3. Science and the Studies of Man

3 Science and the Studies of Man ELISEO VIVAS I These notes intend to show that the disciplines fashionably called at present "the behavioral sciences" are not scientific in the sense that the physical and the biological sciences are scientific. It is in the latter sense, in the sense we employ it in speaking of the exact, the natural sciences, that I shall use the term "science." The so-called behavioral sciences I shall refer to as the disciplines or studies of man. It is a pity that we cannot call them collectively "anthropology," thus providing ourselves with a much needed term to refer to all the disciplines whose subject matter is anthro pos and the institutions that actualize and secure his values.! But since I do not hold that the only valid knowledge is the scientific, but believe that there is philosophical knowledge of a substantive nature and that there is moral and religious knowledge and, in a qualified sense, even aesthetic knowledge, it is not my intention to disparage the studies of man. These disciplines attain truth of their kind and have worth irrespective of whether or not they employ the methods of the sciences.

Although in view of the Zeitgeist it would be naive to expect the differences between the studies of man and the sciences to be acknowledged, nevertheless it is important to be clear about them because the studies of man, when they are thought of as scientific, tend to develop a number of objectionable symptoms. Their lan50 Science and the Studies of Man 51 guage tends to become gobbledygook. 2 The matter accepted as· the object of inquiry tends to be confined to those aspects of man and his activities that can be handled quantitatively or at least objec tively. This would not necessarily be productive of harm were not the assumption widely and uncritically accepted that the real is only that which can be brought to the attention of the scientist. This assumption is operative in academic psychology with harmful consequences. We are told by men superbly equipped mentally that man has no mind. The psychologist initially understands what the statement means. Mind is not an entity in the sense in which the liver or the lungs are entities. But soon the statement is taken out of its context to mean that man's minding is a process, that can be understood adequately by analogy with complex "thinking"

machines. The upshot is that subjective experience, what Santayana called "the inward landscape," is first denied existence as a valid object of inquiry and finally denied existence tout court. Those who accept these denials do not stop to think what effects they have on scholarly thought. Consider, for instance, that neither Freud nor Rhine (whatever the ultimate judgment concerning the validity of his speculations or experiments) could have even started on his work had he taken the behaviorists seriously.3 Along with the acceptance of these denials comes the habit of looking upon man as we look upon the other animals, simultane ously failing to realize the consequences of our change of attitude. But we cannot maintain our self-respect if implicit in our approach to ourselves and others lies the conviction that man is only that which science says he is. And one of the consequences of a loss. of self-respect is that the fiber of actual living is coarsened. 4 Other objectionable symptoms appear when we overlook the dif ference between the studies of man and the sciences. A false and sometimes an utterly absurd quantification is introduced into sub ject matter that is not quantifiable. The triviality and the egre...

gious absurdity of the results thus obtained do not daunt the man bent on such specious feats, since he does not take the slightest pains to inquire what makes one subject matter quantifiable and another not. This question, apparently, is not one that can be sen· sibly asked, since, not being quantifiable, it is not itself a scientific 52 Scientism and Values question. It must be, therefore, what misologists refer to as a "phil osophic" question-by which is meant one that no s,ensible man would bother his head about. Still another objectionable symptom appears when we overlook the difference between science and the studies of man: the latter become irrelevant to the human situation, since they are taken to be value-free, pure. As a result .a number of consequences follow. The distinction made by Aristotle between the theoretical and the practical sciences is erased, and the studies of man become irrelevant to the human situation, which presumably they were initiated to elucidate. When it is acknowledged that they can be applied in the way that the pure sciences can be applied, a facti tious problem appears, viz., the relation between fact and value, between the pure science and the valuable ends that they are ap plied to secure. The ends are taken to be external to the science and therefore considered arbitrary and unattainable by rational suasion.

In moral philosophy and in the philosophy of religion, the con sequences of erasing the distinction between the theoretical and the practical sciences are even worse. Philosophers of a positivist and those of a linguistic orientation insist that their task is to carry on a philosophical analysis and not to "preach" or "moral ize." The latter is considered demeaning, although sometimes the need for it is verbally conceded. The immediate result of this doc trine is a kind of institutionalized schizophrenia, according to which the. philosophic analysis of moral decisions is kept in one compartment of the mind, hermetically sealed and inviolate, while the actual life of the philosopher goes its way untouched by what he knows or professes to know about morality. At a time when we could use the maximum of intelligence in solving our practical problems and still not have enough, philosophers take pride in demonstrating, on the basis of an antiquated psychology and sim plistic dichotomies, that moral conflicts cannot, ultimately, be re solved rationally. If this were truly the case, one could not adduce the disadvantages of this view as reasons for not accepting it. But one would expect that responsible human beings would explore Science and the Studies of Man 53 the alternatives in a wholehearted way and not be complacent about what they take to be the truth, when it is so obviously one that cannot improve our desperate pr.actical situation.

II To show that the disciplines of man are not sciences, all one needs to do is to point to the fact that while the physical and the biological sciences are each one science, or a constellation of disci plines more or less interdependent in respect to subject matter and in the process of reduction to one science through the exten sion and simplification of their laws, this is not the case with the studies of man. There is no such thing as Marxist physics as dis tinct from capitalist physics. Pontecorvo can defect to Russia, but the knowledge of physics he takes with him was developed in the Western world. This is, true also of biology. When Lisenko, for reasons external to the science of genetics, proposes. theories that are in harmony with his political beliefs, there are means of show ing that his results are false-if, indeed, they are, which is some thing experts decide. But this does not hold for the disciplines of man. Among them we do not find a science or several'sciences, but innumerable schools at bitter war with one another, aiming, as it seems to the outsider, for total victory and the unconditional sur render of the loser. At best these factions lack any kind of rela tionship with one another; at worst, and not infrequently, they actually contradict one another.

Take psychology. The work of the Gestalt psychologists has not been integrated with that of Hull and of Tolman and of Lashley and Eysenck and the hundreds of schools of psychology that make up the chaotic domain of that discipline. When we turn to depth psychology the factionalism is even more obvious, the partisanship among the various schools more rife and more embittered, and the possibility of integration seems less likely. Recently a psycholo gist named Ruth Monroe published a book entitled Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought) An Exposition) Critique) and Attempt at Integration. 5 The one thing we can say in favor of this work, with.

54 Scientism and Values out fear of contradiction, is that Dr. Monroe's amiable modesty is not false, for all she succeeded in doing was to make the attempt at integration. We have not yet heard that as the result of her at tempt Freudians and Jungians. have united with Adlerians and with the followers of Rank and of Sullivan and of Horney and of Fromm and the other schools in a grand ecum.enical fellowship of integrated love and intellectual cooperation. This is also true of sociology and of anthropology. Malinowski has his school, and so has Radcliffe-Brown and Kroeber and any one else who is anyone and some who are not. In 1931, Radcliffe-Brown wrote: It is impossible to reconcile the different theories with one another, or even to discover principles of method about which there is general agreement. To say nothing of theories of the derivation of culture from a lost Atlantis or a lost Pacific continent, we are offered a choice between the Egyptian theory championed in its latest form by Pro fessor Elliot Smith, or the theory of culture cycles of Graebner, or the somewhat different theory of Father Schmidt, or that of Frobenius, and I know not how many more. Each school goes its own way, build ing up its own hypothetical structure, not attempting to seek out points on which agreement can be reached with others. The procedure is often that of disciples of a cult rather than that of students of a science.6 And a little later Linton referred to the same situation. Falling back on the youthfulness of the science, he tells, us that anthropol ogy is "unsure of its objectives" and that "this has resulted in the development of a number of different schools." Although these statements are over twenty years old, they apply to the contempo r.ary situation. 7 Obviously, where there are schools and no effective means ot mediating among them and of integrating the results, there is no one science, and where there is no one science, there is, properly speaking, no science. If it is any comfort to the students of man, we can say that their disciplines constitute a protoscience, an Urnaturwissenschaft) out of which, it is· hoped, a science will come in the fullness of time. Against hope there can be no argument.

Science and the Studies of Man 55 But at the moment we must admit that the presence of these fac tions and divisions is clear proof that conflicting differences of opinion-for we cannot call them scientific hypotheses~annot be subjected to the same kind of verification and invalidation to which scientists submit their hypotheses. I do not mean to assert that som.e, aspects of man and of his insti. tutions are not susceptible of scientific treatment or of something that makes the brave effort-all the more admirable because it is so pitifully unsuccessful-to approximate the rigorous techniques and procedures of the sciences. There is a great difference, for in stance, between Hobbes' or Hume's psychology and som.e are.as· of contemporary psychology. And there is a great difference between the accounts of primitive peoples brought back by missionaries prior to the development of anthropology and the studies of con temporary anthropologists. It is easy, on the other hand, to exag gerate the difference between us and our prescientific ancestors, and the reason is that we think of our studies of man as scientific and of theirs as not scientific. But in quite a responsible sense the H istoria general of Fr. de SahagUn has been called a rigorous, lin guistic and ethnographic account of early sixteenth-century Mex ico.8 Still, when one has said the most that can be said for the sci entific status of contemporary studies, of man, the difference be tween them and the sciences remains. What aspects of man and of his activities can be treated in a manner approaching that of the sciences and what aspects cannot is; a question that cannot be an swered in an a priori manner; it is a strictly empirical, casuistic question. But it is not a question that I expect to hear asked seri ously in my lifetime by students of man. There are not many men in any generation who have the courage to challenge the Zeitgeist.

When scientific status is uncritically claimed for the studies of man, the result is what, following Hayek, is known as "scientism." And scientism is endemic in our culture--or so, for the moment, it seems to be. But scientism is not yet absolutely pandemic, and a number of students of man can be cited who are fully aware that their disci plines are· not scientific in the sense in which I am using the term in these notes. Let me cite two instances among the several that 56 Scientism and Values have come to my attention. In an article entitled "Social Scientist: Man Between," Robert Redfield, with the wisdom and modesty those who enjoyed the privilege of his friendship expected of him, acknowledged the differences between the social scientist and the student of the humanities. 9 In psychology, Abraham Maslow has courageously and, in my outsider's opinion, successfully tried to inquire into phenomena in which the imitation of the methods of the physicist is simply inconceivable.

When I say that physics and biology are sciences, I do not mean that in any given science at a given time there are not stubborn, unresolved problems about which scientists are in doubt. These problems no doubt exist, and they are no doubt the source of dis agreements. But these disagreements seem to arise for the most part, at least in the Western regions of the science, so to speak, where the explorers are opening the land and no settlement has yet taken place. Nor do they seem to be the source of the kinds of schools or factions that we find in the studies of man. I am aware that in biology there are unresolved problems that seem to be cause for factionalism and cannot be said to be frontier problems: there is a minority that holds that teleology and vital ism are unresolved problems-if they are two, and not essentially one. The outsider is in no position to judge the merits of the solu tions proposed for these problems when they are formulated within the domain of biology. All he can do is suspend judgment on the ground that if these problems have been resolved success fully, it is difficult to see why reputable scientists continue to re ject the solutions offered. May not the reason be that these stub born problems are philosophic, and not scientific, and seem to arise from causes similar to those to which the factionalism of the disciplines of man can be traced, viz., the effort to deal with bio logical subject matter in the way in which the physicist deals with his? However that may be, when allowance is made for these dis agreements, it still can be said in fairness that the factionalism that is the normal condition in the studies of man does not exist in anything like the same degree in biology .10 The preceding argument should carry conviction, although it is external to the disciplines themselves. When it is advanced, stuScience and the Studies of Man 57 dents of man make two replies. With Linton they plead the youth of their studies. When one remembers the rapidity of the develop ment of classical mechanics from Galileo to Newton, all this old excuse does is to remind one of Oscar Wilde's epigram about the United States: "America's youth is its oldest tradition." The sec ond reply is that what gives a discipline its status as a science is the use of the scientific method, and since the studies of man use this method, they are sciences. It is fair to reply to them that it is a strange kind of subject matter that, when treated scientifically, pro duces no better results, in terms of agreement, than philosophers produce. It is also fair to add that it is a question whether in some of the disciplines of man scientific method in any but the most rudimentary sense can be said to be applicable. Indeed, it might not be useless to ask whether ((the scientific method" (as, distinct from a variety of generalized techniques, procedures, and manners of observation and correlation) is not the most successful canard palmed off by philosophers on philosophically naive scientists but let me hasten to add that I would not dare ask this question, for only madmen dare outrage the pieties of their fellow beings.

We must consider another difficulty that prevents the studies of man from achieving the status of a science. The difficulty is not encountered by all the studies of man; it is encountered only by those that must reckon with value. Let us first note the obvious fact that the student of man cannot always exclude value from his discipline. The social scientist (whether anthropologist or sociologist), the political theorist, the depth psychologist, and the student of personality turn their work into sheer triviality if they ignore the values of men. I know that Freud asserted that the psychoanalyst is not interested in the morals of his patient. But I take it that it is generally recognized today that this is one point on which Freud was in error. For there seems to be a close link between neuroses and morality, as Freud himself clearly saw. I have not forgotten that since Spinoza's day many philosophers have professed to be able to observe moral phenom ena scientifically-by which they mean, as the physicist observes falling bodies. Hume alleged that his method was that of the physi cist and called on philosophers to follow his lead. And in our day, 58 Scientism and Values as I have noted above, numerous moral philosophers-particularly the positivists, those known as analytic philosophers, and the soit distant "metamoralists" -make the same assertion. I do not deny that some observers are more objective than others. But the prob lem is not as simple as those who allege that values can be observed objectively seem to think it is.

One fact that complicates the objective observation of values is that the student has no means of observing values. but that which is employed by anyone at any time, be he Tom, Dick, or Harry. When Fortune characterizes Dobu culture, Ruth Bunzel observes the Zuni, and Margaret Mead the Arapesh, they observe the values that give these cultures their distinctive qualities in the very way in which we observe one man's honesty or another's vanity. When Miss Mead's observations are criticized, as they were by Thurn wald, because they were hurriedly gathered, she elaborates her method and takes photographs and thus seeks to show that her observations are valid. In other words, the anthropologist may em ploy highly elaborate methods in order to make sure that he has interviewed a representative number of members of the commu nity he studies and that he has not, in haste, attributed to it traits that are not there. But ultimately the judgment, "The Pueblos are Apollonian," is grounded on the same procedures of observation that enable me to say that Jphn is honest and Dick is vain. Photo graphs, adequate sampling, statistics, psychographs, personality tests, and the rest of the apparatus the anthropologist employs to avoid misreading the value traits he observes seek to validate the grasping of a value or complex of values. But this must first be grasped, nor can the observer grasp it in any other way than you or I grasp it. If another anthropologist had disagreed with Fortune -as I understand one did-about Dobu, the discussion would have to be carried on in precisely the same terms we would carry it on if you were to disagree with me about Tom's honesty. You would point out certain actions of Tom that you have observed.

These are purely behavioral observations. You might say that he invariably returns money loaned to him, even when the lender forgets about the loan, and that you saw him return money to a cashier who had "shortchanged" herself. And I would have to Science and the Studies of Man 59 agree with you, or I would have to cite other actions of T'om which, I would assert, override your judgment. This is to say that when we discern value, we point to it, and when someone else does not discern it where we point, we give the physical features to which, as I am wont to put it, value is "anchored." It should be noted, however, that value is not identical with the physical traits to which it is anchored. And the reason for this is that two men can agree thoroughly on the physical traits of an object and disagree on its value. I doubt whether D. H. Lawrence and Hemingway would have disagreed about what actually goes on in a bullfight: what the picador and torero and the horse and the bull did, how they behaved. But we know how deeply these two writers disagree about the moral and aesthetic values of bull fighting.

It is true that the physicist also starts with objects and events of ordinary experience, which is to say, with observations that can be made either with the naked senses or with instruments that are extensions of these. In this respect he cannot be said to differ from the student of man. But sooner or later he finds ways of going beyond the initially observable data and of correlating his subject matter with scales and other instruments of measurement. How he does this beyond elementary physics I do not exactly know except in the vaguest way. But that he does it I believe I know. It is necessary to bear this in mind, for it points to the difference be.. tween the objectivity of the scientist and that which the student of man can achieve. Scientific data, even when not quantifiable, are thoroughly public, are objective in the sense that there need be no question concerning their presence within the purview of observation. The values observed by the student of man cannot be freed from inherent vagueness. When we speak of the Apollonian character of a !=ulture, we cannot be certain that all of us are talking about the same thing--even if, after reading Miss Benedict, we backtrack and read Nietzsche also.ll These considerations are not intended to deny that there are cases in which value can be correlated with objective, value-free data--money or work done or some other physical event or feature of things objectively observable--but the limitations of such cor60 Scientism and Values relations .are too obvious to need going into them. Again, we may be able to discover a man's or a group's values by means of psycho logical tests. But aside from the fact that the reliability of these tests is at the moment a controversial matter (for in principle they need not be unreliable), their radical defect, from the standpoint of our discussion, is that they cannot dispense with the definition of the value and its observation and its relation to behavioral traits expressed in the answers to the tests. We cannot judge the presence of a value without apprehending it to be present, and we cannot apprehend it except through the act of intuition through which it makes itself present to us as an intelligible ob ject. From the standpoint of the kind of objectivity which is repre sented by the judgments that make up the sciences, the study of value is, so to speak, born with an original sin that no methodo logical baptism seems to be able to absolve it from. Let me add, however, although only in passing, that this does not make value judgments hopelessly subjective, mere expressions of affective re sponses which in principle are beyond rational suasion. They can achieve, and often do, a remarkable degree of objectivity. But what kind of objectivity is achieved and what degree and by what means are not questions that I can address myself to in this paper.

This does not exhaust our difficulty. The preceding remarks refer to the difference between the objects of science and the ob jects with which the student of man is concerned. But there is another difference, and that is located in the nature of the observ ers. This difference is pointed out by Robert Redfield in the paper referred to above. I shall let Redfield speak for himself: The dif ference between what I call a scientist and a student of man, lies, for one thing, in the fact that the latter observes values, and he ... enters imaginatively into the minds of the value·-carrying human beings he studies. To understand another's value, I exercise my own valuing nature. Moreover, I come to see that this valuing of mine, as I work, is a part of my problem of observation and analysis. It has to be thought about and controlled. The social scientist no longer sees himself as a special kind of machine studying other things conceived as machines, but as· a human being bringing to his study value judgScience and the Studies of Man 61 ments of which he may take account in accomplishing his. work.

Today one hears, without a sense of shock, one anthropologist say to another, "a value-free anthropology is an illusion." 12 This is well said. All of it is true. But as regards Redfield's pic ture of how the student of man sees himself, one may be allowed to express doubts. Redfield was no man to fall into imprudent exaggerations. Nor can I match my superficial and scanty knowl edge of anthropologists with Redfield's. But his statement leaves me ,vondering whether he was pointing to a fact or expressing a hope. For I have heard anthropologists claim for their discipline the status of a science. And I have also heard sociologists make the same claim. And to my dismay, it has come to my attention that students of politics, whom until recently I had ignorantly taken to be free from scientism, are introducing into their discipline the methods and the procedures the employment of which turns a discipline into scientism.

But if Redfield's statement describes correctly the attitude of anthropologists toward their discipline, something follows, the importance of which cannot be exaggerated: We are in a position to return, if not to the identical distinction, at least to a distinc tion similar to that made by German philosophers between the sciences of nature and those of the spirit. If and when and to the extent that this distinction becomes accepted, scientisIJl will be dead. But these are not the only obstacles that prevent us from giving the studies of man the status of a science. Were we able to appre hend values with the same degree of objectivity that we apprehend the traits observed in the objects of the sciences, and were the stu dent of man capable of keeping his own valuations out of the subject matter observed, and were we able to make invariant corre lations of an adequate nature between values and physical struc tures, our observation of the values espoused by an individual and a group would have, as regards susceptibility to scientific treat ment, one inherent and ineradicable limitation. In principle pre diction is impossible about v.alues to be espoused in the future.

Only on a simplistic assumption of a thoroughgoing cultural or 62 Scientism and Values some other kind of determinism could prediction be depended upon. Having said this much, I shall drop the point, for a full elu cidation of it would plunge us into the difficult problem of free dom, and from such a plunge we cannot be sure to return. Another obstacle that prevents us from giving the studies of man the status of a science"-or perhaps another formulation of the point just stated-is that some predictions in the field of these studies can be nullified or realized by the operative force of the prediction upon the matter which is the subject of study. Thus, the prediction that the stock market will fall tomorrow could lead to its fall-if stockholders took the prediction seriously. And the announcement that a given neighborhood will turn into slums could lead, if taken seriously by the inhabitants of the neighbour hood, to just the condition predicted.

Before we drop this subject, it is advisable to make two remarks. The first is that I am not asserting unqualified freedom, as some philosophers seem to assert. Such an assertion, were it true, would make impossible the development of character, the development of neuroses, and the art of'mental healing, and even human living. The institutions of society are possible because, within limits, men can be relied on, and they can be relied on because their behavior can be conditioned. The second remark is that the qualification I have just made as regards freedom may seem unimportant to anthropologists who study custom-bound societies and who approach their data in an ahistorical manner. In such societies men do not seem, to be free. Their values do not seem to change. Predictions about the Aruntas are possible-if the pictures we have of them are true. But the number of groups as static as the Aruntas is not great in the world and is diminishing rapidly; alas, we are running out of primitives, as we ran out of dodos.

In dynamic societies in which freedom is operative in moral judgments, prediction is not possible. We can know what men have done; we cannot always know what they will do. For when a man asks the question seriously, What ought I to do? to the extent that the perplexity that gave rise to the question is radical Science and the Studies of Man 63 and to the extent that the man confronted with It IS, a serious moral agent, the resolution of his perplexity is unpredictable. The upshot of these considerations is that the studies of man cannot be considered "scientific" in the sense in which I am using the word in this paper. III The claim that man can be studied scientifically is based on one assumption, among others, that should be examined critically. I refer to the conviction, widely shared by students of man and by philosophers, that the hypothesis of organic evolution accounts for the origin of man and of his cultural institutions. How this con viction came to be widely accepted by educated people after Dar win and what results, it led to in the studies of man it is not neces sary to review here. Nor do we need to review the arguments Boas employed to put a stop to the freewheeling of evolutionary anthro pologists. What we need to consider is that anthropologists are embarrassed by the problem of human origins.

In 1949, S. F. Nadel asserted that "a search for origins which is purely speculative and unsupported by genuine historical evidence can be dismissed out of hand." In support of this statement Nadel quotes Radcliffe-Brown. On the other hand, in his Presidential Address to the American Anthropological Association, Hallowell raised the question about human origins and attempted to answer it. 13 We do not need to examine Hallowell's answer. All we need do is to point out that it is a purely speculative effort founded on definitions, generalizations, and inferences, all of which assume that man must have evolved from an earlier form of life. Anthro pologists and students of man in general give their readers the impression that they know, in the sense in which the scientist knows, that man is an animal and that his cultural institutions are the product of evolution. This conviction appears to many edu cated men today to be an irrefragable truth, so well established as to require no further proof. And this is, indeed, the case as regards the manner in which it is accepted: if truth were decided by the 64 Scientism and Values majority vote of those who concern themselves with such questions -the educated-this statement would be as indisputably a truth as any we have.

It is this conviction that I propose to analyze in this section. But before we turn to our problem let me reiterate that biological evo lution is not in question. It takes an utterly ignorant man or a hard fundamentalist impervious to evidence to reject the evolu tionary hypothesis. However, we do not know how man developed his capacity to think and to rear his institutions. And until we have ans,vers to these questions, there is a break between animal evolution and the process of human history as we know it. This break can be bridged only by means of speculations that, were they offered by a theologian or a religious man, would be hooted at by genuine scientists and by scientistic scientists. In order to examine this question in concrete terms I shall use two illustrations of extrapolations from biological to cultural evo lution. The first illustration I take from a book written for the general reader by an anthropologist whom I take to have achieved distinction in his profession, judging by the position he occupies.

Mr. Carleton S. Coon, we are informed by the jacket of his book, is a professor of anthropology and curator of ethnology at the Uni versity of Pennsylvania. He tells us that: More than twenty million years ago, long before the first appearance of man on earth, his remote tree-living ancestors took their first step in a human direction. Somewhere in the tropical regions of the earth, probably in Africa, a band of large monkeys lived in a forest. Every morning at daybreak they awoke, and the males began calling to their families to follow them to the feeding grounds. There they spent most of the day, picking fruit, peeling and eating it, and robbing birds' nests of their eggs and their fledglings. As time went on, however, the fruit became scarcer, and when the monkeys tried to move to another part of the forest they found their way blocked. Every way that they turned they came to the edge of the trees, and all about .them was grass. They were trapped. As the fruit and fledglings failed them, they had no choice but to climb down to the ground.

In their frantic search for food they learned to lift up stones to Science and the Studies of Man 65 collect insects and grubs, and to dig ground squirrels and moles out of their burrows. As the monkeys acquired a taste for meat, they came to relish the flesh of antelope and other large hoofed animals that grazed on the plain, though these were hard to catch. They also soon learned to watch out for lions and other beasts of prey with which they had begun to compete for the meat. Life on the ground was as dangerous as it was exciting. In the trees they had feared only falling and the snake. Although some of these monkeys may have found their way back to the shrinking border of the forest, others stayed on the ground, where they continued to run about on all fours, lifting stones, picking berries, and nibbling on buds and shoots. They still do. They are the baboons and Barbary apes. Others learned to stand on their hind limbs and to walk or run erect when they needed to use their hands.

After a while, however, the climate changed once more and the forest crept back over the plain. Some of the descendants of the monkeys that had learned to walk upright went back to the forest, where they became the ancestors of apes. Only those upright ones that stayed out in the open grew to be men. It cannot therefore be said that man is descended from apes, but rather that apes are descended from ground-living primates. that almost became men. There is sound evidence of this. We know that all animals repeat, during their embryonic life, the general history of their ancestors, from the form of a single-celled animal onward. The human embryo at various stages has gill-slits and a tail. The embryo of a chimpanzee at one stage has a foot resembling that of man in that its great toe points forward for walking rather than back ward for grasping. Only as it approaches its birth size does its foot acquire the appearance of a hand. At no stage of its development does the human foot resemble that of an adult ape. The chimpanzee embryo has hair on its head like that of a man, and human-style eyebrows.l4 It is true that Mr. Coon is not unaware that the evidence on which he bases his remarkably fanciful "reconstruction" is inade quate. On page 43 he states that the Early and Middle Pleistocene bones on which he bases his reconstruction are few and their exact date is dubious. Nevertheless, he is confident about the recon66 Scientism and Values struction, for, although early man's bones are scarce, "the product of his handiwork is abundant," and the tools give him confidence, for they tell him the same story he has read from the bones.

It should be noted that Mr. Coon's scientific reconstruction con stitutes an astonishing achievement. Take, for example, a problem that has troubled philosophers for quite some time and that lin. guists have wrestled with until they seem finally to have given it up as hopeless..-the question of the origin of language. For Mr. Coon the problem is easy. He tells us that by chirpings and roaring animals communicate with one another. But there is, of course, a difference between the vocabulary of the gibbons, who have "been shown to possess. at least nine sets of sounds with specific mean ings," and human language. The gibbons, we are told, utter sim ple imperatives, "Keep away from my wife!" or "Let us go get some fruit!" whereas human languages "include much larger vo cabularies and more complex ideas expressed in units known as words. Not only do we speak and hear words, but we produce them silently when we think." And then he proceeds to tell us how human speech began: The earliest forms of human speech must have begun when man's brain had no more intellectual capacity than that of the gibbon, capable only of a few commands and warnings, and limited entirely to immediate interpersonal relations. Qualities of objects of various classes, such as safe and dangerous, large and small; ways of referring to other persons, such as husband and wife, father and son, in their absence; and methods of expressing the idea that a given action had been finished, rather than left incomplete-these mechanisms of ex pression must have followed, with the eventual addition of further abstractions. 15 By avoiding the difficulties that make the problem an insoluble one for philosophers, Mr. Coon's account is considerably sim plified. For philosophers insist that we must draw a distinction between signs and symbols. It does not take a gibbon to give and respond to signs. All animals do. But, so far as we can tell, man is the only animal that employs symbols. And the difference is radical and indispensable if we are to understand what is meant Science and the Studies of Man 67 by thinking and communicating and what is the problem, of the origin of language.

Mr. Coon has many other wonderful stories to tell us. Thus, he gives us a picture of the social and intellectual life of Upper Paleolithic men, the Late Ice Age Hunters, although so far as I have been able to hnd out, these men left us no books, news papers, clay tablets, or any records from which such pictures could have been drawn, nor does Mr. Coon mention any they might have left. 16 They did leave us their wonderful paintings, and these give evidence of equality, if not superiority, in skill to the artists of today. But from them what can we infer? Not much, and that only in very general terms. Thus, we may assume that animals endowed with such aesthetic sensibility were fully developed human beings, and must have had systems of morality and prob ... ably all the other forms of cultural life that we find in men today. Yet if we believe this, and I do not doubt it, it is because we can not imagine that such aesthetic sensibility as the cave painters gave evidence of could have existed by itself, unaccompanied by the other kinds of sensibility that accompany it in the case of the human beings we know and are. But this is all we can infer; nothing more. Particularly nothing about what manner of animals were the "ancestors" of the cave painters. We do not know how Mr. Coon's ape or Hiirzeler's little animal became a human being-which is to say, a being capable of employing symbols and developing a culture. That human beings somehow appeared we know, for here we are and seem to have been here for quite some time. But Mr. Coon, who seems to believe his own fairy tales, does not realize that the problem cannot be solved on the evidence we have. The missing link, of which I used to hear in my child hood, and which gave so much comfort to believers in special creation, is, still missing, and while it cannot legitimately give comfort to fundam,entalists any more than Piltdown man can, it should disturb the dogmatic slumbers of the evolutionists-and I take it that it does, at least occasionally, as Hallowell's presidential address evinces.

The problem, needless to point out, is an extremely complex one. For it is not only a question of factual evidence, but of basic 68 Scientism and Values definition of terms. We do not yet know with any reasonable con fidence what makes a being human. The impasse is radical and substantive, and not a merely verbal one, because until we know how we came about, we cannot draw the line between our earlier ancestry, if we had such ancestry, Mr. Coon's "half-brained man," his "full-brained man," and Hiirzeler's Oreopithecus.I 7 That the cave painters were fully human we can reasonably hold. But it should be noticed that, if challenged, the conviction can be defended only by a purely speculative, a philosophic, and not a scientific, argument. For it is, based on our inability to imagine aesthetic sensibility unaccompanied by other modes of sensibility-moral, religious, and cognitive. And our inability could be disposed of as Dr. Johnson disposed of the young man who said to him, "Sir, I do not understand." Replied the for midable Doctor: "Sir, I cannot give you understanding." If ",ve cannot imagine, no one can give us imagination. In point of fact, however, there is nothing absurd or self-contradictory in the concept of an animal that gives evidence of aesthetic sensibility and skill and who does not use symbols and has no capacity for moral or religious response. There are Australian birds that are said to "adorn" their nests. We could interpret their activity as protoaesthetic sensibility and skill. But could we infer from their elaborate preparations for mating that these birds have a capacity for moral response? In any case, from the marvelous paintings of the caves of France and Spain and the others nothing but the most general deductions can be made.

How does Mr. Coon find it possible to give us his detailed account of the social and intellectual life of men who left us no records? He makes inferences from contemporary primitives and from monkeys: Australians studied and photographed by Mount ford, African pigmies, some peoples living in modern times Australians, Negritos, and Andamans-who use fire but do not know how to make it, and from the behavior of chimpanzees and gibbons~these are the bases of Mr. Coon's remarkable "recon struction."18 Prior to reading Mr. Coon I had been under the impression that anthropologists had given up the practice of deducing the culture of early man from that of contemporary Science and the Studies of Man 69 primitives and from chimpanzees and gibbons; but obviously I was in error. However, the arguments interdicting such practice seem to me to be conclusive. And since they are well kno,vn, I do not need to review them here.

The abundant and detailed knowledge Mr. Coon succeeds in gathering by these means about Upper Paleolithic man is quite remarkable, and I would offer other specimens of it were I not in fear of abusing the reader's patience and were not Mr. Coon's book easily accessible. I shall confine my remarks in this respect to pointing out that Mr. Coon knows even about the motivations of these early people. Thus, he knows why they painted. This is a question on which aestheticians since Plato and Aristotle have not been able to agree. But for Mr. Coon the problem is one that can be settled in passing: "One great solace in the face of disturb ance is art."19 These full-brained men did not have the advantages that we, now living, have. In the face of disturbance all they could do was paint or look at paintings, whereas for us the Metropolitan or the National Gallery has become obsolescent. Here lies the genuine value of scientific progress. When disturbed we take tranquilizers. It is much less trouble.

Mr. Coon also knows about the religion of Upper Paleolithic man: The Late Ice Age religious institutions likewise exceeded political boundaries, as it should in any healthy society. Ancestral heroes who hovered over the band were shared by other bands that met at cere monial times. Cult heroes responsible for the landscape and its animal life were likewise shared, as were the combined capacities of the old men teaching the young. 20 These are not the only problems that Mr. Coon resolves. Philosophers have quarreled about the nature of religion for some time, and they have been very perplexed, since William James' day, by the difficulty of giving an adequate definition of it in view of the varieties of what, prima facie} seem to be religious ex perience. But for Mr. Coon these difficulties do not exist. He tells us: "Religion is the sum total of behavior concerned with 70 Scientism and Values restoring equilibrium to the individual or the group after disturbance." 21 "But," I hear one of my readers ask, "what harm can there be in Mr. Coon's fictional 'reconstructions'? For he is not trying to palm off his fairy tales, on his fellow scientists. He is writing for the general reader, who is not a specialist." The answer is that there is no harm whatever. For we know that when a religious fundamentalist teaches that his myths are literal truths, he is spreading error and darkness; but when a scientist passes off fiction as science, he spreads truth and light. Mr. Coon is in..

teres ted in the truth, for he is a scientist, whereas the funda mentalist is interested only in acquiring equilibrium after a disturbance--and there is an obvious difference. Perhaps. But I cannot rid myself of the feeling that we have a right to expect responsibility from a scientist, whereas from a fundamentalist all we can expect is his fundamentalism. It must be acknowledged that when specialists write for them selves, and not for the general reader, they do not write fiction. Their assertions are sober and cautious. But the same faith that can be detected in Mr. Coon animates them. To show that this is the case, I turn to my second illustration, from an article by G. S. Carter: Man is an animal, and, however greatly his present state differs from that of the rest of the animal kingdom, we must accept that he arose from subhuman ancestors by a process of evolution. And, since the life of those ancestors must have been very like that of other animals"

the process by which he evolved must have been similar to that which other animals undergo. If so, it is clear that some consideration of the general theory of evolution is required before the'special case of the evolution of man can be discussed.22 This statement sounds unexceptionable on first reading. And it cannot be said to be fiction. It is merely a deduction. If man is an animal, he must have arisen from subhuman ancestors by a process of evolution. In what other way could he have arisen?

Science and the Studies of Man 71 This would seem to be self-evident. But the reason is that we readily supply the implicit premise of Mr. Carter's enthymeme, to the effect that whatever happens must happen by natural means. This assumption is not a scientific proposition, but a philosophical one. That this implicit premise is an unsupported assumption can be noticed when we look with care at another paragraph of Mr. Carter's article. He tells us: We must now consider how far man's evolution since he arose from his primate ancestors can be interpreted as governed by the same controls as those we have seen to govern the evolution of other ani mals. There can be no doubt that his evolution has been in many ways most unusual, and it is to be expected that unusual factors may have taken part in its control. But man is an animal, and he arose from animals much less unusual than he himself is. Also, his geno type is similar in its organization to those of other animals, and there should be no great difference in type between the variations that form the raw material of evolution in him and his animal ancestors. His ecology, at least in the earlier stages of his evolution, must have arisen by modification of that of the Primates from which he arose. Changes in ecology undoubtedly occurred in the course of his evolution and must have largely influenced its course, but he must have arisen from a primate life, probably arboreal, very like that of many of our modern Primates. I shall assume, for the sake of the argument, that he early gave up his arboreal life, coming to live an omnivorous life on the ground; that at first he lived in small groups not much larger than the family; and that the size of his communities was enlarged only later when he began to develop a social life.23 What is of interest in this paragraph is the style in which it is couched. "There can be no doubt ..." we are told, and "there should be no great difference in type," and "he must have arisen,"

and "changes in ecology undoubtedly occurred." And finally: "I shall assume." As, a student of philosophy, I find myself utterly at home in this kind of reasoning, for it is the rhetoric philoso phers use when, as is so frequently the case, they want to per72 Scientism and Values suade their readers and have little more than their own belief in their doctrines to help them achieve their end. If "there can be no doubt" of something or other, why are we not given the evidence that makes it indubitable? And if man "must have arisen" in a particular way and not in another, why are we not given the facts in the case? And if changes in ecology "undoubtedly occurred," why are we not forced to accept the proposition that they occurred by being confronted with the evidence? And why is it necessary to "assume" for the sake of the argument what ought to be the conclusion of an empirical demonstration that has to be accepted whether we like it or not? The reason Mr. Carter uses the persuasive form of address. rather than an argument based pn evidence is that he cannot point to the causal process by which an animal that was the primate ancestor of man finally became a human being. Or, changing the expression, Mr. Carter has to cross from the subhuman to the human, and, lacking factual step ping stones, he pole-vaults by means of his sturdy and trusted conviction that the change could have come about only by natural means.

How does Mr. Carter know the truth of this proposition? He cannot profess to have examined all the processes operative in the universe or even a representative number of the kinds of processes that are known about, nor can anyone else have done this for him. Neither he nor anyone knows by what means man acquired his distinctive powers and developed his institutions. It would seem, therefore, that before we can hold that man is nothing but an animal, we shall have to establish by scientific means that whatever happens can happen only by natural means. But how could the latter statement be established scientifically? However it is-estab lished, until it is, we shall have to be content to call it a philo sophical statement. This is all it is. It is, indeed, the most succinct means of expressing a Weltanschauung known as "naturalism" and widely accepted by contemporary men. To ask, therefore, the question, "How does Mr. Carter know this statement?" is to initiate an inquiry into the validity of naturalism. And to this inquiry we must now turn.

Science and the Studies of Man IV 73 Let me begin with two prefatory remarks. The first is that naturalism is not a school of thought in the sense that idealism or phenomenology is. It is a conviction about the universe that is elaborated in diverse "vays. "Orthodox" naturalism, so to speak, adds to the proposition that nothing happens except by natural means another proposition, namely, that the only way to know what happens is to bring it within the purvie"v of science. This second proposition has been elaborated with gre.at care by posi tivists and instrumentalists who are committed to belief in "the unity of science." There are, however, naturalists who do not accept the doctrine of the unity of science. The second prefatory remark is this: It is widely held today that naturalis,m is one of the indispensable foundations of science. I heard an academic psychologist recently assert, with a warmth one does not expect of a scientist, that psychology is, possible only on a naturalistic foundation. However widespread this belief may be, it is false. Scientific activity of the most rigorous kind is consistent with an indeterminate number of philosophical con victions. The business of the scientist is to discover the invariant relations operative in the domain of his competence. What is to be found beyond the purview of scientific inquiry he need not make any assumptions about. He does not even need to believe, as has been alleged, that nature is through and through governed by the order that is expressed in scientific laws. When he espouses naturalism, his views do not have the authority that his scientific hypotheses have. When scientists speak of mathematics or geom etry as the alphabet of nature, as the men of the seventeenth century did, they speak as philosophers; they do not speak as scientists. A scientist can say, with' Kant, that nature is the realm of law. But if he does, he must stop there, and he does not even have the right, qua scientist, to say that what we ordinarily call nature, the spatiotemporal world, is completely governed by law.

Of course, in his inquiries he discovers laws-these are what he 74 Scientism and Values is searching for. But whether the spatiotemporal world is through and through law-bound or whether, this, is the only world or realm of being that there is, are questions to which he may turn as a philosopher, but which his. scientific method is not designed to answer. When we examine naturalism critically, we find the arguments offered in its favor puzzling. Among the difficulties that naturalism must face are the lacunae in the scientific account of evolution, the missing links that Mr. Coon has so elegantly and courageously supplied us with. We do not know how man appeared on. earth, we do not know how he came by his capacity for the employment of symbolic processes, we know nothing of the beginning of cuI.. ture; we do not know about his first intimation, his first dim awareness of himself and of others, his first apprehension of beauty, his first fit of remorse, his first response to something he ended by calling "God." Until we know how these and other distinctive modes of human experience came about, naturalism is a purely speculative conviction.

Some naturalists avoid this difficulty by employing the term "emergence" to cover up the critical point at which the lacunae are found. This is a mere verbal dodge. But one naturalist, at least, discerning the dodge for what it is, interdicts its use. He writes: ... even some professed naturalists sometimes appear to promote the confusion when they make a fetish of continuity. Naturalists usually stress the emergence of novel forms in physical and biological evolu tion, thereby emphasizing the fact that human traits are not identical with the traits from which they emerge. Nevertheless, some distin guished contemporary naturalists also insist, occasionally with over tones of anxiety, that there is a "continuity" between the typically human on the one hand and the physical and biological on the other.24 Elsewhere our philosopher assures us that naturalism is not based on anything analogous to religious faith. And somewhere else he is emphatic in his assertion that his philosophy is "supScience and the Studies of Man 75 ported by compelling empirical evidence," rather than being "dicta based on dogmatic preference."25 We must examine with care the problems generated by these avowals and disavowals.

But before turning to the substance of our philosopher's argu ment, I invite the reader to consider its £onn. I think we owe our philosopher thanks for the linguistic lesson that he has taught us in passing. The phr.ases "compelling empirical evidence" and "dicta based on dogmatic preference" are descriptive, neutral, utterly value-free, and therefore appropriate for scientific dis course. However, isn't there something slightly unscientific in the manner in which our philosopher dismisses the beliefs of those with whom he disagrees? His opponents accept their beliefs on the ground of preference. Our philosopher knows their motiva tions. And, of course, his own conviction has been gained the hard way, by gathering empirical evidence irrespective of his own preferences. Indeed, he has no preference except to go where the evidence leads. If this argument were put forth by anyone else than a scientific philosopher, I would suggest that what he was doing was psychoanalyzing the opposition-a game that we all can play.

Let us consider next the dichotomy with which our scientific philosopher operates: On the one hand, .we have a doctrine sup ported by empirical evidence and, on the other, mere dicta based on dogmatic preference. No third alternative is conceivable. Truth on the one side and error on the other. It is as simple as that. But is it? The question of the "evidence" on which even the most dogmatic of us and the most depraved victim of his, own. prefer ence holds his beliefs cannot be resolved by rigging up a simplistic dichotomy. And to attempt to resolve it in this manner is to dis play an ungenerous intolerance based on God knows what kind of preference. Other philosophers arrive at their convictions in much the same manner and for much the same kind of psycho logical reasons as naturalists arrive at their views, by means of much the same kind of evidence, and the differences between them, if they can be settled at all, cannot be settled by means of simplistic dichotomies.

76 Scientism and Values The disagreement is, in the last analysis, one about the nature of experience and the quality of life that one philosophy makes possible and another does not. The noun "experience," the verb "to experience," and the adjective "empirical" are not univocal terms that can be transferred from one system to another without a change of meaning. And for this reason, when our naturalist takes the no-nonsense position that "knowledge is knowledge," as he does somewhere in the essay under examination, he is indulg ing in an act of oversimplification. 26 Knowledge is indeed knowl edge, but what is knowledge? I am ashamed to have to say it, because it is something that any undergraduate who has taken a course in the history of philosophy ought to know; but I am forced to say it in view of the no-nonsense attitude of our phi losopher. What knowledge is, is still an open question which Western philosophy has not succeeded in resolving in spite of the tremendous effort that has been put into the attempt to do so.

Experience does not come labeled as empirical, nor does it come self-eertified as, such. What we call "experience" depends on as sumptions often hidden beyond scrutiny, which define it and which in turn it supports. We are here caught in a kind of circular analysis we would do well to admit and accept, for it can be avoided only by abandoning our system and falling back on in coherence. With these observations about the form of our philosopher's argument out of the way, we turn to the substantive problem that arises, because of the introduction of the concept of emergence. In order to examine it, I have to call the reader's attention to the first of the two tenets that our philosopher considers central to naturalism. He states it as follows: "The first [thesis] is the exis tential and causal primacy of organized matter in the executive order of nature." 27 Our problem arises because we can interpret emergence in one of two ways. Either the term "emergence" points to a place where the causal link is not known, but is assumed to exist, or to a place where it is not known because it does not exist. If we assert "the existential and causal primacy of organized matter," we must take the first interpretation of emergence. If we take the second, Science and the Studies of Man 77 we are left with some sort of creation out of nothing. In a paper published over fifteen years ago Paul Henle made clear that "emergence" must be interpreted as pointing to our ignorance of causal links that have not yet been discovered. 28 If Paul Henle is not right, why are scientists and philosophers concerned with the questions whether biochemists can synthesize life in their laboratories and why are evolutionists putting forth speculative doctrines about the condition on earth that made the appearance of life possible? They are-like students of man such as Messrs.

Coon and Carter-concerned with the missing links. To seek for these links relentlessly and everywhere, even where religious or other interests put up no-trespassing signs, has, after a long strug gle, com,e to be recognized as legitimate in the civilized world is, indeed, one of the marks by which we distinguish today a civilized society from one that is not. But to assert that we know that they exist before we find them is to attempt to pass off a "hunch" for a fact for which we have no evidence. Such a conviction is no part of science; it is pure speculation. Until we find the causal links, particularly at the critical places at which they are now missing, the affirmation of the existential and causal primacy of matter is a philosophical conviction on all fours with other philosophical convictions. Or are we here con fronted with privileged a priori knowledge or a scientific revela tion? If we are, we should be informed that we are, for I, and I am certain many others, do not want to infringe on anyone's pri~ileges. Until, however, the privilege is validated or the causal links are supplied, I think we have a right to say that what we have here is a bit of speculation-and a hope, the hope that the links will be found.

There are other problems generated by the improper introduc tion of the scientific temper into the studies of man, but although they are more or less intimately connected with the faith of the naturalist, I cannot take them up here. On one point, before closing, I beg leave to dwell emphatically: In suggesting that Mr. Carter either argues in a circle or begs the question, I have no desire to foist on him the views of the philos opher whom I have criticized. But if his argument is not based 78 Scientism and Values on some formulation of the naturalistic tenet----which is to say, if he does not accept some form or other of the premise I ex pressed as Hwhatever happens happens by natural means" .--what premise allows him to make the deduction from biological to human evolution? Or does he mean to deny the differences be tween man and his "fellow" animals that give rise to the problem?

The latter cannot be his. intention, and the evidence that it is not is the rhetorical effort, to which I have already referred, made by Mr. Carter to persuade the reader that in spite of the differences or alleged differences there is evolutionary continuity between man and the other animals. If these differences are accepted, Mr. Carter must make the deduction by some sort of implicit premise, for his argument is clearly enthymemic. Or is Mr. Carter arguing as a man of faith and not as a man of science? This I can understand and accept. What is more, if the matter is thus put, I have a "hunch" that Mr. Carter is right. That is probably how man came about, although we do not know, at the critical places, how it happened. Having been born in the twentieth century, I find it impossible to entertain any other no tion of how man came about. But "hunches," by whomever held and however widely held, do not constitute scientific knowledge, although some of them may be the starting point of such knowl edge. And the Spirit of the Age-any age, even the greatest of all ages, the age of Belsen .and Hiroshima, of genocig.e and of the commissar---is not always the Spirit of Truth. Had Messrs. Coon and Carter wanted to remain scrupulously within the domain of science, they would have asserted something like this: For the fact of man's biological evolution there is evidence as good as any we have in science. As to the factors, we must be prepared to modify our hypotheses with the progress of biology and other relevant sciences. But how an animal became a human being, a symbolic, culture-rearing animal, what factors led to this change and when, this is a question that scientists can answer only in the most speculative and, as yet at least, non empirical of ways--in the way which Mr. Coon has answered it. Mr. Coon's answer could be im..

proved considerably~ It could be less fanciful, more diffident, and considerably more sophisticated. But, as yet, something like Mr.

Science and the Studies of Man 79 Coon's story is all we can give in answer to the question how an unknown animal became man. Had the answer been couched in these terms, Mr. Coon could not have written his long and lively book; he would have written a much smaller one, and a more sober one. But he would not have been open to criticism. It follows from what I have said that I do not reject the natural istic faith because I believe in man's special creation or in divine miracles. I believe in only one miracle-the miracle of the uni verse. As to creation of any kind-whether that of man or the world-which is to say, as to the generative processes with which the universe teems,-these are too mysterious or miraculous. for me to advance anything resembling a "hypothesis." about them. I am content to let Messrs. Hoyle and Gamow speculate about them. As for myself, all I can do is to respond to these processes with awe and piety. And with unappeased wonder.

That this is not acknowledged frankly, that conscientious scien tists do not see that their argument is enthymemic and the implicit premise is a philosophic assumption and not an em pirically demonstrated proposition, is a fact that it is, most important to notice, because only by noticing it do we grasp the true nature of the conviction that these men possess. It is a faith. And for this reason, when the studies of man claim to be scientific, they are merely scientistic. NOTES 1. In the writing of this paper I have not had history in mind, for I take it that history is still fortunately free from scientistic contagion. But in so far as the assertion is made that history is a science, in the sense of the word here employed, what I say about the scientistic studies of man applies to history. 2. Gobbledygook is not to be identified indiscriminately with the technical language of a discipline, in which terms that are relatively precise are introduced by scholars to save laborious periphrasis and mental effort.

For a deliberate attempt to introduce gobbledygook into a discipline, see E. W. Count et ale "Do We Need More Becoming Words?" American Anthropologist, Vol. LV, No.3 (1953) pp. 395 ff. 3. A valuable contribution towards defining the relation of psychology to the human being is made by Paul Lafitte, The Person in Psychology, Reality or Abstraction (London, 1957).

80 Scientism and' Values 4. I have been asked for "proof" of this statement. By the request, I take it, what is intended is "empirical evidence" obtained as follows: Take at least twenty freshmen (women will do, if men are not available, and upper classmen even; in extremis) professors, if their services can be enlisted) and divide them into two groups, one for control. Destroy the sel£.respect of one of the groups and observe results. The statement is taken as a "hypothesis" which, if "confirmed," becomes a "law." Will the law apply to Hindoos in Trinidad, B.W.I.? This calls for "field work," which first involves a "foundation grant" leading to a little junket in the Caribbean. Alas, I do not have this kind of evidence, and what com.. pounds the felony, I do not have much faith in this way of getting it. The "proof" by which I back the statement is a number of years of ob.. servation of my fellow beings and speculation concerning the nature of the good life. This, I know, is a most disreputable admission for a scholar to make, and I make it in shame, for it puts me (allowing for obvious differences in stature) with men like Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Kant and Hume-yes, even Hume, for consider the nature of the evi· dence he offers in Section II of his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals-and Veblen. A shameful group of men to be with, who make statements of an empirical nature without having taken twenty freshmen, etc.

5. Ruth L. Monroe, Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought) an Exposition, Critique, and Attempt at Integration (New York, 1955). 6. Radcliffe-Brown's statement is quoted by A. C. Haddon, History of An· thropology (London, 1934), p. 123. 7. Ralph Linton, The Study of Man, an Introduction (New York, 1946), p. vii. 8. Fr. Bernardino de Sahagun, H istoria general de las cosas de Nueva Espana, (Mexico, D. F., 1938), I, xiv-xvi. The writer of the "Nota Pre liminar" to the Historia general, Wigberto Jimenez Moreno, concludes his discussion of Sahagun's method in the following manner: "Sahagun followed, without knowing, the most rigorous and demanding method of the anthropological sciences." And he refers to two other writers that have studied Sahagun from this point of view. I once heard the dis tinguished philosopher, the late Joaquin Xirau, make the same point about Sahagun. 9. Redfield's article was published in The Chicago Review) Vol. VIII, No.3 (1954), pp. 35-43. I shall refer to it below in another connection. I want to use this opportunity to express my deep sense of grief: as I was revising these notes his death occurred. American anthropology suffers irreparable loss.

As I was engaged in the revision of this paper a review came to my attention that ought to be read by those interested in the subject of scientism and the studies of man. Entitled "The Proper Study of Man kind," it appeared in The (London) Times Literary Supplement, No.2 946, 57th year (August 15, 1958), pp. 453-454. See also Abraham Maslow, Personality and Motivation (New York, 1954) and a paper to be pub.. lished in the Journal of Genetic Psychology entitled "The Cognition of Scienceand the Studies of Man 81 Being in the Peak-Experiences." His recent papers all indicate that the subject matter in which he is interested, which is of great importance, cannot be handled within the restrictions of scientism. 10. Thus, one of the contributors to this volume, Professor von Bertalanffy, seems to hold (I say "seems," because I am not certain that I have understood him) that teleology is no longer a problem among biologists.

II. Philosophers of science will consider this account of what scientists do superficial and inaccurate. But a more accurate account of the matter would take us too far afield. The essential point I want to make is that the student of man, for complex reasons, cannot handle value data as the scientist handles merely factual, value-free data. 12. Redfield, Ope cit.} p. 40. 13. S. F. Nadel, The Foundations of Anthropology (Glencoe, 111., 1951-but the Preface is dated November, 1949). A. Irving Hallowell, "Personality Structure and the Evolution of Man," American Anthropologist) Vol. LII, No.2 (April-June, 1950), pp. 159 ff. Since failure of communication at this point would lead to a total misunderstanding of my point, let me emphasize that I am not speaking here about the cluster of problems brilliantly elucidated by Redfield in The Primitive World and Its Trans formations (Ithaca, New York, 1953). Redfield starts with beings that are already human. I am referring to the critical period during which the transition took place between a prehuman animal and the culture rearing, symbol-using animal, the full human beings we now are.

14. Carleton S. Coon, The Story of Man (New York, 1954), pp. 11-12. If Hiirzeler's Oreopithecus is accepted, Mr. Coon's ape took to the grass in vain, for he was too late to found a dynasty. And, what is more amusing to the student of philosophy, Bishop Wilberforce's query to Huxley had a point in spite of His Grace's prejudice and ignorance. But our prob lem is not changed by little Oreopithecus. 15. Ope cit.} p. 18. 16. Ope cit.) p. 28, p. 32. 17. Ope cit.} pp. 96 fI. 18. Ope cit.) pp. 45, 47, 61, 65. 19. Ope cit.) p. 101. 20. Ope cit.) p. 105. 21. Loc. cit. I may be giving the reader the impression of being a carping, implacable, and even picayune critic. So be it. But these are important questions, and one cannot stand by and watch them settled in such a cavalier manner by a man who speaks in the name of science. On Mr. Coon's conception of religion and of art, they are both means of restor ing equilibrium. It would seem that the difference between one mode of experience and the other requires careful discrimination, in which the anthropologist would be as seriously interested as the student of phi losophy. But note that I am not complaining that Mr. Coon failed to elucidate the distinction between religion and art; that is not within his professional competence. The complaint is that he did not indicate in passing that this difference constitutes a difficult problem. Is it not de sirable that the scientist who writes for the general public should point 82 Scientism and Values out the difficulties that perplex us when we try to grasp the nature of man and his experience?

22. G. S. Carter, "The Theory of Evolution and the Evolution of Man," in Anthropology Today, an Encyclopedic Inventory, prepared under the chairmanship of A. L. Kroeber (Chicago, 1953), p. 327 A. 23. Ope cit., 339 B. 24. Ernest Nagel, "Naturalism Reconsidered," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 1954-55, p. 10. However, I am not quite sure exactly what attitude Mr. Nagel does take towards "emergence," and the reason for my difficulty is that earlier in the same page he says that "naturalism views the emergence and the continuance of human society as dependent on physical and physiological condi tions .. ." 25. Ope cit., p. 14 and p. 12 respectively. 26. Ope cit., p. 14. 27. Op.cit., p. 8. 28. Paul Henle, "The Status of Emergence," The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXXIX, No. 18 (August 27, 1942), pp. 486 fI.