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The fallacy of premature psychologizing about history is first presented. The question is raised, do primitive people represent earlier phases of psycho-cultural adjustment? Against this is the fact that so-called primitive groups exist to-day whose cultures are presumably as old as those of civilized man. The term primitive is found to need definition, since it is used sometimes to mean archaic; i.e. early in time; sometimes it is applied to illiterate people, and sometimes it is used to mean simple as opposed to complex.
A comparative approach to the study of anthropology offers more than the historical. It requires only one assumption, that of the psychic unity of mankind. This assumption has as substantiation the following:—
1Workers with aborigines have the intuitive feeling that the aborigines do not differ from themselves in mental processes.
2Aborigines placed under the influence of the culture of Western Europe have adopted to it.
3By tests it is impossible to discover differences not attributable to cultural conditioning or the nature of the test devised.
4There are certain constants in the dream forms of widely separated peoples.
5Large categories of institutionalized behaviour shew certain unanimity in psychic constitution; e.g., marriage, incest tabus, æsthetic attitudes and religious beliefs, although treated differently, are important in all groups.
On this basis one can make the following generalizations:—