If, however, these races have been so deficient in the fine arts, they have been as excellent in all the useful ones. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, ship-building, and road-making, all that tends to accumulate wealth or to advance material prosperity, has been developed to an extent as great as it is unprecedented, and promises to produce results which as yet can only be dimly guessed at. A great, and, so far as we can see, an inevitable revolution, is pervading the whole world through the devotion of the Aryan races to these arts. We have no reason for supposing it will be otherwise than beneficial, however much we may feel inclined to regret that the beautiful could not be allowed to share a little of that worship so lavishly bestowed on the useful.
Sciences.
It follows, as a matter of course, that, with minds so constituted, the Aryans should have cultivated science with earnestness and success. The only beauty they, in fact, appreciated was the beauty of scientific truth; the only harmony they ever really felt was that of the laws of nature; and the only art they ever cared to cultivate was that which grouped these truths and their harmonies into forms which enabled them to be easily grasped and appreciated. Mathematics always had especial charms to the Aryan mind; and, more even than this, astronomy was always captivating. So, also, were the mechanical, and so, too, the natural sciences. It is to the Aryans that Induction owes its birth, and they probably alone have the patience and the sobriety to work it to its legitimate conclusions.
The true mission of the Aryan races appears to be to pervade the world with the useful and industrial arts, and so tend to reproduce that unity which has long been lost, to raise man, not by magnifying his individual cleverness, but by accumulating a knowledge of the works of God, so tending to make him a greater and wiser, and at the same time a humbler and a more religious servant of his Creator.
CONCLUSION.
When Auguste Comte proposed that classification which made the fortune of his philosophy,—when he said that all mankind passed through the theological state in childhood, the metaphysical in youth, and the philosophical or positive in manhood,—and ventured to extend this discovery to nations, he had a glimpse, as others have had before him, of the beauty of the great harmony which pervades all created things. But he had not philosophy enough to see that the one great law is so vast and so remote, that no human intellect can grasp it, and that it is only the little fragments of that great scheme which are found everywhere which man is permitted to understand.
Had he known as much of ethnographical as he did of mathematical science, he would have perceived that there is no warrant for this daring generalisation; but that nations, in the states which he calls the theological, the metaphysical, and the philosophical, exist now and coexisted through all the ages of the world to which our historical knowledge extends.
What the Egyptians were when they first appeared on the scene they were when they perished under the Greek and Roman sway;—what the Chinese always were they now are;—the Jews and Arabs are unchanged to this day;—the Celts are as daringly speculative and as blindly superstitious now as we always found them;—and the Aryans of the Vedas or of Tacitus were very much the same sober, reasoning, unimaginative, and unartistic people as they are at this hour. Progress among men, as among the animals, seems to be achieved not so much by advances made within the limits of the group, as by the supercession of the less finely organised beings by those of a higher class;—and this, so far as our knowledge extends, is accomplished neither by successive creations, nor by the gradual development of one species out of another, but by the successive prominent appearances of previously developed, though partially dormant creations.
Ethnographers have already worked out this problem to a great extent, and arrived at a very considerable degree of certainty, through the researches of patient linguistic investigators. But language is in itself too impalpable ever to give the science that tangible, local reality which is necessary to its success; and it is here that Archæology comes so opportunely to its aid. What men dug or built remains where it was first placed, and probably retains the first impressions it received: and so fixes the era and standing of those who called it into existence; so that even those who cannot appreciate the evidence derived from grammar or from words, may generally see at a glance what the facts of the case really are.
It is even more important that such a science as Ethnology should have two or more methods of investigation at its command. Certainty can hardly ever be attained by only one process, unless checked and elucidated by others, and nothing can therefore be more fortunate than the possession of so important a sister science as that of Archæology to aid in the search after scientific truth.