As an undergraduate Westermarck became (and thereafter remained) an agnostic. The theme of his last book, Christianity and Morals, is that the moral influence of Christianity has been, on the whole, bad rather than good. He found German metaphysics distasteful but was attracted by English empiricism, especially that of J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. This interest, together with the aim of using the library of the British Museum, attracted Westermarck to England. Through an interest in evolution he was led to the investigation of the history of marriage, which was to be the subject of his first book. Though much of his later work was based on his own observations and personal knowledge of Morocco, all Westermarck's early anthropological research was carried out in the reading room of the British Museum. On each topic that he studied, he painstakingly collected an enormous volume of data from a wide range of sources. His aim was never merely to amass evidence, however, but to draw general conclusions from it.
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