Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/396

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384
BOAS

to find something that could be fitted to the problem in question giving an explanation satisfactory to his mind. While the classification of concepts, the types of association, and the resistance to change of automatic acts, developed unconsciously, many of the secondary explanations are due to conscious reasoning.

In the preceding remarks I have tried to point out a direction in which anthropological data may be used to good advantage by the psychologist; that from a psychological point of view, the starting-point of our investigations must not be looked for in anthropological phenomena that happen to be alike in outward appearance, but that in many cases diverse phenomena are based on similar psychic processes, and that these offer to the investigator a promising line of attack.