902 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IV. No. 103. 



But the discovery of these universal 

 ideas is only the beginning of the work of 

 the anthropologist. Scientific inquiry must 

 answer two questions in regard to them : 

 First, what is their origin ? and second, 

 how do they assert themselves in various 

 cultures ? 



The second question is the easier one to 

 answer. The ideas do not exist everywhere 

 in identical form, but they vary. Sufficient 

 material has been accumulated to show that 

 the causes of these variations are either ex- 

 ternal, that is founded in environment — 

 taking the term environment in its widest 

 sense — or internal, that is founded on 

 psychological conditions. The influence of 

 external and internal factors upon elemen- 

 tary ideas embodies one group of laws 

 governing the growth of culture. There- 

 fore, our endeavors must be directed to 

 showing how such factors modify elemen- 

 tary ideas. 



The first method that suggests itself and 

 which has been generally adopted by mod- 

 ern anthropologists is to isolate and classify 

 causes by grouping the variants of certain 

 ethnological phenomena according to exter- 

 nal conditions under which the people live, 

 among whom they are found, or to internal 

 causes which influence their minds ; or in- 

 versely, by grouping these variants accord- 

 ing to their similarities. Then the corre- 

 lated conditions of life may be found. 



By this method we begin to recognize 

 even now with imperfect knowledge of the 

 facts what causes may have been at work 

 in shaping the culture of mankind. Fried- 

 rich Eatzel and W J McGee have investi- 

 gated the influence of geographical environ- 

 ment on a broader basis of facts than E,itter 

 and Guyot were able to do at their time. 

 Sociologists have made important studies 

 on the effects of the density of population 

 and of other simple social causes. Thus 

 the influence of external factors upon the 

 growth of society is becoming clearer. 



The effects of psychical factors are also 

 being studied in the same manner. Stoll 

 has tried to isolate the phenomena of sug- 

 gestion and of hypnotism and to study the 

 effects of their presence in the cultures of 

 various peoples. Inquiries into the mutual 

 relations of tribes and peoples begin to show 

 that certain cultural elements are easily 

 assimilated while others are rejected, and 

 the time-worn phrases of the imposition of 

 culture by a more highly civilized people 

 upon one of lower culture that has been 

 conquered are giving way to more thorough 

 views on the subject of exchange of cultural 

 achievements. In all these investigations 

 we are using sound, inductive methods in 

 order to isolate the causes of observed phe- 

 nomena. 



The other question in regard to the uni- 

 versal ideas, namely that of their origin, is 

 much more difficult to treat. Many attempts 

 have been made to discover the causes which 

 have led to the formation of ideas ' that de- 

 velop with iron necessity wherever man 

 lives.' This is the most difficult problem 

 of anthropology and we may expect that it 

 will baffle our attempts for a long time to 

 come. Bastian denies that it is possible to 

 discover the ultimate sources of inventions, 

 ideas, customs and beliefs which are of uni- 

 versal occurrence. They may be indigenous, 

 they may be imported, they may have arisen 

 from a variety of sources, but they are there. 

 The human mind is so formed that it invents 

 them spontaneously or accepts them when- 

 ever they are offered to it. This is the much 

 misunderstood elementary idea of Bastian. 



To a certain extent the clear enunciation 

 of the elementary idea gives us the psycho- 

 logical reason for its existence. To exem- 

 plify: the fact that the land of the shadows 

 is so often placed in the west suggests the 

 endeavor to localize it at the place where 

 the sun and the stars vanish. The mere 

 statement that primitive man considers 

 animals as gifted with all the qualities of 



