Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/174

 l6o THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the nature of the reaction of attention to crisis is conditioned by the ideas which prepossess the mind.

It is, of course, possible to overwork any standpoint, but on the whole I think that the best course the student can follow is to keep crisis constantly in mind — the nature of the crisis, the degree of mental and cultural preparation a people has already attained as fitting it to handle the crisis, and the various and often contradictory types of reaccommodation effected through the attention. In this way he will be able to note the transition of blood-feud into law, of magic into science, of constraint into liberty, and, in general, the increasing determination of conduct in the region of the reason and the cerebral cortex instead of the region of habit and the spinal cord.

Ill

Finally, I wish to warn the student to be suspicious of what may be called the particularistic explanation of social change. Some years ago, when it was the habit to explain everything in terms of "the survival of the fittest," an ingenious German scholar put forth the theory that the thick crania of the Australians were due to the fact that the men treated the women with such violence as to break all the thin heads, thus leaving only thick-headed women to reproduce. A still more ingenious German offered as an explanation of the origin of the practice of circumcision the desire of certain tribes to assure themselves that there should be no fraud in the collection of trophies in battle. This was assured by first circumcising all the males of one's own tribe. Under these circumstances certitude was secured that any foreskins brought in after battle with uncircumcised enemies could not have been secured from the slain of one's own party. Lippert, the great culture-historian, has argued that the presence or ab- sence of the milk of domestic animals has sealed the fate of the different races, pointing out that no race without milk has ever risen to a high level of culture. He is also responsible for the suggestion that man took the idea of a mill for grinding, with its upper and nether mill-stones, from the upper and lower molars in his own mouth. Pitt-Rivers says that the idea of a