46 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920
Europe, to the inclusion, especially, of the great continental mass of Asia. 1 Again, the author's careful attention to the psychological factors involved in historic reconstruction, deserve especially warm support in these days of behaviorism and statistics. The approach of the mental side of human advance from the standpoint of the growth, conflict and transformation of idea-systems, holds out many alluring vistas, of interest and concern not alone to the historian and sociologist, but to the psychologist (barring the behaviorist faction) and the philosopher. General recognition must also be granted to the author's tripartite classification of the factors in- volved in the maintenance and growth of civilization, the factor of persistence and fixity, that of gradual cumulative change, and, finally, that of violent transformation leading to definite "ad- vance." As has been seen, however, the scope given to the pheno- menon of "advance" cannot be accepted without reservation.
On the other hand, the specific formulation of the author's task cannot be pronounced as entirely satisfactory. That his attempt represents an application of the method of science to the study of man, cannot be accepted, for, in the last analysis, what he wants to do is to lay bare certain constants in the determina- mination of historic successions, an enterprise which theoretically lies in the level of the historic branches of the natural sciences such as astronomy, geology, and biology, but which must also be quite different, in its problems as well as its methods, from the procedures characteristic of the non-historic branches of the natural sciences as well as of the entire field of exact science. Again, the narrowing down of the investigation to the determinants of "political organization," while permissible in itself, seems to have impeded the author's recognition of the vast multiplicity of factors of historic causation. The connotation given to the term "political organization" is too narrow, an issue not merely of terminological character, for a wider view readily reveals the fact that some fundamental features of political organization are inherent in all
1 It is worth noting that a similar extension of historic outlook on an even vaster scale, was theoretically advocated by Lamprecht, Die Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft, and that the task has been actually attacked by Breysig, Die Geschichte der Menschheit;. the highly speculative and almost phantastic excursions of the latter author could, however, only serve to bring the entire scheme into undeserved disrepute.
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