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Updated: June 4, 2025
By statistic methods of sociology the social problems of immorality and crime have been opened up, and external facts have been studied; and criminal anthropology has revealed the "inferior types" who by hereditary taint are those who have a predisposition to all the moral infection of their surroundings.
The further we get from mathematical exactness the more liable we are to differences of opinion, which may, as in the case of anthropology, cluster round some question of national pique.
He will not hear of presentiments, and, unlike Hegel, he scouts the Highland second-sight. The 'possessed' of anthropology are epileptic patients. This reference to Swedenborg is remarked upon by Schubert in his preface to the essay of Kant. The opinion in paragraph 35 is a general one as to mystics.
It was only after modern anthropology had unearthed the characteristic beliefs of primitive man that many myths became intelligible. A few examples will make this relationship clearer. Totemism is a sort of cult rendered to animals and plants which are regarded as akin to the tribe. It must be remembered that primitive man was not nearly so convinced of his superiority as is modern man.
Yet turn to the opening chapters of Thucydides' book. You will find most of the sciences on which long modern treatises are written: but you will find something more: you will find them blended into a unity. Let those who cry up anthropology examine into his treatment of legend and custom and his power, untrained in Seminar or institute, to use it as sociological evidence.
We must see who is the more scientific, he who in carrying the experimental science beyond the narrow confines of criminal anthropology and applying it in the broad field of social science, accepts all the logical consequences of scientific observations and gives his open adherence to Marxian socialism or he who while being a positivist and innovator in one special branch of science, remains a conservative in the other branches, to which he refuses to apply the positive method, and which he does not study with a critical spirit, but in which he contents himself with the easy and superficial repetition of trite commonplaces.
Manifestly I cannot speak with any less confidence of Anthropology than a chemist does of chemistry, when for forty-five years, I have ever been able and willing to demonstrate its principles by experiments on intelligent persons, changing their physical strength, their circulation and their mental faculties.
Anthropology has only escaped the knowledge of this circumstance by laying down the rule, demonstrably unbased on facts, that 'the divine sanction of ethical laws ... belongs almost or wholly to religions above the savage level, not to the earlier and lower creeds; that 'savage Animism is almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainspring of practical religion.
He speaks of "eminence," of "success," of "ability," of "zeal," and "energy," for example, and except for the last two items I would submit that these qualities, though of enormous personal value, are of no practical value in inheritance whatever; that to wed "ability" to "ability" may breed something less than mediocrity, and that "ability" is just as likely or just as unlikely to be prepotent and to assert itself in descent with the most casually selected partner as it is with one picked with all the knowledge, or rather pseudo-knowledge, anthropology in its present state can give us.
It has been taken with a spiritual sauce that has disguised its real flavor. Anything in the Bible, no matter how raw, is taken as God's food. It is used to demonstrate problems of diet which do not provide a balanced ration; it is accepted by the gullible though contradicted by the revelations of Geology, Astronomy, Anthropology, Zoology, and Biology.
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