THE STUDY OF CULTURE The subject of culture as it bears on survival may be con sidered under three heads: language, material culture (arts and crafts), and moral culture (social institutions). It is necessary to realize at the outset that, although these aspects of culture are often studied apart because of the special methods involved, they form one whole for the anthropologist, who contrasts them in their entirety with the race-factor as representing another kind of inheritance, not born with us, but acquired by tradition. Culture is indeed sometimes described as a "social heredity"; but it is fair to describe culture as an inheritance, since we speak of inher iting the acquisitions of our forbears no less than of inheriting their features. Culture is communicable intelligence. Intelligence being mind viewed in its directive and purposive capacity, the meanings that we communicate essentially relate to purposes that we wish to share. Communication is a two-sided process, taking in being just as important as giving out; so much so, indeed, that the tragedy of history may be said to consist in the fact that the nations have so often failed to interpret what their men of genius sought to express. For, strictly speaking, each man's experience is locked up in his own bosom. If the other man's mind is to be made to respond, a medium of communication, always of a physi cal kind, must be used ; such as a gesture, a sound, or a piece of paper with marks on it. Thereupon the other party to the com munication can share in the purpose suggested just in so far as he can translate the outward sign into terms of his own conscious ness. Now the other animals have no culture worthy of the name, because their powers of intelligent intercourse are slight, and in particular are confined to those alive and present together. Man, however, through his culture can defy time and space, taking counsel with the dead and gathering in wisdom from the ends of the earth.
Articulate speech, is, perhaps, the very root of cul ture. It is a wonderful fact that there is no people now existing or known to history that is without a language such as is not only intelligible to themselves, but likewise intelligible to any other man who takes the trouble to master it. There lies humanity's chance of eventually acting together, namely, in this power of talking out its difficulties and so getting its cross-purposes straightened out. So much, indeed, is articulate speech our human prerogative that it is simplest to couple the pre-linguistic with the pre-cultural and to treat both together as the marks of the pre-human. The suggestion sometimes made, on the strength of certain differences in the make of the jaw-bone, that Neanderthal man could not articulate properly is, apart from physiological objections, very unconvincing, if only because his culture was by that time already more than rudimentary. It is almost incon ceivable that he could not distinguish by names the very various implements that he chipped so carefully out of flint ; or that he buried his dead according to a silent tradition and with a word less lament. Indeed, lack of words is in language as we can actually observe it, no test of primitiveness, since, on the con trary, savages, otherwise very low in the scale of culture, often employ what to us seems a quite unnecessary number of terms to distinguish things to our view very much alike. Thus in the vocabulary of the Eskimo every shade in the taste of putrid blubber calls for a designation of its own in the bill of fare. Their language, in short, reflects a mental state in which particu larization runs a long way ahead of generalization ; so that it is almost as if they gave a personal name to everything that struck their senses. On the other hand, a logical arrangement of their thoughts, as revealed more especially in syntax, is far less in evi dence. A corollary is that a backward people in contact with a higher culture will far more readily borrow its words than its power of using them connectedly.
It should be added, however, that language, even as at present developed, remains curiously unsusceptible to the influence of logic, and retains all the marks of a popular, not to say primitive, origin. Gender, for instance, instead of conforming to biological fact, still follows the obsolete vagaries of mythological fancy. Or, again, sheer economy of effort, vocal and even mental, is responsible for phonetic and grammatical changes that blur and twist the elements of speech without regard to their function as vehicles of meaning. The most that can be said for this irresponsiveness to conscious con trol on the part of human language is that it implies the claim of all men to have a share in the making of it. Just because all help to create it does it seem not to be made at all, but rather to grow of itself. The most ancient and precious of the rights of man is the right to talk, a right carrying with it the corresponding duty of occasionally listening to what others say. Unfortunately, since tricks of talk are catching, from mere accent up to vocabu lary and grammar, every petty group rejoices in its own dialect; wherefore the curse of Babel rests upon mankind unto this day.
There is no use in language except to render intelligence more communicable. Unless a people wished to conceal its thoughts, it would be ill-advised to exchange a world-wide tongue for a local one. On the other hand, nothing counts for more in the struggle for existence between ethnic types than the advantage of common speech. Language is a poor test of race, but an excellent measure of culture in its bearing on sur vival. Collinguals are cousins whatever their pedigree, and, no less naturally than they talk, are inclined to share sympathies and ideas. A common language, however, implies a common education such as can maintain it, as against that tendency to sink back into a confusion of tongues which is latent in every civilization and becomes active with the first symptoms of decline. Thus the Roman empire did much to impose a uniform mode of official and polite speech on the Mediterranean world, and, had it not taken a bilingual form, the political seclusion between West and East, reflected later on in the history of the Christian Church, might have been largely averted.
