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So much for the ideal scope of anthropology.  Now, in the second place, for its ideal limitations.  Here, I am afraid, we must touch for a moment on very deep and difficult questions.  But it is well worth while to try at all costs to get firm hold of the fact that anthropology, though a big thing, is not everything.

It will be enough to insist briefly on the following points:  that anthropology is science in whatever way history is science; that it is not philosophy, though it must conform to its needs; and that it is not policy, though it may subserve its designs.

Anthropology is science in the sense of specialized research that aims at truth for truth’s sake.  Knowing by parts is science, knowing the whole as a whole is philosophy.  Each supports the other, and there is no profit in asking which of the two should come first.  One is aware of the universe as the whole universe, however much one may be resolved to study its details one at a time.  The scientific mood, however, is uppermost when one says:  Here is a particular lot of things that seem to hang together in a particular way; let us try to get a general idea of what that way is.  Anthropology, then, specializes on the particular group of human beings, which itself is part of the larger particular group of living beings.  Inasmuch as it takes over the evolutionary principle from the science dealing with the larger group, namely biology, anthropology may be regarded as a branch of biology.  Let it be added, however, that, of all the branches of biology, it is the one that is likely to bring us nearest to the true meaning of life; because the life of human beings must always be nearer to human students of life than, say, the life of plants.

But, you will perhaps object, anthropology was previously identified with history, and now it is identified with science, namely, with a branch of biology?  Is history science?  The answer is, Yes.  I know that a great many people who call themselves historians say that it is not, apparently on the ground that, when it comes to writing history, truth for truth’s sake is apt to bring out the wrong results.  Well, the doctored sort of history is not science, nor anthropology, I am ready to admit.  But now let us listen to another and a more serious objection to the claim of history to be science.  Science, it will be said by many earnest men of science, aims at discovering laws that are clean out of time.  History, on the other hand, aims at no more than the generalized description of one or another phase of a time-process.  To this it may be replied that physics, and physics only, answers to this altogether too narrow conception of science.  The laws of matter in motion are, or seem to be, of the timeless or mathematical kind.  Directly we pass on to biology, however, laws of this kind are not to be discovered, or at any rate are not discovered.  Biology deals with life, or, if you like, with matter