Excerpt from Science and Faith
In 1895, the editors of The Monist extended to a number of prominent European and American thinkers an invitation to discuss, from the points of view of their several specialties, the main problems of the philosophy of science and of the reconciliation of science and faith. The most extensive outcome of this invitation was the present work, by Dr. Paul Topinard, the eminent French anthropologist.
Dr. Topinard's book is essentially a contribution to sociology; but it possesses the additional merit that it has been made by an original inquirer of high rank in a department of science which constitutes the groundwork of sociology, and that consequently its conclusions have sprung from a direct and creative contact with the facts, and not from derivative and secondary theories about those facts. Whatever objections, therefore, some of its special tenets may evoke, its importance as a firsthand investigation, and the weight consequently due to its utterances, cannot be underrated.
But, while written by a specialist, the discussion is not exclusively anthropological and ethnological. The physical, historical, cultural, and psychological factors of social evolution receive the same emphasis of consideration as the biological and sociological proper.
We shall briefly indicate Dr. Topinard's central view.
To begin with, anthropology, supposing it not to concern itself with societies, discovers in man an animal only; man is in his primitive stage perforce subjective, and by a rigorous natural logic egocentric; the law of self-preservation, as determining his conduct, both towards nature and his fellow-animals, is paramount with him. Sociologically considered, therefore, man's animality, man's primitive and inherited egocentrism, is the primal source of all the difficulties that arise in society, the arch-enemy to be combated.
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