[7] Wood's Natural History of Man.
[8] See [Appendix].
[9] See [Note] at end of this chapter.
[10] No words or theory even of morality can express or formulate this—no enthronement of any virtue can take its place; for all virtue enthroned before our humanity becomes vice, and worse than vice.
[11] It is curious that this word seems to have the same root as the word Man, the original idea apparently being Order, or Measure.
[12] And with regard to disease, though it is not maintained that among the animals there is anything like immunity from it—since diseases of a more or less parasitic character are common in all tribes of plants and animals—still they seem to be rarer, and the organic instinct of health greater, than in the civilised man.
[13] As to the unity of these wild races with Nature, that is a matter seemingly beyond dispute; their keenness of sense, sensitiveness to atmospheric changes, knowledge of properties of plants and habits of animals, etc., have been the subject of frequent remark; but beyond this, their strong feeling of union with the universal spirit, probably only dimly self conscious, but expressing itself very markedly and clearly in their customs, is most strange and pregnant of meaning. The dances of the Andaman Islanders on the sands at night, the wild festival of the new moon among the Fans and other African tribes, the processions through the forests, the chants and dull thudding of drums, the torture-dances of the young Red Indian bravos in the burning heat of the sun; the Dionysiac festivals among the early Greeks; and indeed the sacrificial nature-rites and carnivals and extraordinary powers of second-sight found among all primitive peoples; all these things indicate clearly a faculty which, though it had hardly become self-conscious enough to be what we call religion, was yet in truth the foundation element of religion, and the germ of some human powers which wait yet to be developed.
[14] There is another point worth noting as characteristic of the civilisation-period. This is the abnormal development of the abstract intellect in comparison with the physical senses on the one hand, and the moral sense on the other. Such a result might be expected, seeing that abstraction from reality is naturally the great engine of that false individuality or apartness, which it is the object of Civilisation to produce. As it is, during this period man builds himself an intellectual world apart from the great actual universe around him; the "ghosts of things" are studied in books; the student lives indoors, he cannot face the open air—his theories "may prove very well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds, and along the landscape and flowing currents"; children are "educated" afar from actual life; huge phantom-temples of philosophy and science are reared upon the most slender foundations; and in these he lives defended from actual fact. For as a drop of water, when it comes in contact with red-hot iron, wraps itself in a cloud of vapor and is saved from destruction, so the little mind of man, lest it should touch the burning truth of Nature and God and be consumed, evolves at each point of contact a veil of insubstantial thought which allows it for a time to exist apart, and becomes the nurse of its self-consciousness.
[15] See Alonso di Ovalle's Account of the Kingdom of Chile in Churchill's Collection of Voyages and Travels, 1724.