May 19, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



781 



far outweighed by numberless dissimilari- 

 ties of a sort manifestly attesting inde- 

 pendent development. About 1880 Powell 

 summarized the observed resemblances and 

 differences among devices, and showed that 

 the former are to be regarded as coinci- 

 dences due to the tendency of the human 

 mind to respond to contact with external 

 nature in a uniform way. A dozen years 

 later Brinton resumed the growing data 

 and corroborated the Powellian conclusion ; 

 and on extending the inquiry to institu- 

 tions, forms of expression and types of 

 opinion and belief (in which the coinci- 

 dences are even more striking than in the 

 material devices), he formulated a theory 

 of ' the unity of the human mind, ' in which 

 he saw a suggestion that the mind was ex- 

 traneous in origin, i. e., impressed on man- 

 kind from without — a view not unlike that 

 long maintained by Alfred Russel Wallace. 

 With the setting of the old century and 

 the dawn of the new, the ever-multiplying 

 facts were again reviewed, and the earlier 

 generalizations were again sustained, but 

 found to tell less than the whole story; 

 for it was discovered that while minds of 

 corresponding culture-grade commonly re- 

 spond similarly to like stimuli, minds of 

 other grades frequently respond differently 

 — as when the savage eviscerates an enemy 

 and devours his heart as food for courage, 

 or the barbarian immolates a widow on the 

 bier of her spouse, or the budding christian 

 lends himself to the tortures of the inquisi- 

 tion, each reveling in his own righteousness 

 and reprobating all the rest, though all are 

 alike ghastly and obnoxious to enlightened 

 thought. The new generalization rendered 

 it easy to define the limits within which the 

 responses of different minds to similar im- 

 pressions may be expected to coincide; 

 thereby it cleared away many of the anom- 

 alies and apparent incongruities among the 

 observed facts, thus strengthening the law 



of activital coincidences as first propound- 

 ed. The introduction of a limiting term 

 also rendered the law more specific ; so 

 that the sum of knowledge concerning the 

 relations between mind and external nature 

 may now be expressed in the proposition : 

 Minds of corresponding culture-grades 

 commonly respond similarly to like stimidi. 

 By far the most important effect of the new- 

 generalization was the inevitable recogni- 

 tion of a cumulative mind-growth in pass- 

 ing from savagery to barbarism, thence to 

 civilization, and on to enlightenment; for, 

 in the first place, this recognition afforded 

 a key to— indeed a full explanation of— the 

 sequence of the culture-grades, while, in 

 the second place, it showed forth the course 

 of the world's mental development as a 

 growth no less natural than that of tree or 

 shrub, originating within, conditioned by 

 external environment, and not derived from 

 any extraneous source. Thus the general- 

 ization in 1900 of a quarter-century's ob- 

 servations on mankind brought empirical 

 knowledge to the theoretical plane so mas- 

 terfully projected by Bacon three centuries 

 before— for it was he who first grasped the 

 great concept that mind is at once product 

 and mirror of other nature. 



Is the Baconian foundation for all sci- 

 ence sound; is the most sweeping general- 

 ization of anthropology safe? This prob- 

 lem—for the two questions are but one- 

 is the most important presented by the 

 science of man, indeed by all science ; for it 

 threads the whole web of human knowl- 

 edge, touches every human thought, tinc- 

 tures every human hope, tinges every hu- 

 man motive. True, it is too large for easy 

 apprehension, too round for ready grasp, 

 but it spans the world's intellectual struc- 

 ture from corner-stone to dome, and must 

 sooner or later be wrought out personally 

 (as are all problems in the end) by each 

 rational being. 



