WHAT IS THE NORMAL? Anthropologists, from the beginning of anthropology, have battled in vain for a satisfactory inclusive definition, or, at least, description of the normal.

All contribute their specific effect, and the blend, the sum of the additions and subtractions constituting their influences, appears as a specific trait of the individual, a trait so significant as to be used by the professionals absorbed in the study of man, the anthropologists, as a criterion of racial classifications.

So far back as the anthropologists can trace the history of Swedish people, the boundaries of their land have remained the same.

There is a fundamental distinction between the anthropological and social types of criminals, whom I have divided into five categories, which are today unanimously accepted by criminalist anthropologists, since the Geneva congress offered an opportunity to explain the misapprehension which led some foreign scientists to believe that the Italian school regarded one of these types (the born criminal) merely as an organic anomaly.

Scientific curiosity and nationalistic egotism have compelled modern biographers to become anthropologists.

His romanticism may be more easily explained by his early devotion to the Catullan group of poets, and the Celtic traitswhatever they may beby the close racial affiliations between Celts and Italians, vouched for by anthropologists.

Some anthropologists consider, however, that the Peking Man possessed already certain characteristics peculiar to the yellow race.

Most villages along the south coast having rather more than the usual proportion of dark-haired folk have been claimed as asylums for the castaway sailors and soldiers of Spain by enthusiastic amateur anthropologists.

What Indian stories really are, the reader, if he can stomach such things, may find out for himself by consulting the marvellously copious and almost phonographically accurate collection of native tales which another of our most eminent anthropologists, Dr. Franz Boas, has printed.[200]

Anthropologists have not hitherto applied to the savage mental conditions, out of which, in part, the doctrine of "spirits" arose, the recent researches of French, German, and English psychologists of the new school.

As to whether these researches into abnormal psychological conditions do, or do not, indicate the existence of a transcendental region of human faculty, anthropologists appear to be unconcerned.

Anthropologists have gone on discussing the trances, and visions, and so-called "demoniacal possession" of savages, as if no new researches into similar facts in the psychology of civilised mankind existed; or, if they existed, threw any glimmer of light on the abnormal psychology of savages.

Thanks to this daring novelty, the book has been virtually taken as two books; anthropologists have criticised the second part, and one or two Psychical Researchers have criticised the first part; each school leaving one part severely alone.

I only point out, as Bastian had already pointed out, the existence of a field that deserves closer study by anthropologists who can observe savages in their homes.

They have no business, anthropologists declare, to entertain so large an idea.

Anthropologists distrust missionaries, and most of my evidence is from laymen.

But the evidence that I adduce is from such sources as anthropologists, at least, accept, and employ in the construction of theories from which, in some points, I venture to dissent.

This opinion of Mr. Im Thurn's is, roughly stated, the usual theory of anthropologists.

While the real problem is to account for the evolution out of ghosts of the eternal, creative moral god of the 'plain man,' the germ of such a god or being in the creeds of the lowest savages is by anthropologists denied, or left out of sight, or accounted for by theories contradicted by facts, or, at best, is explained away as a result of European or Islamite influences.

Thus, anthropologists, as a rule, in place of facing and solving their problem, have merely evaded itdoubtless unwittingly.

This negligence of anthropologists has arisen from a single circumstance.

These two factors in religionghost and godseem to have perfectly different sources, and it appears extraordinary that anthropologists have not (as far as I am aware) observed this circumstance before.

A ghost is said, by anthropologists, to have developed into a god.

But anthropologists continually tell us, with truth, that the idea of death as a universal ordinance is unknown to the savage.

It is therefore quite incorrect, and strangely presumptuous, to deny, with almost all anthropologists, the alliance of ethics with religion among the most backward races.