Such an improvement is broadly referred to as an increased or higher civilization; and it is the avowed aim of applied anthropology accurately to ascertain what are the criteria of civilization, what individual or social elements have in the past contributed most to it, how these can be continued and strengthened, and what new forces, if any, may be called in to hasten the progress. Certainly no aims could be more immediately practical than these.
Here, again, anthropology sharply opposes its methods to those of the ideologists, the dogmatists, and the deductive philosophers. It refuses to ask. What should improve man? but asks only. What has improved him in the past? and it is extremely cautious in its decision as to what "improvement" really means. It certainly does not accept the definition which up to the present the philosophies and theologies have offered any more than it accepts the means by which these claim that our present civilization has been brought about.
This department of anthropology is still in its infancy. We are only beginning to appreciate that, in the future, political economy, like history, will have to be rearranged on lines which this new science dictates. The lessons of the past, their meaning clearly apprehended, will be acknowledged as the sole guides for the future. It may be true, as De Tocqueville said of the United States, that a new world needs a new political science; but the only sure foundation for the new will be the old.
Applied anthropology clearly recognizes that the improvement of humanity depends primarily on the correct adjustment of the group to the individual; and, as in ethnology, its ultimate reference is not to the group, but to the individual. In the words of John Stuart Mill, the first to apply inductive science to social evolution, it is that the individual may become "happier, nobler, wiser," that all social systems have any value.
We may profitably recall what the same profound thinker and logician tells us have been up to the present time the prime movers in human social progress. They are: First, property and its protection; second, knowledge and the opportunity to use it; and third, co-operation, or the application of knowledge and property to the benefit of the many.
But Mill was altogether too acute an observer not to perceive that while these momenta have proved powerful stimulants to the group, they have often reacted injuriously on the individual, developing that morbid and remorseless egotism which is so prevalent in modern civilized communities. Nor should I omit to add that the remedy which he urged and believed adequate for this dangerous symptom is one which every anthropologist and every scientist will fully indorse—the general inculcation of the love of truth, scientific, verifiable truth.
