Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/82

72 It seems clear, therefore, that the teachings of anthropology, whether theoretical or practical, lead us back to the individual as the point of departure and also the goal. The state was made for him, not he for the state; any improvement in the group must start by the improvement of its individual members. This may seem a truism, but how constantly is it overlooked in the most modern legislation and schemes of social amelioration! How many even of such a learned audience as this have carefully considered in what respects the individual man has improved since the beginning of historic time? Is he taller, stronger, more beautiful? Are his senses more acute, his love purer, his memory more retentive, his will firmer, his reason stronger? Can you answer me these questions correctly? I doubt it much. Yet if you can not, what right have you to say that there is any improvement at all?

To be sure there is less physical suffering, less pain. War and famine and bitter cold are not the sleuthhounds that they once were. The dungeons and flames of brutal laws and bigoted religions have mostly passed away. Life is on the average longer, its days of sickness fewer, justice is more within reach, mercy is more bountifully dispensed, the tender eye of pity is ever unscarfed.

But under what difficulties have these results been secured! What floods of tears and blood, what long wails of woe, sound down the centuries of the past, poured forth by humanity in its desperate struggle for a better life—a struggle which was blind, unconscious of its aims, unknowing of the means by which they should be obtained, groping in darkness for the track leading it knew not whither!

Ignorant of his past, ignorant of his real needs, ignorant of himself, man has blundered and stumbled up the thorny path of progress for tens of thousands of years. Mighty states, millions of individuals, have been hurled to destruction in the perilous ascent, mistaking the way, pursuing false paths, following blind guides,

Now anthropology steps in, the new Science of Man, offering the knowledge of what he has been and is, the young but wise teacher, revealing the future by the unwavering light of the past, offering itself as man's trusty mentor and friend, ready to conduct him by sure steps upward and onward to the highest summit which his nature is capable of attaining; and who dares set a limit to that?

This is the final aim of anthropology, the lofty ambition which the student of this science deliberately sets before himself. Who will point to a worthier or a nobler one?