Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/467

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

the progress of knowledge, the position of anthropology in America, and especially in the Anthropological Society of the National Capital, is definitely fixed. We are long past the numerical stage in which the individual body is the unit, well past the formal stage in which organic and even superorganic structure marks finality, fairly advanced on the stage in which superorganic or collective activities form the bases of our work — so well advanced, indeed, that it is easy to forecast the transition from the merely potential interpretation to the sequential arrange- ment in which families and tribes and nations and cults and culture stages will be considered and classified genetically, as things that arise and pass like the plant, leaving ever the germs of new (and mostly better) organizations. The organization of the Society is well above the formal or static plane, well within the higher grade represented by the New-Science family ; and it is the chief purpose of this writing to suggest the short and easy step from the potential interpretation embodied in our law to the sequential interpretation which must mark our next advance — unless the history of scientific progress is a delusion.

Recognizing the collective character of the human unit, and realizing that the human activities form the best basis for the classification of the human kind, it is but natural first to note and next to trace the growth of activital products, and then to note and trace the development of the activities themselves. No mind is too idle to note the shaping of the horseshoe under the hammer of the smith, and no thinking observer can resist passing to the skill of the smith and then to the growth of smithing itself, though he may be (indeed, commonly is) diverted before his mind has long followed its normal path. The idea of the collec- tive unit may be likened to that of the iron and coal and tools, the material requisites for the making of the horseshoe ; the idea of the potential factor may be likened to that of the smith and his fire, without whose work the iron and coal would avail

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