Abstract
DR. H. S. HARRISON was characteristically stimulating in his presidential address to the Royal Anthropological Institute on June 30, when he spoke “Concerning Human Progress”. Unquestionably his choice of a topic was apt to the needs of contemporary thought, which may well look to the anthropologist for guidance on such questions as the direction and mechanism of human development. Dr. Harrison's conclusions, however, gave his hearers little cause for complacency. He showed no little courage in electing neither to attempt a strict definition of progress, nor to lay down canons of discrimination between upward and downward, in the direction of change. In the event, however, when once he had pointed out that the idea of progress is a modern growth, which did not affect human development until the latter part of the nineteenth century, this deliberate omission enabled him, speaking more especially as a technologist, to demonstrate the essential opportunism of cultural development in the past, which has moved continually forward, backward and sideways, without knowledge of what the direction might be, and not infrequently has led to a dead end. Social progress, he went on to point out, has had no better guidance; but as codes of conduct and actual behaviour are the objective revelations of the mind of man, individually or collectively, and both the material and immaterial products of the human mind have trespassed far beyond the biological necessities, the question arises whether the mind of man has been moulded in response. Dr. Harrison, quite rightly, stressed the apparent paradox that, so far as the evidence goes, there is little, if any, difference to be discerned in physical character and brain power between the earliest example of Homo sapiens and the man of to-day. If we look for the directional factor which might have brought about a change in the heart and mind of man, of those forces which have been put forward as active in organic evolution, use-inheritance alone appears to fulfil the requirement, but is ruled out of court, owing to its general repudiation by the biologist. Hence, Dr. Harrison concluded on a note of pessimism, “the mind of man . . . has little sense of direction, and if it may be said to have an ultimate aim, that aim is too obscure for formulation.”
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” Concerning Human Progress”. Nature 138, 20 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138020a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138020a0