Our much admired scientific training has never proved a safeguard against the seductiveness of emotional appeals, just as little as it has prevented the acceptance as gospel truth of the grossest absurdities, if presented with sufficient energy, self assertion and authority. If anything, the late war with its organized governmental and private propaganda should make us understand this truth. Opinions energetically propagated and spurious facts diligently disseminated color the thinking of the people, and not only of the uneducated. The intellectual is deceived as easily as the untutored by sanctimonious professions that conform to the moral code of time and place and flatter the feeling of self-righteousness. They gloss over the conflict of deed and word and, when uttered by those in authority, make criminals appear like saints. Our advantage over primitive people is one of greater knowledge of the objective world, painfully gained by the labor of many generations, a knowledge which we apply rather badly and which we, or at least most of us, discard just as soon as a strong emotional urge impels us to do so, and for which we substitute forms quite analogous to those of primitive thought. The much maligned introspective psychology proves to the unbiased observer that the causes that make primitive man think as he does, are equally present in our minds. The particular behavior in each case is determined by the traditional knowledge at the disposal of the individual. * * * * * The second fundamental point to be borne in mind is that each culture can be understood only as an historical growth determined by the social and geographical environment in which each people is placed and by the way in which it develops the cultural material that comes into its possession from the outside or through its own creativeness. For the purpose of an historical analysis we treat each particular problem first of all as a unit, and we attempt to unravel the threads that may be traced in the development of its present form. For this reason we may not start our inquiries and interpretations, as though the fundamental thesis of a single unilineal development of cultural traits the world over, of a development that follows everywhere the same lines, had been definitely proven. If it is claimed that culture has run such a course, the assertion must be proven on the basis of detailed studies of the historical changes in single cultures and by the demonstration of analogies in their development. It is safe to say that the critical study of recent years has definitely disproved the existence of far-reaching homologies which would permit us to arrange all the manifold cultural lines in an ascending scale in which to each can be assigned its proper place.