340 THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION 



both, or might not differ in a greater proportion than 

 as 5 to 6 ; whence we may fairly infer that the savage 

 possesses a brain capable, if cultivated and developed, 

 of performing work of a kind and degree far beyond 

 what he ever requires it to do. 



Again, let us consider the power of the higher or 

 even the average civilized man, of forming abstract 

 ideas, and carrying on more or less complex trains 

 of reasoning. Our languages are full of terms to 

 express abstract conceptions. Our business and our 

 pleasures involve the continual foresight of many con- 

 tingencies. Our law, our government, and our science, 

 continually require us to reason through a variety of 

 complicated phenomena to the expected result. Even 

 our games, such as chess, compel us to exercise all 

 these faculties in a remarkable degree. Compare this 

 with the savage languages, which contain no words 

 for abstract conceptions ; the utter want of foresight 

 of the savage man beyond his simplest necessities ; his 

 inability to combine, or to compare, or to reason on 

 any general subject that does not immediately appeal 

 to his senses. So, in his moral and aesthetic faculties, 

 the savage has none of those wide sympathies with all 

 nature, those conceptions of the infinite, of the good, 

 of the sublime and beautiful, which are so largely 

 developed in civilized man. Any considerable develop- 

 ment of these would, in fact, be useless or even hurtful 

 to him, since they would to some extent interfere with 

 the supremacy of those perceptive and animal faculties 

 on which his very existence often depends, in the 



