er the sisters Okey were or were not honest
is a question on which we cannot enter here.]

III

ANTHROPOLOGY AND RELIGION

Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the
new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough,
Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of
the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining. The British
Association used to reject anthropological papers as 'vain dreams based on
travellers' tales.' No doubt the British Association would reject a paper
on clairvoyance as a vain dream based on old wives' fables, or on
hysterical imposture. Undeniably the study of such themes is hampered by
fable and fraud, just as anthropology has to be ceaselessly on its guard
against 'travellers' tales,' against European misunderstandings of savage
ideas, and against civilised notions and scientific theories unconsciously
read into barbaric customs, rites, traditions, and usages. Man, _ondoyant
et divers_, is the subject alike of anthropology and of psychical
research. Man (especially savage man) cannot be secluded from disturbing
influences, and watched, like the materials of a chemical experiment in a
laboratory. Nor can man be caught in a 'primitive' state: his intellectual
beginnings lie very far behind the stage of culture in which we find the
lowest known races. Consequently the matter on which anthropology works is
fluctuating; the evidence on which it rests needs the most sceptical
criticism, and many of its conclusions, in the necessary absence of
historical testimony as to times far behind the lowest known savages, must
be hypothetical.

For these sound reasons official science long looked askance on
Anthropology. Her followers were not regarded as genuine scholars, and,
perhaps as a result of this contempt, they were often 'broken men,'
intellectual outlaws, people of one wild idea. To the scientific mind,
anthropologists or ethnologists were a horde who darkly muttered of
serpent worship, phallus worship, Arkite doctrines, and the Ten Lost
Tribes that kept turning up in the most unexpected places. Anthropologists
were said to gloat over dirty rites of dirty savages, and to seek reason
where there was none. The exiled, the outcast, the pariah of Science, is,
indeed, apt to find himself in odd company. Round the camp-fire of
Psychical Research too, in the unofficial, unstaked waste of Science,
hover odd, menacing figures of