Book Title: Indian Antiquary Vol 42
Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

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Page 305
________________ DECEMBER, 1913.) ADMINISTRATIVE VALUE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 291 voice to the ear, and secondarily to the eye in a more elaborate form by the graphic artspictures, marks and writing. Man further tries to express his emotions by what are known as the Fine Arts; that is by modifying the material articles which he contrives for his livelihood in a manner that makes them represent to him something beyond their economic use makes them pleasant, representative or symbolical-leading him on to draw, paint, enamel, engrave, carve and mould. In purely mental efforts this striving to satisfy the artistic or æsthetic sense takes the form of stories, proverbs, riddles, songs, and music Dancing, drama, games, tricks and amusements are other manifestations of the same effort, combining in these cases the movements of the body with those of the mind in expressing the emotions. The mental process necessary for the expression of his emotions have induced man to extend his powers of mind in directions now included in the term Abstract Reasoning. This has led him to express the results of his reasoning by such terms as reckoning and measurement, and to fix standards for comparison in such immaterial but all essential matters as enumeration, distance, surface, capacity, weight, time, value and exchange. These last enable him to reach the idea of money, which is the measurement of value by means of tokens, and represents perhaps the highest economic development of the reasoning powers common to nearly all mankind. The mental capacities of man have so far been considered only in relation to the expression of the emotions and of the results of abstract reasoning; but they have served him also to develop other results and expressions equally important, which have arisen out of observation of his surroundings, and have given birth to the Natural Sciences : astronomy, meteorology, geography, topography and natural history. And further they have enabled him to memorise all these things by means of records, which in their highest form have brought about what is known to all of us as history, the bugbear of impulsive and shallow thinkers, but the veryback-bone of all solid opinion. The last and most complex development of the mental processes, dependent upon all the others according to the degree to which they themselves have been developed in any given variety of mankind, is, and has always heen, present in every race or groupon record from the remotest to the most recent time in some form or other and in a high degree. Groups of men observe the phenomena exhibited by themselves or their environment, and account for them according to their mental capacity as modified by their heredity. Man's bare abstract rcasoning, following on his observation of such phenomena, is his philosophy, but his inherited emotions influence his reasoning to an almost controlling extent and induce his religion, which is thus his philosophy or explanation of natural phenomena as effected by his hereditary emotions, producing that most wonderful of all human phenomena, his belief. In the conditions, belief, faith, and religion must and do vary with race, period and environment. . Consequent on the belief, present or past of any given variety of mankind, there follow religious practices (customs as they are usually called) based thereon, and described commonly in terms that are familiar to all, but are nevertheless by no means even yet clearly defined : theology, heathenism, fetishism, animism, totemism, magic, superstition, with soul, ghost, and spirit, and so on, as regards mental concepts; worship, ritual, prayer, sanctity, sacrifice, taboo, etc., as regards custom and practice. Thus have the anthropologists, as I understand them, shown that they desire to answer the question as to what their science is, and to explain the nain points in the subject of which they strive to obtain and impart accurate knowledge based on scientific inquiry : that is, on an

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