Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/80

70 sure foundation for legislation; not a priori notions of the rights of man, nor abstract theories of what should constitute a perfect state, as was the fashion with the older philosophies and still is with the modern social reformers. The aim of the anthropologist in this practical field is to ascertain in all their details, such as religions, language, social life, notions of right and wrong, etc., wherein lie the idiosyncrasies of a given group, and frame its laws accordingly.

Perhaps what I have said sufficiently explains the aims of ethnology. Some one has pertinently called it "the natural science of social life," because its methods are strictly those of the natural sciences, and its material is supplied by man living in society.

The final arbiter, however, to whom it appeals is, I repeat, not the ethnos, not the social group, but the individual. I think it was Goethe who, nearly a century ago, uttered the pithy remark, "Man makes genera and species; Nature makes only individuals." Hence the justification of any result claimed by ethnology must come from the psychology of the individual; in his personal feelings and thoughts will be discovered the final and only complete explanation of the forms of sociology and the events of history. As I have elsewhere urged, man himself, the individual man, is the only final measure of his own activities, in whatever direction they are directed.

On the other hand, the only rational psychology—using that term as a science of the mental processes must be the outcome of anthropology conducted as a natural science. For thousands of years other plans have been pursued. The philosopher would delve in his "inner consciousness"; the theologian would turn to his revelation; the historian would reason on his undigested facts; but the psychologist of the future, taking nothing for granted, will define the mentality of the race by analyzing each of its lines of action back to the individual feelings which gave them rise.

It is quite likely that some who have heard me thus far, and have agreed with me, are still dissatisfied. On their lips is that question which is so often put to, and which so often puzzles, the student of the sciences, cui bono? What practical worth have these analyses and generalizations which have been referred to?

Fortunately, the anthropologist is not puzzled. His science, like others, has its abstract side, seemingly remote from the interests of the workaday world; but it is also and pre-eminently an applied science—one the practicality and immediate pertinence of which to daily affairs render it utilitarian in the highest degree.

Applied anthropology has for its aims to bring to bear on the improvement of the species, regarded on the one hand as groups, and on the other as individuals, the results obtained by ethnography, ethnology, and psychology.