Science Quote by Arthur Keith

Keith writes with the calm finality of a man who thinks he is describing a natural law, not offering an argument. “Comes automatically to an end” is doing the heavy lifting: it recasts a messy, contested process - displacement, coercion, schooling, wage labor, policing - as something like gravity. The sentence is built to sound inevitable. That’s the intent: to translate social change into destiny, and destiny into permission.

The subtext is assimilationist and, in its era, conveniently imperial. If “primitive people” (itself a loaded, hierarchical category) simply cannot keep “tribal organization” intact in urban life, then colonial expansion and urbanization become not disruptions but upgrades. Keith frames incompatibility as a property of the “tribal” rather than a choice made by states and institutions. It’s a subtle rhetorical move that relocates responsibility away from power and toward supposedly outdated social forms.

Context matters because Keith is speaking from early 20th-century scientific culture, when anthropology, evolutionary thought, and racial typologies often blended into a confident narrative of “stages” of civilization. His phrasing echoes that ladder: tribe to town to city, with the last rung treated as the endpoint.

The irony, visible now, is that cities rarely erase kinship; they reorganize it. Migrant networks, diasporas, neighborhood-based mutual aid, even political machines are urban “tribalisms” in new clothes. What Keith really captures isn’t an absolute incompatibility; it’s the modern state’s preference for legible, individualized citizens over stubborn, collective loyalties.