Anthropology a study of recent date. Strange as it may seem, in the large and thriving family of the sciences, Anthropology, or the Science of Man, is the latest born. So young indeed is the study that three of its distinguished founders in England, Professor E. B. Tylor, Lord Avebury, and Mr. Francis Galton, are happily still with us. It is true that particular departments of man’s complex nature have long been the theme of special studies. Anatomy has investigated his body, psychology has explored his mind, theology and metaphysics have sought to plumb the depths of the great mysteries by which he is encompassed on every hand. But it has been reserved for the present generation, or rather for the generation which is passing away, to attempt the comprehensive study of man as a whole, to enquire not merely into the physical and mental structure of the individual, but to compare the various races of men, to trace their affinities, and by means of a wide collection of facts to follow as far as may be the evolution of human thought and institutions from the earliest times. The aim of this, as of every other science, is to discover the general laws to which the particular facts may be supposed to conform. I say, may be supposed to conform, because research in all departments has rendered it antecedently probable that everywhere law and order will be found to prevail if we search for them diligently, and that accordingly the affairs of man, however complex and incalculable they may seem to be, are no exception to the uniformity of nature. Anthropology, therefore, in the widest sense of the word, aims at discovering the general laws which have regulated human history in the past, and which, if nature is really uniform, may be expected to regulate it in the future.
The scope of Social Anthropology more limited than that of Sociology; it includes only the rudimentary phases of human society. Hence the science of man coincides to a certain extent with what has long been known as the philosophy of history as well as with the study to which of late years the name of Sociology has been given. Indeed it might with some reason be held that Social Anthropology, or the study of man in society, is only another expression for Sociology. Yet I think that the two sciences may be conveniently distinguished, and that while the name of Sociology should be reserved for the study of human society in the most comprehensive sense of the words, the name of Social Anthropology may with advantage be restricted to one particular department of that immense field of knowledge. At least I wish to make it perfectly clear at the outset that I for one do not pretend to treat of the whole of human society, past, present, and future. Whether any single man’s compass of mind and range of learning suffice for such a vast undertaking, I will not venture to say, but I do say without hesitation or ambiguity that mine certainly do not. I can only speak of what I have studied, and my studies have been mostly confined to a small, a very small part of man’s social history. That part is the origin, or rather the rudimentary phases, the infancy and childhood, of human society, and to that part accordingly I propose to limit the scope of Social Anthropology, or at all events my treatment of it. My successors in the chair will be free to extend their purview beyond the narrow boundaries which the limitation of my knowledge imposes on me. They may survey the latest developments as well as the earliest beginnings of custom and law, of science and art, of morality and religion, and from that survey they may deduce the principles which should guide mankind in the future, so that those who come after us may avoid the snares and pitfalls into which we and our fathers have slipped. For the best fruit of knowledge is wisdom, and it may reasonably be hoped that a deeper and wider acquaintance with the past history of mankind will in time enable our statesmen to mould the destiny of the race in fairer forms than we of this generation shall live to see.
“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s desire!”
At least the present lecturer limits himself to these phases. But if you wish to shatter the social fabric, you must not expect your professor of Social Anthropology to aid and abet you. He is no seer to discern, no prophet to foretell a coming heaven on earth, no mountebank with a sovran remedy for every ill, no Red Cross Knight to head a crusade against misery and want, against disease and death, against all the horrid spectres that war on poor humanity. It is for others with higher notes and nobler natures than his to sound the charge and lead it in this Holy War. He is only a student, a student of the past, who may perhaps tell you a little, a very little, of what has been, but who cannot, dare not tell you what ought to be. Yet even the little that he can contribute to the elucidation of the past may have its utility as well as its interest when it finally takes its place in that great temple of science to which it is the ambition of every student to add a stone. For we cherish a belief that if we truly love and seek knowledge for its own sake, without any ulterior aim, every addition we may make to it, however insignificant and useless it may appear, will yet at last be found to work together with the whole accumulated store for the general good of mankind.
Social Anthropology embraces the study, first, of savagery, and, second, of folklore, that is, of the traces of savagery in civilization. Thus the sphere of Social Anthropology as I understand it, or at least as I propose to treat it, is limited to the crude beginnings, the rudimentary development of human society: it does not include the maturer phases of that complex growth, still less does it embrace the practical problems with which our modern statesmen and lawgivers are called upon to deal. The study might accordingly be described as the embryology of human thought and institutions, or, to be more precise, as that enquiry which seeks to ascertain, first, the beliefs and customs of savages, and, second, the relics of these beliefs and customs which have survived like fossils among peoples of higher culture. All civilization evolved from savagery. In this description of the sphere of Social Anthropology it is implied that the ancestors of the civilized nations were once savages, and that they have transmitted, or may have transmitted, to their more cultured descendants ideas and institutions which, however incongruous with their later surroundings, were perfectly in keeping with the modes of thought and action of the ruder society in which they originated. In short, the definition assumes that civilization has always and everywhere been evolved out of savagery. The mass of evidence on which this assumption rests is in my opinion so great as to render the induction incontrovertible. At least, if any one disputes it I do not think it worth while to argue with him. There are still, I believe, in civilized society people who hold that the earth is flat and that the sun goes round it; but no sensible man will waste time in the vain attempt to convince such persons of their error, even though these flatteners of the earth and circulators of the sun appeal with perfect justice to the evidence of their senses in support of their hallucination, which is more than the opponents of man’s primitive savagery are able to do.
Hence a study of savagery essential to an understanding of the evolution of humanity. Thus the study of savage life is a very important part of Social Anthropology. For by comparison with civilized man the savage represents an arrested or rather retarded stage of social development, and an examination of his customs and beliefs accordingly supplies the same sort of evidence of the evolution of the human mind that an examination of the embryo supplies of the evolution of the human body. To put it otherwise, a savage is to a civilized man as a child is to an adult; and just as the gradual growth of intelligence in a child corresponds to, and in a sense recapitulates, the gradual growth of intelligence in the species, so a study of savage society at various stages of evolution enables us to follow approximately, though of course not exactly, the road by which the ancestors of the higher races must have travelled in their progress upward through barbarism to civilization. In short, savagery is the primitive condition of mankind, and if we would understand what primitive man was we must know what the savage now is.
Savages of the present day are primitive only in a relative sense, namely by comparison with civilized peoples; their customs and beliefs are in fact the product of a long course of evolution as to which we can know little or nothing. But here it is necessary to guard against a common misapprehension. The savages of to-day are primitive only in a relative, not in an absolute sense. They are primitive by comparison with us; but they are not primitive by comparison with truly primæval man, that is, with man as he was when he first emerged from the purely bestial stage of existence. Indeed, compared with man in his absolutely pristine state even the lowest savage of to-day is doubtless a highly developed and cultured being, since all evidence and all probability are in favour of the view that every existing race of men, the rudest as well as the most civilized, has reached its present level of culture, whether it be high or low, only after a slow and painful progress upwards, which must have extended over many thousands, perhaps millions, of years. Therefore when we speak of any known savages as primitive, which the usage of the English language permits us to do, it should always be remembered that we apply the term primitive to them in a relative, not in an absolute sense. What we mean is that their culture is rudimentary compared with that of the civilized nations, but not by any means that it is identical with that of primæval man. It is necessary to emphasize this relative use of the term primitive in its application to all known savages without exception, because the ambiguity arising from the double meaning of the word has been the source of much confusion and misunderstanding. Careless or unscrupulous writers have made great play with it for purposes of controversy, using the word now in the one sense and now in the other as it suited their argument at the moment, without perceiving, or at all events without indicating, the equivocation. In order to avoid these verbal fallacies it is only necessary to bear steadily in mind that while Social Anthropology has much to say of primitive man in the relative sense, it has nothing whatever to say about primitive man in the absolute sense, and that for the very simple reason that it knows nothing whatever about him, and, so far as we can see at present, is never likely to know anything. To construct a history of human society by starting from absolutely primordial man and working down through thousands or millions of years to the institutions of existing savages might possibly have merits as a flight of imagination, but it could have none as a work of science. To do this would be exactly to reverse the proper mode of scientific procedure. It would be to work a priori from the unknown to the known instead of a posteriori from the known to the unknown. For we do know a good deal about the social state of the savages of to-day and yesterday, but we know nothing whatever, I repeat, about absolutely primitive human society. Hence a sober enquirer who seeks to elucidate the social evolution of mankind in ages before the dawn of history must start, not from an unknown and purely hypothetical primæval man, but from the lowest savages whom we know or possess adequate records of; and from their customs, beliefs, and traditions as a solid basis of fact he may work back a little way hypothetically through the obscurity of the past; that is, he may form a reasonable theory of the way in which these actual customs, beliefs, and traditions have grown up and developed in a period more or less remote, but probably not very remote, from the one in which they have been observed and recorded. But if, as I assume, he is a sober enquirer, he will never expect to carry back this reconstruction of human history very far, still less will he dream of linking it up with the very beginning, because he is aware that we possess no evidence which would enable us to bridge even hypothetically the gulf of thousands or millions of years which divides the savage of to-day from primæval man.
For example, the marriage customs and systems of relationship prevalent among many savage tribes appear to have been evolved from a preceding, but not necessarily primitive, state of sexual promiscuity. It may be well to illustrate my meaning by an example. The matrimonial customs and modes of tracing relationships which prevail among some savage races, and even among peoples at a higher stage of culture, furnish very strong grounds for believing that the systems of marriage and consanguinity which are now in vogue among civilized peoples must have been immediately preceded at a more or less distant time by very different modes of counting kin and regulating marriage; in fact, that monogamy and the forbidden degrees of kinship have replaced an older system of much wider and looser sexual relations. But to say this is not to affirm that such looser and wider relations were characteristic of the absolutely primitive condition of mankind; it is only to say that actually existing customs and traditions clearly indicate the extensive prevalence of such relations at some former time in the history of our race. How remote that time was, we cannot tell; but, estimated by the whole vast period of man’s existence on earth, it seems probable that the era of sexual communism to which the evidence points was comparatively recent; in other words, that for the civilized races the interval which divides that era from our own is to be reckoned by thousands rather than by hundreds of thousands of years, while for the lowest of existing savages, for example, the aborigines of Australia, it is possible or probable that the interval may not be greater than a few centuries. Be that as it may, even if on the strength of the evidence I have referred to we could demonstrate the former prevalence of a system of sexual communism among all the races of mankind, this would only carry us back a single step in the long history of our species; it would not justify us in concluding that such a system had been practised by truly primæval man, still less that it had prevailed among mankind from the beginning down to the comparatively recent period at which its existence may be inferred from the evidence at our disposal. About the social condition of primæval man, I repeat, we know absolutely nothing, and it is vain to speculate. Our first parents may have been as strict monogamists as Whiston or Dr. Primrose, or they may have been just the reverse. We have no information on the subject, and are never likely to get any. In the countless ages which have elapsed since man and woman first roamed the happy garden hand in hand or jabbered like apes among the leafy boughs of the virgin forest, their relations to each other may have undergone innumerable changes. For human affairs, like the courses of the heaven, seem to run in cycles: the social pendulum swings to and fro from one extremity of the scale to the other: in the political sphere it has swung from democracy to despotism, and back again from despotism to democracy; and so in the domestic sphere it may have oscillated many a time between libertinism and monogamy.
The second department of Social Anthropology is folklore, or the study of savage survivals in civilization. If I am right in my definition of Social Anthropology, its province may be roughly divided into two departments, one of which embraces the customs and beliefs of savages, while the other includes such relics of these customs and beliefs as have survived in the thought and institutions of more cultured peoples. The one department may be called the study of savagery, the other the study of folklore. I have said something of savagery: I now turn to folklore, that is, to the survivals of more primitive ideas and practices among peoples who in other respects have risen to a higher plane of culture. That such survivals may be discovered in every civilized nation will hardly now be disputed by anybody. When we read, for example, of an Irishwoman roasted to death by her husband on a suspicion that she was not his wife but a fairy changeling,[166.1] or again, of an Englishwoman dying of lockjaw because she had anointed the nail that wounded her instead of the wound,[166.2] we may be sure that the beliefs to which these poor creatures fell victims were not learned by them in school or at church, but had been transmitted from truly savage ancestors through many generations of outwardly though not really civilized descendants. Beliefs and practices of this sort are therefore rightly called superstitions, which means literally survivals. It is with superstitions in the strict sense of the word that the second department of Social Anthropology is concerned.
Such survivals are due to the essential inequality of men, many of whom remain at heart savages under a civilized exterior. If we ask how it happens that superstitions linger among a people who in general have reached a higher level of culture, the answer is to be found in the natural, universal, and ineradicable inequality of men. Not only are different races differently endowed in respect of intelligence, courage, industry, and so forth, but within the same nation men of the same generation differ enormously in inborn capacity and worth. No abstract doctrine is more false and mischievous than that of the natural equality of men. It is true that the legislator must treat men as if they were equal, because laws of necessity are general and cannot be made so as to fit the infinite variety of individual cases. But we must not imagine that because men are equal before the law they are therefore intrinsically equal to each other. The experience of common life sufficiently contradicts such a vain imagination. At school and at the universities, at work and at play, in peace and in war, the mental and moral inequalities of human beings stand out too conspicuously to be ignored or disputed. On the whole the men of keenest intelligence and strongest characters lead the rest and shape the moulds into which, outwardly at least, society is cast. Mankind dominated by an enlightened minority. As such men are necessarily few by comparison with the multitude whom they lead, it follows that the community is really dominated by the will of an enlightened minority[167.1] even in countries where the ruling power is nominally vested in the hands of the numerical majority. In fact, disguise it as we may, the government of mankind is always and everywhere essentially aristocratic. No juggling with political machinery can evade this law of nature. However it may seem to lead, the dull-witted majority in the end follows a keener-witted minority. That is its salvation and the secret of progress. The higher human intelligence sways the lower, just as the intelligence of man gives him the mastery over the brutes. I do not mean that the ultimate direction of society rests with its nominal governors, with its kings, its statesmen, its legislators. The uncrowned kings. The true rulers of men are the thinkers who advance knowledge; for just as it is through his superior knowledge, not through his superior strength, that man bears rule over the rest of the animal creation, so among men themselves it is knowledge which in the long run directs and controls the forces of society. Thus the discoverers of new truths are the real though uncrowned and unsceptred kings of mankind; monarchs, statesmen, and law-givers are but their ministers, who sooner or later do their bidding by carrying out the ideas of these master minds. The more we study the inward workings of society and the progress of civilization, the more clearly shall we perceive how both are governed by the influence of thoughts which, springing up at first we know not how or whence in a few superior minds, gradually spread till they have leavened the whole inert lump of a community or of mankind. The origin of such mental variations, with all their far-reaching train of social consequences, is just as obscure as is the origin of those physical variations on which, if biologists are right, depends the evolution of species, and with it the possibility of progress. Perhaps the same unknown cause which determines the one set of variations gives rise to the other also. We cannot tell. All we can say is that on the whole in the conflict of competing forces, whether physical or mental, the strongest at last prevails, the fittest survives. In the mental sphere the struggle for existence is not less fierce and internecine than in the physical, but in the end the better ideas, which we call the truth, carry the day. The clamorous opposition with which at their first appearance they are regularly greeted, whenever they conflict with old prejudices, may retard but cannot prevent their final victory. The tombs of the prophets. It is the practice of the mob first to stone and then to erect useless memorials to their greatest benefactors. All who set themselves to replace ancient error and superstition by truth and reason must lay their account with brickbats in their life and a marble monument after death.