Anthropology

Of the three, human nature is the most general, for it is, in its content, universal. It may be asserted that all (normal) men and women have the same human nature (although it is not proved or universally admitted that this is the case). But it cannot be asserted that all men have the same personality or that all groups have the same culture, although it is properly asserted that all men have personalities and that all continuing groups of people who communicate with one another are characterized by culture. By human nature we mean that nature which everyone (after infancy) of our species has, if provided with the usual capacities, when he is brought up in a society characterized by culture. It is the nature we assume we shall meet in every man or woman, no matter where we meet him or her. We assume, and rightly, that every human being has something of which he may be proud and something of which he may be ashamed. Before we have even tried to communicate with him, we know that if we hit upon what he finds amusing or shocking he will be amused or shocked; that he will desire praise, and that he will give up present pleasures for some deferred good which he values highly. We cannot predict these qualities of the animals we meet (unless domesticated dogs, having been made just a little human, are a small exception), but we know we shall find these qualities and many others in the tribe as in the city, among peasants as among princes. This human nature is a thing built up on the basis of that original nature which we can never see quite clearly in mankind because it begins to change into human nature soon after birth.

This important and essential characteristic aspect of the nature of mankind seems never to have been very carefully investigated by anyone who looked much farther than inside himself. In recent times some of the psychologists have learned a good deal about the mechanisms whereby original nature gets made over into human nature, and the study of this process from the point of view of those concerned with relations between persons in the family and the neighborhood, and with the cultures of the groups within which the process occurs, has been enlightening. Some sociologists have collected material throwing light on the nature of human nature, and some have tried to study those exceptional members of our species, feral men, who grew up without acquiring human nature. But the content of human nature is not well understood.

Of course its existence is assumed by anyone who talks about human beings at all. It is a commonplace that philosophers and writers about social problems makes assumptions about what human nature is like that vary greatly from one another, and the views of literary people on this subject are quite as various. One thinks of the different views of human nature suggested by Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, and Dostoevski.

The anthropologist demonstrates the existence of human nature whenever he finds out what an exotic people are thinking and feeling. He can do this only by supposing that they have in common with him certain acquired propensities of attitude; these are human nature. To be able to find out what it is that a Zulli Indian is ashamed of, one must first know what it is to be ashamed. Although anthropologists commonly make assertions to the effect that “human nature is infinitely malleable” or speak of “the refutation of human nature” as an achievement of their science, they in fact recognize its existence every day.

The sources as to the nature of human nature are the records of human living. They exist in ethnography and in history; they exist in biography and in psychiatric case records; and they exist in creative literature. No one is more deeply engaged in the examination and understanding of human nature than are the dramatist and the novelist. In learning about human nature, men of literature and men of social science share a common effort, a common interest. It may be doubted if the results so far achieved by the social scientists are more communicative of the truth about human nature than are the results achieved by the more personal and imaginative methods of the artist.

The common interest of social scientist and of creative artist exists similarly in the study of personality, the organization of human nature and of culture in any particular individual. Here also it is the man of literature and art who has the longest interest in the subject. A personality wholly invented, like Madame Bovary or Huckleberry Finn, provides a record of a human individual that tells us much about the nature of human personality, of its development in relation to other personalities, and to events. A biography may be so written, as that of Hervey Allen on Edgar Allan Poe or that by Marquis James on Andrew Jackson, as to show much of those relationships between original temperament, personal associations, the culture of the community, and the happenings of circumstance, as equally concern the students of personality who are social scientists.

It is perhaps in their common interest in what is called “culture” that the students of the humanities and many of the social scientists find their most obvious and fruitful field for co-operative endeavor. In considering this common interest of humanist and social scientist, one thinks of “culture” as the term has been developed in the comparative study of societies, in the sense which includes all the customs, institutions, and conventions whatsoever, “acquired by man as a member of society,” in Tyler’s familiar words. The conception is a sort of master-term that brings after it many of the more special concepts used by social sciences specializing in the study of families, markets, schools, law, and so forth.