December 18, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



905 



just as well conclude that paternal families 

 have in some cases arisen from maternal 

 institutions, in other cases in other ways. 

 To give another example : Many concep- 

 tions of the future life have evidently de- 

 veloped from dreams and hallucinations. 

 Consequently, it is said, all notions of this 

 character have had the same origin. This 

 is also true only if no other causes could 

 possibly lead to the same ideas. 



We have seen that the facts do not favor 

 the assumption of which we are speaking 

 at all ; that they much rather point in the 

 opposite direction. Therefore we must also 

 consider all the ingenious attempts at con- 

 structions of a grand system of the evolu- 

 tion of society as of very doubtful value, 

 tinless at the same time proof is given that 

 the same phenomena could not develop by 

 ^ny other method. Until this is done, the 

 presumption is always in favor of a variety 

 of courses which historical growth may have 

 taken. 



It will be well to restate at this place one 

 of the principal aims of anthropological re- 

 search. We agreed that certain laws exist 

 which govern the growth of human culture, 

 and it is our endeavor to discover these 

 laws. The object of our investigation is to 

 find the processes by which certain stages of 

 culture have developed. The customs and 

 beliefs themselves are not the ultimate ob- 

 jects of research. We desire to learn the 

 reasons why such customs and beliefs ex- 

 ist — in other words, we wish to discover 

 1)he history of their development. The 

 method which is at present most frequently 

 applied in investigations of this character 

 compares the variations under which the 

 customs or beliefs occur and endeavors to 

 find the common psychological cause that 

 iunderlies all of them. I have stated that 

 this method is open to a very fundamental 

 objection. 



We have another method, which in many 

 trespects is much safer. A detailed study of 



customs in their bearings to the total cul- 

 ture of the tribe practicing them, and in 

 connection with an investigation of their 

 geographical distribution among neighbor- 

 ing tribes, afford us almost always a means 

 of determining with considerable accuracy 

 the historical causes that led to the forma- 

 tion of the customs in question and to the 

 psychological processes that were at work 

 in their development. The results of in- 

 quiries conducted by this method may be 

 three-fold. They may reveal the environ- 

 mental conditions which have created or 

 modified cultural elements ; they may clear 

 up psychological factors which are at work 

 in shaping the culture ; or they may bring 

 before our eyes the efiects that historical 

 connections have had upon the growth of 

 the culture. 



We have in this method a means of re- 

 constructing the history of the growth of 

 ideas with much greater accuracy than the 

 generalizations of the comparative method 

 will permit. The latter must always pro- 

 ceed from a hypothetical mode of develop- 

 ment, the probability of which may be 

 weighed more or less accurately by means 

 of observed data. But so far I have not 

 yet seen any extended attempt to prove the 

 correctness of a theory by testing it at the 

 hand of developments with whose histories 

 we are familiar. This method of starting 

 with a hypothesis is infinitely inferior to 

 the one in which by truly inductive pro- 

 cesses the actual history of definite phe- 

 nomena is derived. The latter is no other 

 than the much ridiculed historical method. 

 Its way of proceeding is, of course, no 

 longer that of former times when slight 

 similarities of culture were considered 

 proofs of relationships, but it duly recog- 

 nizes the results obtained by comparative 

 studies. Its application is based, first of 

 all, on a well-defined, small geographical 

 territory, and its comparisons are not ex- 

 tended beyond the limits of the cultural 



