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Theology has become a stagnant science, and, to prove the rule by contraries, the main problem of man's spiritual relation to the universe, his end in living, and the secret of real happiness is left to a sentimental idealism in which reason, as the Greeks knew it, has less and less place, and primitive instinct, as the anthropologists define it, and the Freudian psychologists explain it, is given more and more control.
But let a man go aboard ship to visit foreign parts, and, when he returns home, he will cause that parish to wake up. With Darwin, then, we anthropologists say: Let any and every portion of human history be studied in the light of the whole history of mankind, and against the background of the history of living things in general. It is the Darwinian outlook that matters.
The hasta fetialis has been styled a fetish an apparent abuse of language. As to the Holy Cross qua fetish, why discuss such free-thinking credulities? Modern anthropologists Tylor, Frazer, and the rest are not under the censure appropriate to the illogical. More Mischiefs of Comparison Fetishism was represented as 'the very beginning of religion, first among the negroes, then among all races.
But, as legends were not invented by anthropologists to prove a point, it is odd that the traditions of Athens, as preserved by Varro, speak of a time when names were derived from the mother, and when promiscuity prevailed.
The work of telling the world what it knows to be true will never want self- sacrificing workers. The Humanitarian was her monthly organ of propaganda. Within its cover, which presented a luminiferous stark ideal of exemplary muscularity, popular preachers, popular bishops, and popular anthropologists vied with titled ladies of liberal outlook in the service of this conception.
The Descent of Man, end of ch. ii. pp. 63 and 64 of the 2nd edition. Anthropologists who fully endorse the above views as regards man nevertheless intimate, sometimes, that the apes live in polygamous families, under the leadership of "a strong and jealous male." I do not know how far that assertion is based upon conclusive observation.
Unfortunately for anthropologists, natural agencies sometimes produce effects resembling those achieved by man's hands, and some degree of skill in manufacture and well-marked design is necessary before one can be sure that a seeming stone weapon has not been shaped by nature instead of man.
These gods might most judiciously be spoken of, not as 'spirits, but as 'undefined eternal beings. To us, such a being is necessarily a spirit, but he was by no means necessarily so to an early thinker, who may not yet have reached the conception of a ghost. A ghost is said, by anthropologists, to have developed into a god. A ghost is the phantasm of a dead man.
But a fairly energetic Kinetic is probably the nearest thing to that ideal our earthly anthropologists have in mind when they speak of the "Normal" human being. The very definition of the Poietic class involves a certain abnormality.
Many anthropologists accord too great an importance to the third constituent of human faculty, I believe, and they are therefore led to deny that races differ in mental respects to so large a degree as the thoroughgoing evolutionist would contend.
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