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animal. Who can question that some canine races, of which the descent from stupid jackals and wolves is as good as certain, have raised themselves mentally far above their ancestry? Who, that has read the comprehensive investigations of H. Müller, the brother of our Fritz Müller, can doubt that the honey-bee, as it gradually attained its bodily advantages and peculiarities, developed likewise the higher mental powers, corresponding with the more minute and complex organism of her brain? Man-such is the thesis we propound, reserving the question of language-differs from many animals only in the degree and means of progress. It is therefore unscientific to contrast humanity and animality in the abstract.

Man alone, it is further maintained, has a free will. In so far as the more highly developed man acts in accordance with philosophical, moral and religious principles, for which he is indebted to education and instruction-in so far as he is able to apprehend ideals, and strive after them with his own mental and bodily power, this command of will may be readily admitted, although we know that this "freedom" is likewise the collective result of natural causes. But the more simple and uniform the conditions of life, the more do the dealings of men lose the semblance and character of freedom, and the more does the individual act after the will of the tribe—I might say, of the herd—that is to say, instinctively. In this case actions are not performed even with the astounding premeditation with which some few happily organized individual animals of some few species turn the circumstances to account with apparently complete free will. The free will of the

morally elevated man, is no common property of all mankind.

Man alone, and all men, are supposed to have a conscience. We consider, on the contrary, that conscience, which is known to be utterly lost in many individuals of even the most civilized nations, is, like moral will, a result of education in some few races and tribes. Fear of detection after a bad action, is not conscience; and that well-trained dogs have sensations of conscientious shame far superior to the animal terror of savage cannibals after they have wrought the murder of their fellow-men, it is impossible to deny. Of this, evidence in profusion is accumulated in the anthropological compilations of Waitz.

That a consciousness of the Divine existence is a fundamental property of all men, we likewise hold in question. It is, again, an established phrase that the most barbarous nations are guided by emotions and cravings, however obscure, towards the unknown God. This assumption is as old as the well-known attempt to prove the existence of God, " De quo omnium natura consentit, id verum esse necesse est" (That in which all intuitively agree, must necessarily be true). How often has this saying of Cicero been thoughtlessly repeated? This idea of God is, however, as little intuitive as the discrimination of good and evil by the conscience. Others maintain the contrary. Thus Gerland says of the Australians: 83 "The statement that Australian civilization indicates a higher grade is nowhere more clearly proved than here (in the province of religion), where everything resounds like the expiring voices of a previous and richer age; but we in no way receive the impression that we are

dealing with stagnation or incomplete development. Thus the idea that the Australians have no trace of religion or mythology is thoroughly false. But this religion is certainly quite deteriorated, and has degenerated into a wild, disjointed, and often incredibly absurd demonology, into a superstitious fear of apparitions."

But when a few lines later in the work quoted, we are informed that the natives to the west of the Liverpool range, ascribe everything in nature which they cannot explain to the Devil-Devil, and that this is manifestly only a name, derived from the English Devil, for a Deity of whom they have not preserved any distinct conception, the shallowness of this evidence in favour of the hypothesis of a previous standpoint, now sunk into oblivion, enables us to infer the value of the other instances. We have far more reason to believe this low state of mental development in harmony with the bodily condition, when we hear that the natives of the Gulf of St. Vincent and the neighbourhood of Adelaide are extremely hairy, and that even the brown-coloured down of the children is so abundant and so long, that the skin of boys of five or six years of age assumes a furry appearance. But, contrary to all experience and history, we are required to believe ** that the inhabitants of the northern parts of Australia are the most aboriginal, for "they are the most civilized, as well as the best developed, in mind and body; they only are fixed in one dwellingplace; and in any case the supposition is easier and more natural that the other natives should have degenerated, with their eternal wanderings, than that the former, fixed by the more convenient territory, should have raised themselves."

This inverts all that has hitherto been called anthropology. Moreover, there are even very advanced nations without any consciousness of God. Schweinfurth relates that the Niam-Niam, that highly interesting dwarf people of Central Africa, have no word for God, and therefore it must be supposed, not the idea; and Moritz Wagner has given a whole selection of reports on the absence of religious consciousness in inferior nations. When, in spite of all these corroborations, it is always retorted afresh that even among the lowest savages some sort of feeling of superior powers is manifested, the dispute finally results in mere verbal criticism, which has no farther interest for the doctrine of Descent.

And yet we cannot leave this subject without alluding to a fact, universally known, but, strange to say, not as yet employed in this connection, and which, as it would seem, is by itself sufficient to invalidate the assertion that the idea of God is immanent in human nature. We mean the fact that many millions in the most cultivated nations, and among them the most eminent and lucid thinkers, have not the consciousness of a personal God; those millions of whom the heroic David Strauss became the spokesman when he adopted for his own the motto of his favourite, Ulrich von Hutten: I have dared itJacta est alea!

And now as to Language? All modern philologists agree that languages are developed, and that most probably all linguistic families pass through three stages. In the stage of the radical languages all words are roots, and are merely placed side by side. In the second stage, that of the agglutinated languages, one root defines the other, and the defining root ultimately becomes merely

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a determinative element. Finally, in the inflected languages, the determinating element, of which the determinating significance has long vanished from the national consciousness, unites into a whole with the formative element. As we have said, this development, in which retrogression takes an extensive share, is universally admitted. Opinions differ only as to the origin of the linguistic material, which the acuteness of the philosophers extracts in the guise of "roots." A great authority, Max Müller, discerns in the existence of the roots evidence of the absolute separation of man from the animal. While Locke says that man is distinguished from the animal by the power of forming general ideas, the philologist ought to say that human language is distinguished from the animal capacity of communication by the power of forming roots. To trace up all words to imitation and exclamatory sounds is inadmissible, as we most frequently come upon roots of fixed form and general meaning which are inexplicable in themselves. He deems the existence of these readymade roots, before which linguistic science stands helpless, an insurmountable impediment to the apprehension of man as a link in the general evolution of organisms.

This point excepted, this excellent scholar naturally admits all those phenomena of heredity, acquisition, and degeneration, which are manifested in the laws of language, and find their most perfect analogies in our doctrine of Descent. If, for instance, we compare Zend with Sanscrit, and hear several of its words explained, we are at once reminded of the rudimentary organs and their significance. A host of anomalies are, like the isolated organisms of present times, primæval and

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