Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/465

 406 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., x, i8g^

The founders and renovators of our Society have sought merely to conform the opinion expressed in their organic law to all recorded and remembered and inherited experience of men with respect to mankind. Their latest step is not their first pioneering ; but should increased knowledge prove it ill-directed, it will be their first failure in defining and forecasting the rapidly- growing Science of Man.

There are certain fundamental modes of arranging and inter- preting the facts of nature which seem to arise in a certain order ; they seem also to reflect the spontaneous operations of the human mind, and thus to embody the sum of human experi- ence and epitomize the history of knowledge, (i) The simplest arrangement is numerical ; it involves no acute or continuous observation, no discrimination save the most superficial, yet it easily expands so widely as to engage the full faculty of the stu- dent of nature in its external aspects ; it matures in arithmetic, the earliest of the sciences and in some measure the foundation of all. (2) As the numerical arrangement is found too meager to express observed relations, an orderly arrangement in which rela- tive position, or form, or size, or structure, or all of these com- bined, is superadded ; this arrangement, or interpretation of relation in terms of space, involves increasingly acute observation and discrimination, and growing power of abstraction, but does not necessarily involve continuity in observation and ratiocina- tion ; it is expressed in the higher mathematics, in geography in its protean aspects, in all the descriptive sciences and aspects of science — its key-note is graphos. The two methods easily blend in that formal knowledge, or static interpretation, which marked the beginning of every branch of science. (3) As the numerical and formal experiences multiply into chaos, the mind spontaneously gathers its forces : observation is sharpened and prolonged, memory and reason are strengthened, experiences are sifted and synthesized intuitively, and at length the barrier to

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