty sophistry and misapplied 

 Herbartian philosophy. In many other 

 branches of learning, such as archeology, 

 philology and the history of many of the arts, 

 numerous scholars, who have escaped the 

 vicious influences of this reactionary school, 

 have continued to rely upon facts and inter- 

 pret their meaning straightforwardly. The 

 writings of Graebner, Frobenius, Ankermann, 

 Poy, Schmidt and Montandon were quite un- 

 known to me when my conclusions were first 

 formulated; their views and mine have noth- 

 ing in common except that both repudiate the 

 speculations and the antiquated psychology 

 which for far too long have been permitted to 

 hide the truth. 



As a guest at the meeting of the British As- 

 sociation in 1911, when Dr. Elvers devoted his 

 presidential address to the discussion of this 

 matter. Dr. Goldenweiser had every oppor- 

 tunity for appreciating the magnitude of the 

 gap that separated his (Rivers's) views from 

 Graebner's. It is straining the truth to brand 

 Rivers as a recruit of the latter's. 



The Graebnerian attitude is largely the out- 

 come of the revulsion of modern German opin- 

 ion against the whole conception of evolution. 

 It included within the scope of its hostility 

 the method in ethnology which has been mis- 

 named " evolutionary." 



But the very essence of the conception of 

 evolution is the derivation of all organisms 

 from a common source. It is the teaching of 

 Bastian and Tylor which is a repudiation of 

 evolution; for it is a much closer approxima- 

 tion to the biological idea to look upon similar 

 complex organizations of a series of artificial 

 civilizations as having been derived from the 

 same common source, just as all vertebrate 

 animals were the offspring of one stock, which, 

 after spreading abroad, became more or less 

 specialized in a distinctive way in each local- 

 ity. To adopt the attitude, which Dr. Golden- 

 weiser is championing, of regarding as the 

 common parent of all these similar customs 

 and beliefs some mystical " psychic unity " is 



to place ourselves upon the same mental plane 

 as the aboriginal Australian who believes that 

 children are spirits which have entered their 

 mothers in some mysterious fashion. 



But, as he devotes the greater part of his 

 criticism to this matter, I must deal with the 

 specific questions he puts to me. 



Dr. Goldenweiser asks me to " name one 

 ethnologist who can be shown to have attrib- 

 uted similarities in cultures to the working of 

 highly specialized human instincts." Al- 

 though every ethnologist who subscribes to the 

 modern Tylorian doctrines necessarily adopts 

 a theory of the working of the human mind 

 which, on analysis, can hardly be differentiated 

 from what the modern psychologist regards as 

 instinct — and an instinct which leads men on 

 the two sides of the Pacific independently the 

 one of the other to look upon a serpent 

 equipped with wings and deer's antlers as a 

 power controlling water can hardly be other- 

 wise defined than as " highly specialized " — 

 very few of them, since the time of Daniel Wil- 

 son, have had the frankness to admit a fact 

 which would have branded their speculation as 

 a reductio ad absurdum. At the meeting of the 

 British Association in 1912 (see Report, p. 

 607) I discussed this question, and no one at- 

 tempted to refute the argument that the adop- 

 tion by two peoples of highly complex and 

 arbitrary practises along with scores of iden- 

 tical and unessential details can be explained 

 only by the assumption of their {i. e., the cus- 

 toms) derivation from a common source, or 

 by postulating human instincts of so complex 

 a kind that no modern psychologist will admit 

 their reality. Several ethnologists accepted 

 the definition of such phenomena as instinc- 

 tive. Professor Flinders Petrie made the 

 fantastic claim that there was an instinct to 

 build chambered tumuli which could be ex- 

 plained on biological principles. In a written 

 communication Mr. Cecil Firth argued that if 

 the beaver instinctively built his dam, why 

 shouldn't men for analogous reasons build 

 dolmens? But most of my critics stopped 

 short of admitting that such actions were in- 

 stinctive, though no one attempted to rebut 

 my argument that the modern ethnological 



