Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/463

 404 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899

eral substance of which their bodies are built; but prolonged experience forced the conviction that mankind must be viewed by the scientist, no less than by the idealist, as an essentially in- tellectual entity, and the possessor of social and moral charac- ters reflecting the fundamental intellectuality. Next it came to be recognized that the unit of anthropology is not merely the individual body, as the animal body is the unit of zoology, but the social group, and this advance marked the birth of anthro- pology in its full sense; for the object-matter of the science is not so much man as men, not the somatikos so much as the ethnos and demos, not the person so much as the family, the clan, the tribe, the municipality, the state, the nation, the cul- ture-group — indeed any assemblage, or all assemblages, of men. Now, the recognition of the essentially collective character of mankind was but the swinging of aberrant and idle opinion into the current of the stream of experience — for it is the function of science, the highest yet simplest form of knowledge, to resolve indi- vidual experiences into their true components and to bring ever- varying opinion into harmony with the invariable course of nature. Recognizing the collective assemblage as the basis of his science, the anthropologist was nevertheless impressed by the variable structure of units constantly changing with birth and death of individuals, with migration and readjustment to new conditions, with the blending of groups and peoples, with discov- ery and invention ; and he was soon led to see that the structure of the unit is less important than its activities — and thereby to raise his science to the plane of dynamic interpretation. True, he had the example of the other sciences before him, yet he pressed forward so rapidly as hardly to note their precedence until his passage was made ; astronomy spent three millenniums in passing from astrology to formal description and thence to interpretation in terms of molar and molecular motion ; chemistry dragged drearily from alchemy up to Avogadro and above before the physical basis of the science was fixed ; biology rested in formal-

��*

�� �