Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/76

66 doubt that the psychical faculties of the individual as soon as they reach outward expression fall under the control of natural laws as fixed as those of inorganic nature."

As the endless variety of arts and events in the culture history of different tribes in different places, or of the same tribe at different epochs, illustrates the variables in anthropologic science, so these independent parallelisms prove beyond cavil the ever-present constant in the problem—to wit, the one and unvarying psychical nature of man, guided by the same reason, swept by the same storms of passion and emotion, directed by the same will toward the same goals, availing itself of the same means when they are within reach, finding its pleasure in the same actions, lulling its fears with the same sedatives.

The anthropologist of to-day who, like a late distinguished scholar among ourselves, would claim that because the rather complex social system of the Iroquois had a close parallel among the Munda tribes of the Punjab, therefore the ancestors of each must have come from a common culture center; or who, like an eminent living English ethnologist, sees a proof of Asiatic relations in American culture because the Aztec game of patolli is like the East Indian game of parchesi—such an ethnologist, I say, may have contributed ably to his science in the past, but he does not know where it stands to-day. Its true position on this crucial question is thus tersely and admirably stated by Dr. Steinmetz: "The various customs, institutions, thoughts, etc., of different peoples are to be regarded either as the expressions of the different stadia of culture of our common humanity or as different reactions of that common humanity under varying conditions and circumstances. The one does not exclude the other. Therefore the concordance of two peoples in a custom, etc., should be explained by borrowing or by derivation from a common source only when there are special known and controlling reasons indicating this; and when these are absent, the explanation should be either because the two peoples are on the same plane of culture or because their surroundings are similar."

This is true not only of the articles intended for use, to supply the necessities of existence, as weapons and huts and boats—we might anticipate that they would be something similar, otherwise they would not serve the purpose everywhere in view; but the analogies are, if anything, still more close and striking when we come to compare pure products of the fancy, creations of the imagination or the emotions, such as stories, myths, and motives of decorative art.

It has proved very difficult for the comparative mythologist or the folklorist of the old school to learn that the same stories—for instance, of the four rivers of Paradise, the flood, the ark, and