facts fit together better than they do on any other
supposition. What is the truth that Darwinism supposes? Simply that
all the forms of life in the world are related together; and that the
relations manifested in time and space between the different lives
are sufficiently uniform to be described under a general formula, or
law of evolution.

This means that man must, for certain purposes of science, toe the
line with the rest of living things. And at first, naturally enough,
man did not like it. He was too lordly. For a long time, therefore,
he pretended to be fighting for the Bible, when he was really fighting
for his own dignity. This was rather hard on the Bible, which has
nothing to do with the Aristotelian theory of the fixity of species;
though it might seem possible to read back something of the kind into
the primitive creation-stories preserved in Genesis. Now-a-days,
however, we have mostly got over the first shock to our family pride.
We are all Darwinians in a passive kind of way. But we need to darwinize
actively. In the sciences that have to do with plants, and with the
rest of the animals besides man, naturalists have been so active in
their darwinizing that the pre-Darwinian stuff is once for all laid
by on the shelf. When man, however, engages on the subject of his noble
self, the tendency still is to say: We accept Darwinism so long as
it is not allowed to count, so long as we may go on believing the same
old stuff in the same old way.

How do we anthropologists propose to combat this tendency? By working
away at our subject, and persuading people to have a look at our results.
Once people take up anthropology, they may be trusted not to drop it
again. It is like learning to sleep with your window open. What could
be more stupefying than to shut yourself up in a closet and swallow
your own gas? But is it any less stupefying to shut yourself up within
the last few thousand years of the history of your own corner of the
world, and suck in the stale atmosphere of its own self-generated
prejudices? Or, to vary the metaphor, anthropology is like travel.
Every one starts by thinking that there is nothing so perfect as his
own parish. But let a man go aboard ship to visit foreign parts, and,
when he returns home, he will cause that parish to wake up.

With Darwin, then, we anthropologists say: Let any and every portion
of human history be studied in the light of the whole history of mankind,
and against th