Bias of Theory
Yes, our critic may reply, ‘but Mr. Curr thinks that there is a strong tendency in observers abroad, if they have become acquainted with a new and startling theory that has become popular at home, to see confirmations of it everywhere.’ So I had explicitly stated in commenting on Dr. Tylor’s test of recurrences. [{101b}] ‘Travellers and missionaries have begun to read anthropological books, and their evidence is, therefore, much more likely to be biassed now by anthropological theories than it was of old.’ So Mr. McLennan, in the very earliest of all writings on totemism, said: ‘As the totem has not till now got itself mixed up with speculations the observers have been unbiassed.’ Mr. McLennan finally declined to admit any evidence as to the savage marriage laws collected after his own theory, and other theories born from it, had begun to bias observers of barbaric tribes.
It does not quite seem to me that Mr. Max Müller makes his audience acquainted with these precautions of anthropologists, with their sedulous sifting of evidence, and watchfulness against the theoretical bias of observers. Thus he assails the faible, not the fort of our argument, and may even seem not to be aware that we have removed the faible by careful discrimination.
What opinion must his readers, who know not Mr. McLennan’s works, entertain about that acute and intrepid pioneer, a man of warm temper, I admit, a man who threw out his daringly original theory at a heat, using at first such untrustworthy materials as lay at hand, but a man whom disease could not daunt, and whom only death prevented from building a stately edifice on the soil which he was the first to explore?
Our author often returns to the weakness of the evidence of travellers and missionaries.