questions of better or worse--in a word, with value.
Hence, it must always be somewhat arbitrary on the part of an historian
to identify change in a given direction with a gain or increase in
value. Nevertheless, the anthropologist may do so, if he be prepared to
take the risk. He sees that human life has on the whole grown more
complex. He cannot be sure that it will continue to grow more complex.
Much less has he a right to lay it down for certain that it ought to
grow more complex. But so long as he realizes that he is thereby
committing himself by implication to a prophetic and purposive
interpretation of the facts, he need not hesitate to style this growth
of complexity progress so far as man is concerned. For if he is an
anthropologist, he is also a man, and cannot afford to take a wholly
external and impartial view of the process whereby the very growth of
his science is itself explained. Anthropologists though we be, we run
with the other runners in the race of life, and cannot be indifferent to
the prize to be won.

Progress, then, according to the anthropologist, is defined as increase
in complexity, with the tacit assumption that this somehow implies
betterment, though it is left with the philosopher to justify such an
assumption finally and fully. Whereas in most cases man would seem to
have succeeded in the struggle for existence by growing more complex,
though in some cases survival has been secured by way of simplification,
anthropology concentrates its attention on the former set of cases as
the more interesting and instructive even from a theoretical point of
view. Let biology by all means dispense with the notion of progress, and
consider man along with the other forms of life as subject to mere
process. But anthropology, though in a way it is a branch of biology,
has a right to a special point of view. For it employs special methods
involving the use of a self-knowledge that in respect to the other forms
of life is inevitably wanting. Anthropology, in short, like charity,
begins at home. Because we know in ourselves the will to progress, we go
on to seek for evidences of progress in the history of mankind. Nor need
we cease to think of progress as something to be willed, something that
concerns the inner man, even though for scientific purposes we undertake
to recognize it by some external sign, as, for instance, by the sign of
an increasing complexity, that is, such differentiation as likewise
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