a student of human nature, this is only a very faint beginning
of the painful progress towards being human. For the study
of primitive race and religion stands apart in one important
respect from all, or nearly all, the ordinary scientific studies.
A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer; he can
understand entomology only by being an entomologist (or, perhaps,
an insect); but he can understand a great deal of anthropology
merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies.
Hence arises the fact which strikes the eye everywhere in the records
of ethnology and folk-lore--the fact that the same frigid and detached
spirit which leads to success in the study of astronomy or botany
leads to disaster in the study of mythology or human origins.
It is necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice
to a microbe; it is not necessary to cease to be a man in order
to do justice to men. That same suppression of sympathies,
that same waving away of intuitions or guess-work which make a man
preternaturally clever in dealing with the stomach of a spider,
will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing with the heart of man.
He is making himself inhuman in order to understand humanity.
An ignorance of the other world is boasted by many men of science;
but in this matter their defect arises, not from ignorance of
the other world, but from ignorance of this world. For the secrets
about which anthropologists concern themselves can be best learnt,
not from books or voyages, but from the ordinary commerce of man with man.
The secret of why some savage tribe worships monkeys or the moon
is not to be found even by travelling among those savages and taking
down their answers in a note-book, although the cleverest man
may pursue this course. The answer to the riddle is in England;
it is in London; nay, it is in his own heart. When a man has
discovered why men in Bond Street wear black hats he will at the same