gical position at sufficient length to make a complicated
subject clear, if I can do so, I shall limit both my arguments and the
evidence in support of them to the narrowest limits.

I

Mr. Wallace, I think, supplies the dominant note of the
anthropological position when he suggests, though in a strangely
unsatisfactory terminology, that it is the conscious use by man of his
experience which causes his superior mental endowments, and his
superior range of development.[288] We must lay stress upon the
important qualification "conscious." It is conscious use of experience
which is the great factor in man's progress. It is the greatest
possession of man in his beginning, and has remained his greatest
possession ever since. His experience did not always lead him to the
best paths of progress, but it has led him to progress.

Even Mr. Wallace did not appreciate the full significance of this
principle. The conscious adoption of a natural fact, of an observation
from nature, or an assumed observation from nature, for social
purposes, is an altogether different thing from the unconscious
knowledge which man might have been possessed of, but which he never
put to any use in his social development. Anthropologists must note
not the natural facts known to later man or known to science, but the
facts, or assumed facts, which early man consciously adopted for his
purpose during the long period of his development from savage to
civilised forms of life. The unconscious acts of mankind are of no
use, or of very little use. It is only the conscious acts that will
lead us along the lines of man's development. Man did not begin to
build up his social system with the scientific fact of blood kinship
through father and mother, but he evolved a theory of social
relationship which served his purpose until the fact of blood kinship
supplied a better basis. At almost the first point of origin in savage
society we see man acting consciously, and it is amongst his conscious
acts that we must place those traces of a sort of primitive
legislation which have been found.[289]

Now this being the basis of anthropological observation, we have to
apply it to the question of man's earliest progress. It is at its base
an economic question. Primitive economics dominated the movements and
condition of early man in a far more thorough manner than modern
economics affect civilisation, and between the two systems lies the
whole history of man. It reveal