In other words, we shall briefly consider the legal and religious customs, together with the associated beliefs.
How do the forms of social organization come into being?
Does some one invent them?
Does the very notion of organization imply an organizer?
Or, like Topsy, do they simply grow?
Are they natural crystallizations that take place when people are thrown together?
For my own part, I think that, so long as we are pursuing anthropology and not philosophy--in other words, are piecing together events historically according as they appear to follow one another, and are not discussing the ultimate question of the relation of mind to matter, and which of the two in the long run governs which--we must be prepared to recognize both physical necessity and spiritual freedom as interpenetrating factors in human life.

In the meantime, when considering the subject of social organization, we shall do well, I think, to keep asking ourselves all along, How far does force of circumstances, and how far does the force of intelligent purpose, account for such and such a net result?
If I were called upon to exhibit the chief determinants of human life as a single chain of causes and effects--a simplification of the historical problem, I may say at once, which I should never dream of putting forward except as a convenient fiction, a device for making research easier by providing it with a central line--I should do it thus.

Working backwards, I should say that culture depends on social organization; social organization on numbers; numbers on food; and food on invention.

Here both ends of the series are represented by spiritual factors--namely, culture at the one end, and invention at the other.

Amongst the intermediate links, food and numbers may be reckoned as physical factors.