Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/451

Rh little merit except the facility which they give for building on them inferences tremendously out of proportion to the mental labor which they cost the builder. " But the formation of artificial or historic races, through the influence of milieu and the diffusion of a common fund of beliefs, sentiments, ideas, and interests among a heterogeneous population brought by hap and chance into the same geographical zone, is taking place before our eyes at the present moment, and is a matter of history; and we are safe in assuming that in this the process of the formation of true races is repeating itself.

It was inevitable that anthropology, like biology, should first collect and classify its material. Every scrap of knowledge it has brought to light is precious, and its classification of its materials, though like all classifications more or less arbitrary, is useful, if not used for more than it is worth. But anthropology has undergone a change well illustrated by the difference between the biological botany of today, and the "herbarium" botany of the past; its primary interest is in the laws of growth. Among those who led in this change of direction—in theory, at least—are Bastian, Lazarus, Steinthal, Waitz, Weinhold, Post, Andree, Ratzel and Achelis—some of them philologists rather than anthropologists. They have insisted that our customs, our laws, our arts, our religion, our speech, our minds, are the product of society in common, and that through a comparative examination of the languages, ceremonies, usages, and institutions of primitive peoples, we have means of entering the region which Wundt despaired of penetrating with the psycho-physical experiment, and of tracing the laws of the progressive unfolding of the psychical activities of man. "Only in and through society is a man a psychical being and raises himself above the type of a zoological species of the animal organisms to an individual personality."