Anthropology eBook

Robert Ranulph Marett
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 205 pages of information about Anthropology.

Anthropology eBook

Robert Ranulph Marett
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 205 pages of information about Anthropology.
as living.  Matter moves.  Life evolves.  We have entered a new dimension of existence.  The laws of matter in motion are not abrogated, for the simple reason that in physics one makes abstraction of life, or in other words leaves its peculiar effects entirely out of account.  But they are transcended.  They are multiplied by x, an unknown quantity.  This being so from the standpoint of pure physics, biology takes up the tale afresh, and devises means of its own for describing the particular ways in which things hang together in virtue of their being alive.  And biology finds that it cannot conveniently abstract away the reference to time.  It cannot treat living things as machines.  What does it do, then?  It takes the form of history.  It states that certain things have changed in certain ways, and goes on to show, so far as it can, that the changes are on the whole in a certain direction.  In short, it formulates tendencies, and these are its only laws.  Some tendencies, of course, appear to be more enduring than others, and thus may be thought to approximate more closely to laws of the timeless kind.  But x, the unknown quantity, the something or other that is not physical, runs through them all, however much or little they may seem to endure.  For science, at any rate, which departmentalizes the world, and studies it bit by bit, there is no getting over the fact that living beings in general, and human beings in particular, are subject to an evolution which is simple matter of history.

And now what about philosophy?  I am not going into philosophical questions here.  For that reason I am not going to describe biology as natural history, or anthropology as the natural history of man.  Let philosophers discuss what “nature” is going to mean for them.  In science the word is question-begging; and the only sound rule in science is to beg as few philosophical questions as you possibly can.  Everything in the world is natural, of course, in the sense that things are somehow all akin—­all of a piece.  We are simply bound to take in the parts as parts of a whole, and it is just this fact that makes philosophy not only possible but inevitable.  All the same, this fact does not prevent the parts from having their own specific natures and specific ways of behaving.  The people who identify the natural with the physical are putting all their money on one specific kind of nature or behaviour that is to be found in the world.  In the case of man they are backing the wrong horse.  The horse to back is the horse that goes.  As a going concern, however, anthropology, as part of evolutionary biology, is a history of vital tendencies which are not natural in the sense of merely physical.

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Anthropology from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.