phenomena mentioned and the rest of the same order relate to man, and they relate to man not as an animal but as an organism endowed with a higher mentality. Tylor’s definition expressly speaks of ‘capabilities and habits’. But there is a science that deals with capabilities and habits, to wit, psychology. Is it, then, necessary to have a distinct branch of knowledge, or can we not simply merge the cultural phenomena in those of the older science of psychology? It is this question that concerns us here. On the answer must depend our conception of culture and our attitude towards a science purporting to deal with cultural phenomena as something distinct from other data of reality.

In seeking light on this subject we must understand what sort of problems arise from the contemplation of cultural facts and attempt to connect them with the established principles of psychology. A few concrete examples will illustrate the situation.

One of the striking characteristics of our civilization, a trait of our material culture that is nevertheless an invaluable, nay indispensable, means for the propagation of knowledge under modern conditions, is the existence of paper, that is, of a cheap, readily manufactured material for writing and printing. The obvious problem that develops from this fact is, How did we get the art of paper-manufacture? Now we shall search in vain our psychological literature in quest of an explanation. Höffding and James, Wundt and Titchener have no answer to offer. An answer, nevertheless, exists. Europe learnt the art of paper-making from the Arabs, who as early as 795 A. D. had established a paper factory in Bagdad. These in turn got their knowledge from the Chinese, who must be regarded as the originators of the technique. The answer is a perfectly satisfactory one, but it is obviously not couched in psychological terms: its nature is purely historical.

Nevertheless, an objection may plausibly be raised here. Though an explanation has certainly been given, it does not account for all aspects of the phenomena we are considering. There is a psychological basis for each and every one of the events in our historical series. This series we may subdivide into three stages—the invention by the Chinese, the borrowing of this invention by the Arabs, and its transmission from Arab to European. Now the two last-named processes of transmission may not suggest the necessity of a special explanation at all. One may think that all that was required was for the Europeans to watch the Arabs and for the Arabs to watch the Chinese, and presto! the thing was done. This indeed, seems to be the view of an influential school of modern ethnologists. But the case is far from being so simple. We know of many instances, in the higher no less than in the lower cultures, corresponding to what the biologist calls symbiosis—a condition where distinct communities or countries persist in a division of labor for mutual benefit, each trading some of its intellectual or material products for equivalents secured from the other. In many parts of Africa there are fixed markets in which negroes from fairly remote localities congregate for the barter of wares, which are thus diffused far from their source of origin; but it is the finished products, not the arts, that are diffused. In New Guinea trading-vessels carry such objects as pottery hundreds of miles from the area of manufacture to natives who remain as ignorant of the ceramic technique as before. In northern Arizona the Hopi Indians occupying three eminences not more than eight miles distant from one another have no perfect uniformity of industrial knowledge. Pottery, which flourishes on the eastern Mesa, is wholly unknown as an art, though constantly used in its specimens, by the people of the central Mesa; a certain type of basketry plaque is made only at Oraibi village; another type is manufactured exclusively on the central Mesa. Conditions more ideal a priori for a transfer of knowledge than among the practically homogeneous neighboring Hopi groups could not be conceived. Nevertheless, it has not taken place. Cultural diffusion, therefore, cannot be taken for granted. We cannot take one people, place it alongside of another, and effect a cultural osmosis in the same way in which we produce a chemical reaction when two substances are brought together under proper conditions of temperature. We are face to face with a selective, with a psychological condition. But when we turn once more to our text-books of psychology, we again find nothing that fits the case. About choice in general we get ample information. But we may rummage all the psychological seminar rooms in the world and yet shall find no reason why the Arabs learned the technique of paper-making from the Chinese instead of ignoring it or only importing Chinese paper.

Nor are we more fortunate when we turn to psychology for an account of how the original Chinese inventor came to conceive his epoch-making idea. This fact, of course, falls under the heading of ‘imagination’, and about imagination psychologists have much to tell us. But what, after all, does their interpretation amount to? We learn that imagination, as distinguished from the power of abstract thought, is the power of forming new concrete ideas. Since even the concrete individual idea is complex, being a product of association, its elements may be linked differently so as to produce new combinations. “The inventor of a new mechanism,” says Höffding, “combines given elements, the laws of whose activity he knows, into a totality and a connection which has no complete parallel in experience.” The scientist tries all possible combinations among his elements of experiences, forming a succession of individual ideas, which are rejected until the one appears that adequately represents reality.

We need hardly go farther to realize the impotence of psychological science for illuminating the psychology as well as the history of the paper-making art. The formulation of psychological science is admirable, but it is too general. It explains the invention of the steam-engine and the phonograph, the sewing-machine and the harvester no less than the origin of paper-making. We, however, do not want to know merely what ultimate psychological processes the invention of paper-making shares with all other inventions whatsoever, but also the differential conditions that produced this one and unique result under the given circumstances. It is as though we asked about a man’s character and were told that he was a vertebrate. The type of psychological explanation we want is by no means unknown; however, we shall find its illustrations not in text-books of psychology, but in histories of literature, science, and art. When Taine raises the question how such a bore as Dr. Samuel Johnson could conceivably have attained his position in English literature and answers that it is because of the English predilection for sermons, he is giving the type of solution—whether right or wrong—that we want to secure for our cultural problem; it explains why the average Englishman, as a member of English society, acquires the habit of regarding Johnson in a certain way. When we inquire why Newton closes his treatise on optics with a statement as to the vanity of human things, our curiosity is satisfied when this expression appears as only one instance of the blending of theological and scientific thought current in his day. It is nonsense to say that these explanations are purely historical; they are psychological, for they take fully into account the subjective attitudes involved in the phenomena studied; and it is hopeless to expect this sort of explanation from psychological science, which deals with a quite distinct and far more generalized form of mental activity.

To turn from the technique of paper manufacture to a very different cultural feature in order to test the possibility of merging the