Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/614

610 This account of one strand in the network of data indispensable to the establishment of a psychological point of view is presumably typical of parallel movements. It indicates how recent are the steps of direct bearing upon present-day problems, and in so far justifies the slight consideration (in the present connection) of the remoter and more fragmentary historical antecedents. It will also make it easy to understand how readily in the absence of an accredited and established view of the bodily correlates of mental action, the ambitious innovations as well as the traditional survivals of beliefs could gain a foothold. This is true in part of even so late a propagandum as that of Lavater—which in large measure was operative before the day of the most decisive discoveries—and to the careers of Gall and Spurzheim, whose contributions in part came after them. The spirit of nineteenth-century science was not then sufficiently disseminated to make obvious the irrelevancy of such pretensions as phrenology, nor indeed to offer a satisfactory consideration of the problems which that system professed to solve.

In the collateral ancestry of “character and temperament” the anthropological attitude occupies an important place,—in a new sense making mankind the proper study of man. It forms part of the broadening outlook upon the constitution of nature in general and human nature in particular, that characterizes modern thinking. It doubtless has a relation to the closer study of the political struggles of nations and to economic expansion, though the relation is not intimate. It aimed at a philosophical interpretation of the structure and motive sources of human society and institutions. The anthropological interest extended to the characteristics of the social groups, particularly of races and peoples in different stages of development and under the sway of distinctive cultures. The enlargement of outlook resulted from the spirit of exploration and inquiry, which brought knowledge of peoples and habitations and other systems of culture, and in another direction extended the reconstruction of the past of man. A similar enterprise resurveyed the story of the intellectual past and traced the slow control of the forces of nature through invention, and the equally laborious attainment of a social control through the organizations of men. The larger intercourse with varieties of mankind together with the broader interpretation of the forces responsible for the development resulting from the same spirit of exploration and inquiry that led to the technical scientific advances, brought with it a more thorough knowledge of the diversity of men and civilizations, and traced in the latter