these nations God our Lord gave charge to one man called St. Peter that he should be lord and superior to all the men in the world and that he should be head of the whole human race.....And he commanded him to place his seat in Rome....This man was Pope...One of these pontiffs who succeeded to St. Peter as Lord of the world in dignity made donation of these isles and terrafirma to the aforesaid (Ferdinand and Juana) and to their successors....wherefore we ask and require of you that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it and that you acknowledge the Church as the ruler and superior of the whole world and the high priest called the Pope and in his name the King and Queen Donna Juana." We all know how the political growth of a Protestant Europe challenged this fantastic document as shown in their attempts 'to singe the Spanish King's beard,' but the obvious anthropological implications of such an authoritative declaration, like the Nordic nightmare of the days before the last war long weighed heavily on the conscience of the ethnological speculators of the New World. In the words of Prof. Wissler, "the Church solved to its own satisfaction an anthropological problem which was theological at its start....When we come to the maritime outburst of Western Europe, the discovery of Africa, India and the Americas, once again the world was brought to face the question, and this time it was a theological problem that came to the fore. Were these different orders of men all children of Adam and God?"[1]
Besides this interest in the spiritual salvation of the new found stray sheep, from one of the lost tribes of Israel, as the armchair anthropologists of the early period were at great pains to prove, another lure came upon the scenes. The new world not only offered land for the starting of democratic models, so long read and admired in the Greek Classics, but the American Indian was directly responsible for sponsoring that fiction of the noble savage, which was the dynamite that burst
- ↑ Recent Developments in the Social Sciences. 1927.
