Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/483

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424 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899

structural or functional differentiation save such as reflects brain- led activities, themselves coalescing with the confluence of culture ; all experience tells of slight but steady remolding of the body through exercise and inspiration's spur, of steadily improv- ing coordination of hand and brain, of the elimination of race distinctions through blood-blending. When the entire field of man's experience of physical man is surveyed, it becomes clear that the human genus is not dividing into species, as the bestial genus divides, but is steadily drifting toward unity of blood and equality of culture. It seems safe to project the lines of experi- ence of somatic progress a little way into the future and a longer way into the past; projected futureward, they converge in consan- guineal union transcending tribal and racial distinctions; projected backward, they divaricate to an indefinite number of confluent currents coming up from proto-human sources to successively merge in the great stream of living humanity — a stream trace- able by all who pause to note commonplace facts of everyday

observation.

Psychology

It is postulated in this writing that, as taught by Darwin, organisms are molded by interaction between their own bodies and their environment, and that the effect of the interaction is perpetuated and made more definite from generation to genera- tion ; it is postulated also that, as taught by Spencer, organized bodies are composed of highly differentiated terrestrial substances combined in such manner as to perpetuate themselves through the continued maintenance of internal and external relations ; it is postulated further that the organization of living bodies is hierarchic, the organs of most highly differentiated substance dom- inating the organs of less differentiated substance, and the degree of differentiation and domination increasing from simple tissue to nerves and ganglia and culminating in the brain ; it is still further postulated that, as recognized for a half-century, the brain is the organ of the mind, and that its function is the conservation and

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