The widening of the middle age orbis terrarum through voyages of discovery led to the science of ethnology, and the works of Linnaeus, Buffon, Lamarck, and Darwin hastened the formulation of somatic anthropology. In the course of time prehistoric archæology, folk-lore and folk-psychology have been added to these, and the term anthropology, like biology, is now used in a large way to designate a congeries of separate sciences—if, indeed, we permit ourselves to call any body of knowledge whatsoever a separate science. In each of these aspects the science of man has been making splendid headway, but it has been so absorbed in the preliminary task of collecting and classifying its materials that it has been able to do no more than approach its main task, the determination of the developmental relation of individual to race consciousness, and the relation of both to accompanying institutions and usages. In the division of labor incidental to the handling of a vast body of material, this special task has been assumed by folk-psychology; and further advance in certain lines of individual psychology and social philosophy are dependent on reliable generalizations from this field.[1] In the preface to his recent work on "Mental Development in the Child and the Race" (in which he is able to say embarrassingly little of the race), Professor Baldwin says very frankly that the attempt to work out a theory of mental development in the child resulted in "the conviction that no consistent view of mental development in the individual could possibly be reached without a doctrine of the race development of consciousness, i. e., the great problem of the evolution of mind;" and Professor
- ↑ The Germans have called this phase of anthropolygy by several names: folk-psychology (Völkerpsychologie), psychical anthropology, ethnological psychology. By whatever name we call it, we must recognize that it is not strictly coordinate with the other branches of anthropology. It studies the conditions and changes in life-direction displayed by the more elementary social aggregates, and in this respect its materials are coincident with those of ethnology, somatic anthropology, prehistoric archæology, and folk-lore; but it uses also, in a minor way, data furnished by philology, history, individual psychology, demography and sociology. In the same way, individual psychology is related to and dependent on zoology, anatomy, and physiology, but is conveniently and properly treated as a separate discipline.
