BY PROF. F. MAX MÜLLER.

There are people in the world who are very fond of asking what they call point-blank questions. They generally profess to hate all shilly-shallying, and they are at no pains to hide their suspicion that anyone who declines to say yes or no to any question which they choose to ask has either his intellect clouded by metaphysics or has not the courage of his opinions. The idea that it is often more difficult to ask a sensible question than to answer it, and that a question, however pointed it may sound, may for all that be so blunt and vague that no accurate and honest thinker would care or dare to answer it, never enters their mind; while the thought that there are realms of knowledge where indefinite language is more appropriate, and in reality more exact and more truthful than the most definite phraseology, is scouted as mere fencing and intellectual cowardice.

One of those point-blank questions which has been addressed to me by several reviewers of my books is this, “Tell us, do you hold that man began as a savage or not?” To say that man began as a savage, and that the most savage and degraded races now existing present us with the primeval type of man, seems to be the shibboleth of a certain school of thought, a school with which on many points I sympathize, so long as it keeps to an accurate and independent inquiry into facts, and to an outspoken statement of its discoveries, regardless of all consequences, but from which I totally dissent as soon as it tries to make facts subservient to theories. I am told that my own utterances on this subject have been ambiguous. Now even granting this, I could never understand why a certain hesitation in answering so difficult a question should rouse such angry feelings, till it began to dawn on me that those who do not unreservedly admit that man began as a savage are supposed to hold that man was created a perfect and almost angelic being. This would amount to denying the gospel of the day, that man was the offspring of a brute, and hence, I suppose, the Anathema.

Now I may say this, that though I have hesitated to affirm that man began as a savage, whatever that may mean, I have been even more careful not to commit myself to the opinion that man began as an angel, or as a child, or as a perfect rational being. I strongly object to such alternatives as that if man did not begin as a savage he must have begun as a child. It would be dreadful if, because there is no sufficient evidence to enable us to form a decided opinion on any given subject, we were to be driven into a corner by such alternatives, instead of preserving our freedom of judgment until we have the complete evidence before us.

But in our case the evidence is as yet extremely scanty, and, from the nature of the case, will probably always remain so. If we want to prove that man began as a child, what evidence can we produce? If we appealed to history, history is impossible before the invention of language; and what language could the primitive child have spoken, what life could it have lived, without a father and without a mother? If we give up history and appeal to our inner consciousness, our reason, nay, our very imagination, collapses when approaching the problem how such a child could have been born, how such a child could have been nourished, reared, and protected from wild animals and other dangers. We feel we have come to the end of our tether, and are running our head against a very old, but a very solid, wall.

Has Kant then written in vain; and is it still supposed that our senses or our reason can ever reach transcendent truths? Has the lesson to be taught again and again that both our senses and our reason have their limits; that we are indeed tethered, and that it is no proof of intellectual strength or suppleness to try to stand on our own shoulders? We are so made that neither can our senses perceive nor can our reason conceive the real beginning and end of anything, whether in space or in time. And yet we imagine we can form a definite conception of the true beginning of mankind.

Then what remains? There remains the humbler and yet far nobler task of studying the earliest records of man's life on earth: to go back as far as literature, language, and tools will allow us, and for a time to consider that as primitive which, whether as a tool, or as a word, or as a proverb, or as a prayer, is the last we can reach, and seems at the same time so simple, so rational, so intelligible, as to require no further antecedents. That is the true work of the historian, and of the philosopher too; and there is plenty of work left for both of them before they dive into the whirlpool of their inner consciousness to find there the primordial savage.

Instead of allowing ourselves to be driven into a corner by such a question as “Did man begin as a savage or as a child?” we have a perfect right to ask the question, What is meant by these two words, savage and child?

Has any one ever attempted to define the meaning of savage, and to draw a sharp line between a savage and a non-savage? Has any one ever attempted to define the meaning of child, if used in opposition to savage or brute? Have we been told whether by child is meant a suckling without a mother, or a boy who can speak, and count, and reason without a father? Lastly, are savage and child really terms that mutually exclude each other? May not a savage be a child, and may not a child be a savage?

How, then, is any one who has given serious thought to the problem of the origin of mankind to answer such a question as “Tell me, do you hold that man began as a savage or as a child?”

When we read some of the more recent works on anthropology, the primordial savage seems to be not unlike one of those hideous india-rubber dolls that can be squeezed into every possible shape, and made to utter every possible noise. There was a time when the savage was held up to the civilised man as the inhabitant of a lost paradise—a being of innocence, simplicity, purity, and nobility. Rousseau ascribed to his son of nature all the perfection which he looked for in vain in Paris and London. At present, when so many philosophers are on the lookout for the missing-link between man and beast, the savage, even if he has established his right to the name of man, cannot be painted black enough. He must be at least a man who maltreats his women, murders his children, kills and eats his fellow-creatures, and commits crimes from which even animals would shrink.

This devil-savage, however, of the present anthropologist is as much a wild creation of scientific fancy as the angel-savage of former philosophers. The true Science of Man has no room for such speculations.

Sometimes the history of a name can take the place of its definition, but this is hardly so in our case. The Greeks spoke of barbarians rather than of savages, and the Romans followed their example, though they might possibly have called the national heroes and sages of Germany and Britain not only barbari but feri—that is, savages not very far removed from ferÆ, or wild beasts. Our own word savage, and the French sauvage, meant originally a man who lived in the woods, a silvaticus. It was at first applied to all who remained outside the cities, who were not cives, or civilised, and who in Christian times were also called heathen—that is, dwellers on the heath.

But all this does not help us much. Of course the Spaniards called the inhabitants of America savages, though it is now quite generally conceded that the Spanish conquerors supplanted a higher civilisation than they established.10 The first discoverers of India called the naked Brahmans savages, though they could hardly have followed them in their subtle arguments on every possible philosophical topic. Even by us New Zealanders and Zulus are classed as savages. And yet a Zulu proved a match for an English bishop; and some of the Maori poems and proverbs may rightly claim a place by the side of English popular poems and proverbs. Nothing is gained if it is said that a savage is the opposite of a civilised man. Civilisation is the product of the uninterrupted work of many generations; and if savage meant no more than an uncivilised man, it is no great discovery to say that the first man must have been a savage. No doubt he could not have been acquainted even with what we consider the fundamental elements of civilisation, such as the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic. His dress must have been very scanty, his food very primitive, his dwelling very uncomfortable, his family life very unrestrained. And yet, for all that, he might have been very far removed from the brute; nay, he might have been a perfect man, doing his duty in that state of life into which it pleased God to call him.

Civilisation, as it is well known, is as vague a term as savagery. When Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, the representative of Greek civilisation, stood before the naked philosophers of India, who were ?????? dwellers in the forest, can we hesitate to say which of the two was the true savage and which the sage? To the New Zealander who has been brought into contact with European civilisation, his former so-called savage life seems to have gained little by recent improvements. A grand Maori chief, reputed to have been one of the strongest men in his youth, thus speaks of the old days:11—

In former times we lived differently; each tribe had its territory; we lived in pas placed high upon the mountains. The men looked to war as their only occupation, and the women and the young people cultivated the fields. We were a strong and a healthy people then. When the Pakeha came, everything began to die away, even the natural animals of the country. Formerly, when we went into a forest, and stood under a tree, we could not hear ourselves speak for the noise of the birds—every tree was full of them. Then we had pigeons and everything in plenty; now many of the birds have died out.... In those times the fields were well tilled, there was always plenty of provisions, and we wore few clothes—only our own mats of feathers. Then the missionaries came and took our children from the fields, and taught them to sing hymns: they changed their minds, and the fields were untilled. The children came home and quoted Gospel on an empty stomach. Then came the war between the Pakeha and the Maori that split up our homes, and made one tribe fight against the other; and after the war came the Pakeha settlers, who took our lands, taught us to drink and to smoke, and made us wear clothes that brought on disease. What race could stand against them? The Maori is passing away like the Kiwi, the Tui, and many other things, and by-and-by they will disappear just like the leaves of the trees, and nothing will remain to tell of them but the names of their mountains and their rivers!

This is the view which a so-called savage takes of the benefits of European civilisation as contrasted with the contentment and happiness in which his forefathers had passed through this life. Let us now hear what a highly educated American, a scholar and a philosopher, Mr. Morgan, says of the character of the Iroquois, who are often quoted as specimens of extreme savagery:—

No test of friendship was too severe; no sacrifice to repay a favor too great; no fidelity to an engagement too inflexible for the red man. With an innate knowledge of the freedom and dignity of man, he has exhibited the noblest virtues of the heart, and the kindest deeds of humanity, in those sylvan retreats we are wont to look upon as vacant and frightful solitudes.

No one would suspect Morgan of exaggeration or sentimentality. And if it should be objected that these were private virtues only, and no proof of true civilisation or a well-organised society among the Iroquois, the same writer tells us:12—

They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other race of Indian lineage, except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European colonisation they stood for nearly two centuries with an unshaken front against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border population. Under their federal system, the Iroquois flourished in independence, and were capable of self-protection long after the New England and Virginia races had surrendered their jurisdictions and fallen into the condition of dependent nations; and they now stand forth upon the canvas of Indian history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil institutions, their sagacity in the administration of the league, and their courage in its defence.

The words of another author also may be quoted, who tells us:13—

Their legislation was simple, and the penalties which gave law its sanctions well defined. Their league stood in the consent of the governed. It was a representative popular government, conceived in the wisdom of genuine statesmanship, and with the sagacity to provide against some of the dangers which beset popular institutions. It is said that the framers of our own (the American) government borrowed some of its features from the Iroquois league. Whether or not this be true, it is a matter of history that as early as 1755 a suggestion came from the Iroquois nation to the colonies that they should unite in a confederacy like their own for mutual protection.

It is the fashion to quote against these favorable statements cases of cruelty committed by the Red Indians or the New Zealanders in their wars among themselves and in their resistance to their white enemies. But let us not forget the bloody pages of our own history. We should probably say that the eighteenth century was one of the most brilliant in the history of Europe. We should probably assign to England at that time a foremost place among European countries, and we know how high a position Scotchmen took during the last century in general culture, in philosophy, in science, and statesmanship. Yet, in his “History of England in the Eighteenth Century,” Mr. Lecky describes the common people of Scotland as broken into fierce clans, ruled by wild chieftains; as thieves and cattle-lifters, kidnappers of men and children to be sold as slaves; as ferocious barbarians, besotted with the most brutal ignorance, and the grossest and gloomiest superstitions, possessed of the rudest modes of agriculture, scratching the earth with a crooked piece of wood for a plough, and for a harrow a brush attached to the tail of a horse, otherwise devoid of harness; their food, oatmeal and milk, mixed with blood drawn from the living cow; their cooking, revolting and filthy, boiling their beef in the hide, and roasting fowls in their feathers, with many like customs and demoralising habits unknown to aboriginal life among the Red Indians.

It will be clear after these few specimens, which might have been considerably increased, that we shall make no step in advance if we continue to use the word savage so vaguely as it has been hitherto used. To think is difficult, but it becomes utterly impossible if we use debased or false coin. I have been considered too inquisitive for venturing to ask anthropologists what they meant by a fetish, but I must expose myself once more to the same reproach by venturing to ask them to state plainly what they mean by a savage.

Whatever other benefits a study of the science of language may confer, there is one which cannot be valued too highly—namely, that it makes us not only look at words, but through words. If we are told that a savage means an uncivilised man, then, to say that the first man was a savage is saying either nothing or what is self-evident. Civilisation consists in the accumulated wisdom of countless generations of men, and to say that the first generation of men was uncivilised is therefore pure tautology. We are far too tolerant with respect to such tautologies. How many people, for instance, have been led to imagine that such a phrase as the survival of the fittest contains the solution of the problem of the survival of certain species and the extinction of others? To the student of language the survival of the fittest is a mere tautology, meaning the survival of the fittest to survive, which is the statement of a fact, but no solution of it.

It is easy to say that the meaning of savage has been explained and defined by almost every writer on anthropology. I know these explanations and definitions, but not one of them can be considered as answering the requirements of a scientific definition.

Some anthropologists say that savage means wild and cruel. But in that case no nation would be without its savages. Others say that savages are people who wear little or no clothing. But in that case the greatest philosophers, the gymnosophists of India, would have to be classed as savages. If it means people without a settled form of government, without laws and without a religion, then, go where you like, you will not find such a race. Again, if people who have no cities and no central government are to be called savages, then the Jews would have been savages, the Hindus, the Arabs, the ancient Germans, and other of the most important races in the history of the world. In fact, whatever characteristics are brought forward as distinctive of a savage, they can always be met by counter-instances, showing that each definition would either include races whom no one dares to call savage, or exclude races whom no one dares to call civilised. It used to be imagined that the use of letters was the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, to quote the words of Gibbon, “the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas committed to her charge, and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers, the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.” Such arguments might pass in the days of Gibbon, but after the new light that has been thrown on the ancient history of some of the principal nations of the world they are no longer tenable.

No one would call the ancient Brahmans savages, and yet writing was unknown to them before the third century B.C. Homer, quite apart from his blindness, was certainly unacquainted with writing for literary purposes. The ancient inhabitants of Germany, as described by Tacitus, were equally ignorant of the art of writing as a vehicle of literature; yet for all that we could not say, with Gibbon, that with them the nobler faculties of the mind had lost their powers, the judgment had become feeble, and the imagination languid.

And as we find that the use of letters is by no means an indispensable element of true civilisation, we should arrive at the same conclusion in examining almost every discovery which has been pointed out as a sine qu non of civilised life. Every generation is apt to consider the measure of comfort which it has reached as indispensable to civilised life, but very often, in small as well as great things, what is called civilised to-day may be called barbarous to-morrow. Races who abstain from eating the flesh of animals are apt to look on carnivorous people as savages; people who abstain from intoxicating drinks naturally despise a nation in which drunkenness is prevalent. What should we say if we entered a town in which the streets were neither paved nor lighted, and in which the windows were without glass; where we saw no carriages in any of the thoroughfares, and where, inside the houses, ladies and gentlemen might be seen eating without forks and wearing garments that had never been washed? And yet even in Paris no street was paved before 1185. In London Holborn was first paved in 1417, and Smithfield in 1614, while Berlin was without paved streets far into the seventeenth century. No houses had windows of glass before the twelfth century, and as late as the fourteenth century anything might be thrown out of window at Paris, after three times calling out “Gare l'eau!” Shirts were an invention of the Crusades, and the fine dresses which ladies and gentlemen wore during the Middle Ages were hardly ever washed, but only refreshed from time to time with precious scents. In 1550 we are told that there existed in Paris no more than three carriages—one belonging to the Queen, the other to Diane de Poitiers, and the third to RenÉ de Laval. In England coaches (so called from the Hungarian kossi) date from 1580, though whirlicotes go back to the fourteenth century. So far as we know, neither Dante nor Beatrice used forks in eating, and yet we should hardly class them as savages.

It is easy to say that all these are matters of small importance. No doubt they are, but we often see them treated as matters of great importance, when we speak of races with red skins or black skins. With us civilisation, whether consisting of these small or great matters, has often become a burden, a check rather than a help to the free development of all that is noble in human nature; while many conditions of life which we are inclined to call barbarous were almost essential for the growth of the human mind during its earlier stages. Can we imagine a religion growing up in modern Paris? Would a travelling bard, such as Homer, find an audience in the streets of London? Would a Socrates be listened to by the professors of Berlin? A Panini sitting almost naked under a pippal tree and composing the rules of his marvellous grammar of Sanskrit, a BÂdÂrÂyana with dishevelled hair, spinning out of his mind the subtle web of VedÂnta philosophy, would be shunned as wild creatures by a young English officer, and yet, on the ladder that leads to the highest excellence of intellect, how many steps would the former stand above the latter! For carrying out the chief objects of our life on earth, very little of what is now called civilisation is really wanted. Many things are pleasant, without being really essential to our fulfilling our mission on earth. For laying the foundations of society, for settling the broad principles of law and morality, for discovering the deep traces of order and unity in nature, and for becoming conscious of the presence of the Divine within and without, a life in the forests, on the mountains, ay, even in the desert, is far more favorable than a lodging in Bond Street.

The latest attempt which has been made at defining the true character of a savage restricts the distinctive characteristics of a savage to three—(1) that he murders his children, (2) that he kills and eats his fellow-men, (3) that he disregards certain laws of nature.

Now in that sense it seems quite clear that the first man could not have been a savage, for if he had murdered his children we should not be alive; if he had eaten his fellow-men, supposing there were any to eat, again we should not be alive; and if he had disregarded certain laws of nature, in that case also, probably, we should not be alive.

What, then, is to be done? Are we to say that there never were any savages, or that it is impossible to distinguish between a savage and a non-savage? Certainly not. All we have to do is to be on our guard against a very common trick of language, or rather against a very common mistake of philosophers, who imagine that the same name must always mean the same thing. All the difficulties hitherto detailed which have prevented anthropologists from agreeing on any real definition of savage have arisen from their having mixed up under the same name at least two totally different classes of men, both called savages in ordinary parlance, but each occupying its own place in the history of the world. How this should have happened is difficult to explain, but I think we can trace the first beginnings in the works of some of the earlier anthropologists, who were carried away by the idea that we can study in the illiterate races of the present day, such as we find in Africa, America, and Polynesia, the true character of the primitive man, as he emerged new-born from the bowels of nature. Scientific ethnologists have long since awaked from this fond dream, but the primitive savage has remained as a troublesome legacy in other quarters. Nothing can be more interesting than the study of races who have no literature, but whose former history may be read in their languages and their tools, and whose present state of civilisation or savagery may certainly be used to throw collateral light on many phases in the history of more highly civilised nations. Only let us remember that these races and their languages are as old as the most civilised races and their languages, while their history, if so we may call it, seldom carries us back beyond the mere surface of the day. If we in England are old, the Fuegians are not a day younger. If the question as to the age of the European and American races could be settled by geological evidence, it would seem as if America is now able to produce human skulls older than the Neanderthal skull.14 No one, so far as I know, has ever succeeded in proving that after man had once been evolved or created, a new evolution or creation of man took place, attested by contemporaneous witnesses. The Duke of Argyll goes so far as to maintain15 that those who hold the opinion that different races of men represent different species, or a species which spread from more than one place, stand outside the general current of scientific thought.

But while scientific anthropologists have long given up the idea that, if we want to know the condition of primitive man, we must study it among the Fuegians or Eskimos, the subject has lost none of its charms. It is, no doubt, a very amusing occupation to run through the books of modern and ancient travellers, traders, or missionaries, to mark with pencil a strange legend here, and an odd custom there, to point out a similarity between a ShÂman and an Archbishop, between a Hottentot and Homer. This kind of work can be done in the intervals of more serious studies, and if it is done with the facile pen of a journalist or the epigrammatic eloquence of a young lawyer, nothing can be more delightful. But it is dangerous work—so dangerous that the prejudice that has lately arisen among scientific anthropologists against Agriology seems justified, at least to a certain extent. There are truly scholarlike works on savages. I say scholarlike intentionally, because they are based on a scholarlike study of the languages spoken by the races whose mental organisation has to be analysed. The works of Bishops Callaway and Caldwell, of Brinton and Horatio Hale, of Gill, Bleek, and Hahn, the more general compilations of Waitz, Tiele, Lubbock, Tylor, and Reville, the clever contributions of A. Lang, John Fiske, and others, are but the first that occur to my mind as specimens of really useful work that may be done in this line. But the loose and superficial appeals to savages as the representatives of a brand-new humanity, fresh from the hands of the potter, the ignorant attempts at explaining classical myths from Melanesian tattle, the wild comparisons of Hebrew customs with the outrages of modern cannibals, have at last met with their well-merited reward, and the very name of savage is gradually disappearing from the best works on anthropology and philosophy.

And yet there are savages, only we must distinguish. There are, as I pointed out long ago, two classes of savages, to say nothing of minor subdivisions—namely, progressive and retrogressive savages. There is a hopeful and a hopeless barbarism, there is a growing and a decaying civilisation. We owe a great deal to the Duke of Argyll, particularly in his last great work, The Unity of Nature, for having laid so much stress on the fact that of all works of nature man is the one most liable to two kinds of evolution, one ascending and the other descending. Like the individual, a whole family, tribe, or race of men may, within a very short time, rise to the highest pitch of virtue and culture, and in the next generation sink to the lowest level of vice and brutality.

The first question, therefore, which we have to ask when we have to speak of savages, is whether there is any indication of their having once reached a higher stage from which they have descended, or whether they are only just ascending from that low but healthy level which must precede every attempt at what we call civilisation. We may call both by the same name of savages, but, if we do so, we must always remember that, from an historical point of view, no two stages in civilised life can be more apart from each other than that of the retrogressive and that of the progressive savage.

But even after we have laid down this broad line of demarcation, we shall by no means find it easy to catch either a progressive or a retrogressive savage pur et simple. If looking out for retrogressive or decaying savages, most people would naturally think of Fuegians, Tasmanians, Hottentots, Ashantis, Veddas, and Red Indians, and one of the strongest proofs of their decay would be derived from the fact that they are dying out wherever they are brought in contact with European civilisation. Now it is true that the Tasmanians have become extinct, and that several of the Red Indian tribes, too, have actually been destroyed by our civilisation. But we must not generalise too quickly. Some of these very tribes, the Red Indians,16 seem to be recovering, seem to increase again, and to be able to hold their own against the baneful influences which threatened to destroy them. The negroes also are by no means dwindling away. On the contrary, they are increasing both in Africa and in America. We must therefore be careful before we deny the recuperative powers even of retrogressive savages, and we must look for other evidence beyond mere statistics in support of their hopeless degeneracy.

Historical evidence of such gradual degeneracy is, from the nature of the case, almost impossible. We must trust, therefore, to less direct proof. I believe there is some distinct historical evidence in the case of the Central and South American races, that at the time of the arrival of Columbus and his successors civilisation had really been decaying for some time in America.17 But in nearly all other cases we have to look out for other proofs in support of a higher antecedent civilisation possessed by tribes who, as we know them at present, have to be classed as savages. Such proofs, if they exist, must be sought for in language, religion, customs, tools, and works of art.

As I look upon language neither as a ready-made gift of God nor as a natural growth of the human mind, but as, in the true sense of the word, a work of human art, I must confess that nothing has surprised me so much as the high art displayed in the languages of so-called savages. I do not wish to exaggerate; and I know quite well that a great abundance of grammatical forms, such as we find in these savage dialects, is by no means a proof of high intellectual development. But if we consider how small is the number of words and ideas in the ordinary vocabulary of an English peasant,18 and if then we find that one dialect of the Fuegians, the Tagan, consists of about 30,000 words,19 we certainly hesitate before venturing to classify the possessors of so vast an inherited wealth as the descendants of poor savages, more savage than themselves. Such facts cannot be argued away. We cannot prevent people from despising religious concepts different from their own, or from laughing at customs which they themselves could never adopt. But such a treasure of conceptual thought as is implied in the possession of a vocabulary of 30,000 entries cannot be ignored in our estimate of the antecedents of this Fuegian race. I select the Fuegians as a crucial test simply because Darwin20 selected them as the strongest proof of his own theory, and placed them almost below the level reached by the most intelligent animals. I have always had a true regard for Darwin, and what I admired in him more than anything else was his fearlessness, his simple devotion to truth. I believe that if he had seen that his own theories were wrong, he would have been the first to declare it, whatever his followers might have said. But in spite of all that, no man can resist the influence of his own convictions. When Darwin looked at the Fuegians, he no doubt saw what he tells us, but then he saw it with Darwinian eyes. According to his account, the party of Fuegians whom he saw resembled the devils which come on the stage in such plays as Der FreischÜtz.21 “Viewing such men, one can hardly believe,” he says, “that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world” (p. 235). “Their language, according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate. Captain Cook has compared it to a man clearing his throat, but certainly no European ever cleared his throat with so many hoarse, guttural, and clicking sounds.”

Now, even with regard to their physical aspect, Darwin must have either been very unlucky in the Fuegians whom he met, or he cannot have kept himself quite free from prejudice. Captain Parker Snow, in his Two Years Cruise of Tierra del Fuego (London 1857), speaks of them as without the least exaggeration really beautiful representatives of the human race. Professor Virchow, when exhibiting a number of Fuegians at Berlin, strongly protested against the supposition of the Fuegians being by nature an inferior race, so that they might be considered as a connecting link between ape and man. But what shall we say of Darwin's estimate of the Fuegian language? Here we can judge for ourselves, and I doubt whether, so far as this sound is concerned, anyone would consider Fuegian as inferior to English. Giacomo Bove, when speaking of the Tagan dialect, says, “le parole di quella sono dolci, piacevoli, piene di vocali.” And though he admits that some of the other dialects are harsher, yet that is very far as yet from the sound of clearing the throat.

And, even if the sound of their language was as guttural as some of the Swiss dialects, how shall we account for the wealth of their vocabulary? Every concept embodied in their language is the result of hard intellectual labor; and although here again excessive wealth may be an embarrassment, yet there remains enough to prove a past that must have been very different from the present.

The workman must at least have been as great as his work; and if the ruins of Central America tell us of architects greater than any that country could produce at present, the magnificent ruins in the dialects, whether of Fuegians, Mohawks, or Hottentots, tell us of mental builders whom no one could match at present. Even in their religious beliefs there are here and there rays of truth which could never have proceeded from the dark night of their actual superstitions. The Fuegians, according to Captain FitzRoy, believe in a just god and a great spirit moving about in forests and mountains. They may believe in a great deal more, but people who believe in a great spirit in forests and mountains, and in a just god, are not on the lowest step of the ladder leading from earth to heaven.

The Duke of Argyll, in examining the principal races that are commonly called savage, has pointed out that degraded races generally inhabit the extreme ends of continents or tracts of country almost unfit for human habitation, or again whole islands difficult of access except under exceptionally favorable conditions. He naturally concludes that they did not go there of their own free will, but that they represent conquered races, exiles, weaklings, cowards, criminals, who saved nothing but their life in their flight before more vigorous conquerors, or in their exile from countries that had thrown them off like poison. Instead of looking on the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego as children of the soil, Autochthones, or the immediate descendants of the mythical Proanthropoi, the Duke points out that it is far more likely they may have come from the north; that their ancestors may have participated in the blessings of the soil and climate of Chili, Peru, Brazil, or Mexico, possibly in the early civilisation of that part of the world; and that the wretchedness of the country into which they were driven fully accounts for their present degradation. Take away the wretchedness of their present home, educate a baby, as Captain FitzRoy did, under the beneficent influences of an English sky and of European civilisation, and in one generation, as Mr. Darwin tells us, “his intellect was good, and his disposition nice.”

It is quite fair that those who oppose this theory should call upon the Duke to establish his view by the evidence of language. If the Fuegians were the descendants of the same race which reached a high pitch of civilisation in Peru, Mexico, or Central America, their language ought to show the irrefragable proof of such descent. If it did, his position would be impregnable. Unfortunately the materials now at hand have not yet been sufficiently examined to enable us to say either yes or no. Nor must we forget that language, when it is not fixed by a popular literature, is liable among nomadic tribes to unlimited variation. The number of languages spoken22 throughout the whole of North and South America has been estimated to considerably exceed twelve hundred; and on the northern continent alone more than five hundred distinct languages are said to be spoken, which admit of classification among seventy-five ethnical groups, each with essential linguistic distinctions, pointing to its own parent stock. Some of these languages are merely well-marked dialects, with fully developed vocabularies. Others have more recently acquired a dialectic character in the breaking up and scattering of dismembered tribes, and present a very limited range of vocabulary, suited to the intellectual requirements of a small tribe or band of nomads. The prevailing condition of life throughout the whole North American continent was peculiarly favorable to the multiplication of such dialects and their growth into new languages, owing to the constant breaking up and scattering of tribes, and the frequent adoption into their numbers of the refugees from other fugitive broken tribes, leading to an intermingling of vocabularies and fresh modifications of speech. It is to be hoped that the study of native American languages may before long receive that attention which it so fully deserves. It must be taken up in good earnest, and with all the accuracy which we are accustomed to in a comparative study of Indo-European languages. All ethnological questions must for the present be kept in abeyance till the linguistic witness can be brought into court, and it would be extraordinary if the laurels that can here be gained should fail to stimulate the ambition of some young scholar in America.

As to the Fuegians at Cape Horn, so at the North Pole the Eskimos, however low their present state of civilisation, have been looked upon as immigrants from a centre of civilisation located in a more temperate zone. The Eskimo leads the only life that is possible in his latitudes. Why he should have migrated there, unless driven by force majeure, is impossible to say. Unless we are willing to admit a special Eskimo Adam, we have no choice except to look upon him either as a withering offshoot of the American moundbuilders, or as a weak descendant of Siberian nomads.

In Africa, the most degraded races, the Bushmen, are clearly a corruption of the Hottentots, while it is well known that some eminent ethnologists look upon the Hottentots as degraded emigrants from Egypt. How much higher the civilisation of Africa stood in former ages, we know from the monuments of Egypt and Nubia, from the histories of Phoenicia, Carthage, and Numidia. If among the ruins of these ancient centres of civilisation we now find tribes whom European travellers would call savage, we see again that in the evolution of man retrogression is as important an element as progression.

Even in Australasia, where we meet with the most repulsive customs and the most hopeless barbarism, the Duke of Argyll shows that, according to the principles of evolution, the separation of the islands from the Asiatic continent would date from a period anterior to the age of man, and that here too man must be an immigrant, a degraded offshoot from that branch of the human race which in China or India has risen to some kind of civilised life. For further details the pages in the last book of the Duke of Argyll, particularly chapter x., on the “Degradation of Man,” should be consulted. It must suffice here to quote his summing up:—

Instead of assuming these (savage) tribes to be the nearest living representatives of primeval man, we should be more safe in assuming them to represent the widest departure from that earliest condition of our race which, on the theory of development, must of necessity have been associated at first with the most highly favorable conditions of external nature.

We have thus seen that, wherever we seem to lay hold of primeval savages who are supposed to represent to us the unchanged image of the primeval man, the evidence of their having been autochthonous in the places where we now find them is very weak, the proofs that they have never changed are altogether wanting; while geographical, physical, and linguistic considerations make it probable, though no more, that they originally came from more favored countries, that they were driven in the struggle for life into inhospitable climates, and that in accommodating themselves to the requirements of their new homes they gradually descended from a higher level of civilisation, indicated by their language and religion, to that low level in which we find them now. Some of them have sunk so low that, like individual members of the noblest families in Europe, they can no longer be reclaimed. Others, however, though shaken by sudden contact with the benefits and the dangers of a higher civilisation, may regain their former health and vigor, and, from having been retrogressive savages, become once more progressive in the great struggle for existence.

But if in the cases just mentioned we feel inclined to recognise the influence of degradation, and if we class such races as the Fuegians, the Eskimos, the Bushmen and Hottentots, the Papuans and brown Polynesians, as retrogressive savages, the question arises where we can hope to find specimens of the progressive savage, or rather of the natural man, who might teach us something of what man may have been before civilisation completely changed him into an artificial being, forgetful of the essential purposes of life, and who feels at home no longer in fields and forests, on rivers or mountains, but only in that enchanted castle of custom and fashion which he has erected for himself out of the unmeaning fragments of former ages?

My answer is that after we have collected the primitive tools and weapons which lie buried beneath the abodes of civilised man, our best chance of learning some of the secrets of primitive civilisation is to study the sacred hymns and the ancient legends of India, the traditions embodied in the Homeric poems, and whatever has been preserved to us of the most ancient literature of the progressive races of the world, the Italic, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic races. This of course applies to the Aryan race only. The Semitic races are represented to us in their progress from a nomadic to a more or less civilised life in the Old Testament, in the earliest ballads of the Arabs, and in passages scattered in the inscriptions of Assyrians, Babylonians, and Phoenicians. China too in its ancient literature allows us an insight into the age of a nascent society, while Egypt discloses to us the most ancient of all civilisations, which can boast of a literature at a time when the very idea of writing was as yet unknown to all other nations.

It is easy to say that all this is modern. In one sense no doubt it is. The Vedic literature, the most ancient of the whole Aryan race, presupposes a succession of intellectual strata which no chronology can measure. The language of the Veda is a work of art which it must have taken generations to build up. But is it reasonable to expect anything less modern in the history of the human race? And is there not a continuity in language and thought which allows us to see even in these literary remains, call them as modern as you like, something of the first dawn of human life. French is a very modern language, but in chien we still hear the Sanskrit ?van; in journal we recognise the old Vedic deity Dyaus. In the same way we can go back from what is common to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, to what was the common language of the Aryans before they broke up in different nationalities. In that common Aryan vocabulary, again, we can distinguish between what is radical and primitive and what is formal and secondary. Thus we may go back beyond all so-called historical limits to a stage of primitive thought, represented by a small number of radical concepts, and a still smaller number of formal elements. And is not that enough? Is it not more historical and more trustworthy, at all events, than all À priori speculations? and have we not at least a right to demand this from our À priori friends, that, in running their tunnel from the other end, they should take care that when it emerges into the daylight of history it should meet the tunnel which comparative philology, mythology, and theology have carefully dug out on the opposite side through the solid rock of facts? It will never do for À priori theories to run counter to À posteriori facts. It is a fact, for instance, proved by historical evidence, that fetichism represents a secondary stage in the growth of religion, and that it presupposes an earlier stage, in which the name and the concept of something divine, the predicate of every fetich, was formed. It would be fatal, therefore, to any system of À priori reasoning if it placed fetichism before that phase in the development of human thought which is represented by the first formation of divine concepts. It would be a real hysteron-proteron.

Again, it is a fact, proved by historical evidence, that all the words of the Aryan languages are derived from definite roots, expressive of definite concepts. It would therefore be fatal, again, to any system of À priori reasoning if it attempted to derive words direct from more or less inarticulate cries or imitations of cries, and not from that small number of roots which has been proved to supply all that is really wanted in explanation of all the facts of Aryan speech.

Again, it is a fact, proved by historical evidence, that most of the ancient deities of the Aryan nations have names expressive of the great powers of nature, and it would be an insult to all historical scholarship if our À priori friends were to attempt to prove once more that the worship of Zeus was derived from a general reverence felt for a gentleman of the name of Sky, or the belief in Eos from a sentimental devotion excited by a young lady of the name of Dawn. I believe it will be admitted by all honest anthropologists that the philological identification of one single word, Dyaus in the Veda and Zeus in Homer, has done more for rectifying our ideas of the true course of ancient Aryan civilisation than all the myths and customs of savages put together.

There was a time when the students of Oriental literature were inclined to claim an extravagant antiquity for the books which they had rescued from oblivion. But that tendency has now been changed into the very opposite. There may be traces of it among Chinese, sometimes among Egyptian and Accadian scholars, but wherever we have to deal with a real literature, whether in India, Persia, or Palestine, scholars are far more anxious to point out what is modern than what is ancient, whether in the Veda the Avesta, or the Old Testament. I certainly do not feel guilty of ever having claimed an excessive antiquity for the Rig-Veda. From the very first, though I placed the whole of Vedic literature before Buddhism, say the sixth century B.C. and though, owing to the changes in language, style, and thought which are clearly perceptible in different parts of Vedic literature, owing also to certain astronomical dates, I ventured to place it between 1000 and 1500 B.C., yet I have never concealed my impression that some portions of the Veda may turn out to be of far more recent origin.23

But is not that sufficient? Is it not perfectly marvellous that so much that is really old, so much that carries us back more than 3,000 years, should have been preserved to us at all? Why will people ask for what is impossible? Savages they say, do not read and write, and yet they want to have trustworthy information from literary documents composed by those very savages who cannot read and write. Among the Aryan nations, I do not believe in any written books before the sixth century B.C. In China, books may have been older, papyri are older in Egypt, and clay tablets in Babylon. But even when literature began, the very last that ancient people do is to write about themselves, about their manners and customs. What we know of the manners and customs of ancient people, when they were still passing through that phase which we call progressive savagery, comes to us from strangers only. As modern travellers give us full accounts of the life of savages who cannot speak and write for themselves, our only chance of learning something about our own ancestors, before they began to write, would be from ancient travellers who were interested in these promising savages. Now it is a piece of excessive good luck that, with regard to one of the Aryan races, with regard to our own Teutonic ancestors, we possess such a book, written by a stranger who felt deeply interested in German savages, and who has told us what they were, before they could write and tell us themselves what they were. If we want to study the progressive savage, not as he ought to have been, according to À priori philosophy, nor as he might have been, according to what we see among Fuegians of the present day, but as he really was according to the best information that could be collected by the best of historians, we must, read and read again the Germania of Tacitus.

If history means the evidence of contemporary eye-witnesses, I doubt whether history will ever enable us to see further into the natural transition of barbarism into civilisation than in the Germania of Tacitus. To divide civilisation from barbarism by a sharp line is of course impossible. There are remnants of barbarism in the most advanced state of civilisation, and there are sparks of civilisation in the most distant ages of barbarism—at least of that healthy barbarism which is represented to us in the Germania, and of which we find but scanty fragments in the ancient literature of the civilising nations of the world.

Here we may see ourselves as we were not quite two thousand years ago. Here we may see from how small beginnings the highest civilisation may be reached. Here we may study the natural man as he really was, in some respects certainly a savage, but a progressive savage, as we know from his later history, and certainly without one sign of that corruption and decay which is so plainly visible in Hottentots and Papuans.

This book, the account of the site, the manners, and the inhabitants of Germany, by Tacitus, has had various fates. To every German, to every member of the Teutonic race, it has always been a kind of national charter, a picture of a golden age, adorned with all that is considered most perfect, pure, and noble in human nature; whereas French savants have often either ridiculed the work of Tacitus as a mere romance, or so interpreted his words as to turn the ancient Germans into real Hottentots.

This controversy has been carried on during several centuries. M. Guizot, for instance, in his History of Civilisation completely ignoring the distinction between retrogressive and progressive savages, tried to show that there was little to choose between the Germans of Tacitus and the Red Indians of the present day.

This controversy became embittered by a curious circumstance. Whereas Tacitus and other Roman writers spoke in glowing terms of the Teutonic races, their remarks on the Gauls, the ancient inhabitants of France, were not only far from complimentary, but happened to touch on points on which Frenchmen are particularly sensitive. Tertullian, who was a great admirer of the Jews, was very wroth with Tacitus because he used very anti-Semitic language. He actually calls Tacitus a “brawler, and the greatest teller of lies,”24 The French do not differ much from that opinion, not so much because Tacitus spoke ill of the Jews, and likewise of the Celts of Gaul, as because he spoke so well of the paysans du Danube. The ancient classical writers dwell rather strongly on the unfavorable side of the Celtic character. It is well known how low an opinion Aristotle formed of Celtic morality. Strabo says that the Celts are simple, but proud and sensitive, fond of dress and ornaments. It is even hinted that they dyed their hair, and allowed their mustache to grow, so that it interfered with the comfort of eating and drinking.25 Strabo goes on to say that they are not malicious, but reckless, changeable, fond of innovation, and never to be depended on. They are quick in their resolutions, but often inconsiderate, fond of war, brave, but intolerably conceited if victorious, and quite demoralised if defeated. Polybius confirms that their first onslaught is terrible, but both CÆsar and Livy agree as to their want of steadiness and perseverance. Other Latin authors add that they are unmanageable and inclined to revolutions, and that, owing to continual factions, many are obliged to leave the country, and to try their fortunes as adventurers elsewhere. Still darker colors were added by others to this picture of national depravity. The state of morality in Gaul was such that it was considered infamous for a father to be seen in company with his son before the latter had come of age. At the death of a nobleman his widow was, as a matter of course, subjected to a trial as to whether she had been the cause of her husband's death. Strabo affirms that it was their custom to cut off the heads of their enemies after a battle, and to hang them on the heads of their horses, or nail them over their doors. While German scholars composed this mosaic out of all the stones that classical writers had ever thrown at the inhabitants of Gaul, French writers retaliated by either throwing discredit on Tacitus, the supposed encomiast of the Germans, or by showing that the account which Tacitus gives of the ancestors of the Teutonic race proves better than anything else that, at his time, the Germans had not yet emerged from a state of the grossest barbarism, and were incapable, therefore, as yet of vices of which they maintain are the outcome of a more advanced state of civilisation.

To my mind, apart from any national idiosyncrasies, the description which Tacitus gives us of the Germans, as he had seen them, is perfectly unique and invaluable as a picture of what I should willingly call the life of progressive savages. What should we give if, besides the hymns of the Rig-Veda, we had the accounts of travellers who had actually seen the ancient Rishis of India with their flocks and families, their priests and sacrifices, their kings and battles? What should we give if, besides the Homeric poems, we had the work of an eyewitness who could describe to us the real Troy, and the real fight between Greece and Asia Minor? This is what Tacitus has done for Germany, and at a time when the ancient religion was still living, when the simple laws of a primitive society were still observed, and when the epic poems of a later time were still being sung as ballads at the feasts of half-naked warriors! In Tacitus, therefore, and not in the missionary accounts of Melanesian savages, should we study the truly primitive man, primitive in the only sense in which we shall ever know of primitive man, and primitive certainly in a far truer sense than Papuans or Fuegians are likely to be in the nineteenth century. I cannot understand how an historian like Guizot could have allowed himself to be so much misguided by national prejudice as to speak of Tacitus as a kind of Montaigne or Rousseau, who, in a fit of disgust with his own country, drew a picture of Germany as a mere satire on Roman manners, or to call the Germania “the eloquent sulking of a patriotic philosopher who wishes to see virtue where he does not find the disgraceful effeminacy and the elegant depravity of an old society.” Surely the work of Tacitus cannot have been very fresh in the memory of the great French historian when he delivered this judgment. If Tacitus, like Rousseau or Voltaire, had intended to draw the picture of an ideal barbarism, would he have mentioned the many vices of the German Utopia, the indolence of the Germans, their drunkenness, their cruelty to slaves, their passion for gambling, and their riotous revels? Besides, three-fourths of his book treat of subjects which have no bearing whatever on Roman society, nay, which are of so little interest to the general reader that I doubt whether many Romans would have taken the trouble to read them. The facts which came to the knowledge of Tacitus are so loosely strung together that his book looks more like a collection of memoranda than the compact and pointed pamphlet of a political satirist. We need only read the letters of Voltaire on England, or Montalembert's pamphlet, De l'Angleterre, in order to perceive the difference between a political satire and an historical memoir. No doubt a man of the temper of Tacitus would naturally dwell with satisfaction on the bright side of the German character, and, while holding before the eyes of his own nation the picture of a brave and simple, religious and independent race, might naturally think of what Rome once had been, and was no longer. But there is no more sarcasm or satire in his work than is inseparable from a straightforward statement of facts when addressed to ears no longer accustomed to the sound of unvarnished truth.

So little did M. Guizot perceive the unique character of the Germania of Tacitus as an historical document of the earliest stage of society, that he amused himself with collecting from various books of travel a number of facts observed among the very lowest races in America and Africa, which, as he thinks, form an exact parallel to the statements of Tacitus with regard to the good and bad qualities of the Germans. His parallel columns, which occupy nearly ten pages, are certainly amusing, but they prove nothing, least of all that there was no difference between the healthy sons of Germany and the tattooed cannibals of New Zealand. If they prove anything, it is that there is one kind of barbarism through which every nation has to pass, the childhood and wild youth of a race, to be followed by the mature vigor of a nation's manhood, and that there is another kind of barbarism which leads to nothing, but ends in mere brutality, shrinking from contact with higher civilisation and succumbing when it attempts to imitate with monkeyish delight the virtues and vices of a more advanced society. Why is it that the fresh breezes of European civilisation proved fatal to the consumptive barbarism of the wretched inhabitants of Australia, while the strong constitution of the Germans of Tacitus resisted even the poisonous vapors of Roman life? When the results are so different, surely there must be a difference in the antecedents, and though M. Guizot is successful in showing that in some respects the ancient Germans did the same things and said the same things as Ojibways and Papuans, he forgets in drawing his conclusion the old proverb, Si duo dicunt idem, non est idem.

After these remarks it will perhaps seem less surprising that students of antiquity should decline to answer the point-blank question whether man began his life on earth as a savage. Every definition that has been attempted of a savage in general, has broken down as soon as it was confronted with facts. The only characteristic of the savage which remained, and was strong enough to withstand the sharpest cross-examination, was cannibalism. But I am not aware that even the most extreme believers in the primitive savage would insist on his having been necessarily a cannibal, a kind of human Kronos, swallowing his own kith and kin.

Every attempt to place the savage who can no longer be called civilised in the place of the savage who can not yet be so-called, could only end, as it has, in utter confusion of thought.

Something, however, will be gained, or at all events some kind of mutual understanding will become possible, if in future discussions on the character of primitive man a careful distinction is made between the two kinds of savages, the progressive and the retrogressive. When that distinction has once been grasped, the question whether man began as a savage has no longer anything perplexing about it. Man certainly began as a savage, but as a progressive savage. He certainly did not begin with an innate knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic; but, on the other hand, there is nothing to lead us to suppose that he was a being altogether foul and filthy, that when he grew up he invariably ill-treated his wife or wives, and that still later in life he passed his time in eating his children.

If we must need form theories or reason by analogy on the primitive state of man, let us go to the nearest ci-prÈs, such as the Vedic Hindus, or the Germans as described by CÆsar and Tacitus, but not to Fuegians, who in time and probably in space also are the most widely removed from the primitive inhabitants of our globe. If we knew nothing of the manners and customs of the Saxons, when they first settled in these isles, should we imagine that they must have resembled the most depraved classes of modern English society? Let us but once see clearly that the Fuegian, whether as described by Darwin or by Parker Snow, is the most modern of human beings, and we shall pause before we see in him the image of the first ancestor of the human race. Wherever we look we can see the rise and fall of the human race. We can see it with our own eyes, if we look at the living representatives of some of our oldest and noblest families; we can read it in history if we compare ancient India with modern India, ancient Greece with modern Greece. The idea that the Fuegian was salted and preserved for us during many thousands of years, so that we might study in him the original type of man, is nothing but a poetical sentiment unsupported alike by fact, analogy, and reason.

I know full well that when I speak of the Germans of Tacitus or of the Aryans of the Veda as the ci-prÈs of primitive man, all the indications of modern, or at all events of secondary and tertiary thought which I have pointed out myself in the hymns of the Rig-Veda, and which might easily be collected from the book of Tacitus, will be mustered against me. Must I quote the old saying again: Est quoddam prodire tenus si non datur ultra? All I maintain is that these historical documents bring us as near to the primitive man as historical documents can bring us; but that the nearest point within our reach is still very far from the cradle of the human race, no one has pointed out more often than myself.

There is, however, plenty of work still to be done in slowly following up the course of human progress and tracing it back to its earliest stages, as far as literary, monumental, and traditional documents will allow us to do so. There are many intricate windings of that historical river to be explored, many riddles to be solved, many lessons to be learnt. One thing only is quite certain—namely, that the private diary of the first man will never be discovered, least of all at Cape Horn.

I have thus tried to show how untenable is the theory which would boldly identify the modern savage with primitive man, and how cautious we ought to be whenever we take even a few hints here and there from degraded tribes of the present day in order to fill out our imaginary picture of the earliest civilisation of our race. Some lessons, and even important lessons, may be learnt from savages, if only they are studied in a truly scholarlike spirit, as they have been, for instance, by Callaway and Codrington, by Waitz and Tylor. But if the interpretation of an Homeric custom or myth requires care, that of African or Polynesian customs or myths requires ten times greater care, and if a man shrinks from writing on the Veda because he does not know Sanskrit, he should tremble whenever he writes the names of Zulus, unless he has some idea of what BÂntu grammar means.

In arguing so far, I have carefully kept to the historical point of view, though I am well aware that the principal traits in the imaginary picture of primitive man are generally taken from a very different source. We are so made that for everything that comes before us we have to postulate a cause and a beginning. We therefore postulate a cause and a beginning for man. The ethnologist is not concerned with the first cause of man, but he cannot resist the craving of his mind to know at least the beginning of man.

Most ethnologists used to hold that, as each individual begins as a child, mankind also began as a child; and they imagined that a careful observation of the modern child would give them some idea of the character of the primeval child. Much ingenuity has been spent on this subject since the days of Voltaire, and many amusing books have been the result, till it was seen at last that the modern baby and the primeval baby have nothing in common but the name, not even a mother or a nurse.

It is chiefly due to Darwin and to the new impulse which he gave to the theory of evolution that this line of argument was abandoned as hopeless. Darwin boldly asked the question whose child the primeval human baby could have been, and he answered it by representing the human baby as the child of non-human parents. Admitting even the possibility of this transitio in aliud genus, which the most honest of Darwin's followers strenuously deny, what should we gain by this for our purpose—namely, for knowing the primitive state of man, the earliest glimmerings of the human intellect? Our difficulties would remain exactly the same, only pushed back a little further.

Disappointing as it may sound, the fact must be faced, nevertheless, that our reasoning faculties, wonderful as they are, break down completely before all problems concerning the origin of things. We may imagine, we may believe, anything we like about the first man; we can know absolutely nothing. If we trace him back to a primeval cell, the primeval cell that could become a man is more mysterious by far than the man that was evolved from a cell. If we trace him back to a primeval pro-anthropos, the pro-anthropos is more unintelligible to us than even the protanthropos would be. If we trace back the whole solar system to a rotating nebula, that wonderful nebula which by evolution and revolution could become an inhabitable universe is, again, far more mysterious than the universe itself.

The lesson that there are limits to our knowledge is an old lesson, but it has to be taught again and again. It was taught by Buddha, it was taught by Socrates, and it was taught for the last time in the most powerful manner by Kant. Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge; it might be called more truly the knowledge of our ignorance, or, to adopt the more moderate language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.—Nineteenth Century.