Page:A History of American Anthropology.pdf/13



Anthropology, as Professor Wissler points out, is the science of man, but it is a trait of European civilization and its point of view is that of the European observing the rest of mankind. So the growth of the science is intimately bound up with the growth of the knowledge and the outlook of Europe. Though we are aware of the beginnings of a scientific age with Euclid, Eratosthenes and Archimedes of Alexandria, where the scholars lived together in a Museum (a sort of University where they were paid salaries), it is not till the middle of the fifteenth century that we arrive at the close of the mediaeval epoch and the re-birth of the spirit of scholarship. It was the Humanists who devoted their lives to the study of culture humanitas (or as it was then but the study of the literatures of Greece and Rome), that revived the interest in man so beautifully expressed by Terence, the inspiring model of the early Elizabethan drama—Homo sum nihil humani a me alienum puto: I am a man; nothing human do I consider foreign to me. Somehow there are periods, as it were, in the life of human activities en masse when the attention shifts curiously enough from the subjective to the objective and, curiously enough at this time, we find poets in another part of the world quite disconnected singing, "Listen, oh brother man, to this truth from the poet Chandidas, Man is the highest truth, there is nothing higher than he."