Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/48

20 mechanism, of a cosmic arrangement of brute matter organized from without. It is with this aspect of the question that we are especially concerned here. Anthropology is science only in the sense that history is science. It can and it must keep itself free from the philosophy of naturalism, with its cardinal principle of mechanism, determinism, materialism, or whatever its adherents choose to call their creed. Anthropology, then, as being primarily concerned with human nature in its more primitive forms, has simply to report on what it finds, leaving it to philosophy and religion to discuss its findings and draw their own conclusions in their own way. All that anthropology seeks to do as science is to be fair to the facts. Even if they seem to lead up to contradictory conclusions of a philosophical or practical kind, we anthropologists must frame our descriptions, whether particular or general, so as to do equal justice to every phase of the life-history of man. Now I am not sure if all my anthropological brethren will be content to acquiesce in such a limitation of outlook. Historically, some of them may say, anthropology is the child of the natural sciences; a naturalistic philosophy is the mother's milk whence it first drew sustenance. Well, even if that were so, it does not follow that the same diet must suit it in its riper years. Besides, if it come to that, it might be argued that all history is afflicted with a certain bias towards determinism. After all, it embodies what must be partly and may be wholly an external view of human life. Thus the soulless sort of historian tends to envisage his world of men simply as a puppet-show. But the historian with a soul projects it into his subject, and forthwith his stage is thronged with living actors. So too, then, we need an anthropology with a soul. An exterior account of man is bound to be false, because it leaves man