The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.

Culture, with its processes and functions, is a subject upon which we need all the enlightenment we can achieve, and there is no direction in which we can seek with greater reward than in the facts of pre-literate societies.

We do not see the lens through which we look.

Virtue begins when we dedicate ourselves actively to the job of gratitude.

An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.

We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.

The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists.