Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/74

64 aims of this science quite distinct from those I have mentioned. That branch is ethnology.

Ethnology in its true sense represents the application of the principles of inductive philosophy to the products of man's faculties. You are aware that that philosophy proceeds from observed facts alone; it discards all preconceived opinions concerning these facts; it renounces all allegiance to dogma, or doctrine, or intuition; in short, to every form of statement that is not capable of verification. Its method of procedure is by comparison—that is, by the logical equations of similarity and diversity, of identity and difference; and on these it bases those generalizations which range the isolated fact under the general law, of which it is at once the exponent and the proof.

By such comparisons ethnology aims to define in clear terms the influence which the geographical and other environment exercises on the individual, the social group, and the race; and, conversely, how much in each remains unaltered by the external forces, and what residual elements are left, defiant of surroundings, wholly personal, purely human. Thus, rising to wider and wider circles of observation and generalization, it will be able at last to offer a conclusive and exhaustive connotation of what man is—a necessary preliminary, mark you, to that other question, so often and so ignorantly answered in the past, as to what he should be.

Ethnology, however, does not and should not concern itself with this latter inquiry. Its own field is broad enough and the harvest offered is rich enough. Its materials are drawn from the whole of history and from pre-history. Those writers who limit its scope to the explanation of the phenomena of primitive social life only have so done because these phenomena are simpler in such conditions, not that the methods of ethnology are applicable only to such. On the contrary, they are not merely suitable, they are necessary to all the facts of history, if we would learn their true meaning and import. The time will come, and that soon, when sound historians will adopt as their guide the principles, and methods of ethnologic science, because by these alone can they assign to the isolated fact its right place in the vast structure of human development.

In the past, histories have told of little but of kings and their wars; some writers of recent date have remembered that there is such a thing as the people, and have essayed to present its humble annals; but how few have even attempted to avail themselves of the myriad of sidelights which ethnology can throw on the motives and the manners of a people, its impulses and acquisitions!

It is the constant aim of ethnology to present its results free