6 7 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cruelty, or for the more abstract ideas. The native Australian, for 

 example, who is in this case, haviag no words for justice, love, mercy, 

 and the like, would not in the least know what remorse meant ; if any 

 one showed it in his presence, he would think probably that he had 

 got a bad headache. He has no words to express the higher senti- 

 ments and thoughts because he has never felt and thought them, and 

 has never had, therefore, the need to express them ; he has not in his 

 inferior brain the nervous substrata which should minister to such sen- 

 timents and thoughts, and can not have them in his present state of 

 social evolution, any more than he could make a particular movement 

 of his body if the proper muscles were wanting. Nor could any 

 amount of training in the world, we may be sure, ever make him equal 

 in this respect to the average European, any more than it could add 

 substance to the brain of a small-headed idiot and raise it to the ordi- 

 nary level. Were any one, indeed, to make the experiment of taking 

 the young child of an Australian savage and of bringing it up side by 

 side with an average European child, taking great pains to give them 

 exactly the same education in every respect, he would certainly have 

 widely different results in the end : in the one case he would have to 

 do with a well-organized instrument, ready to give out good intellec- 

 tual notes and a fine harmony of moral feeling when properly handled ; 

 in the other case, an imperfectly organized instrument, from which it 

 would be out of the power of the most patient and skillful touch to 

 elicit more than a few feeble intellectual notes and a very rude and 

 primitive sort of moral feeling a little better feeling, certainly, than 

 that of its fathers, but still most primitive ; for many savages regard 

 as virtues most of the big vices and crimes, such as theft, rape, mur- 

 der, at any rate when they are practiced at the expense of neighboring 

 tribes. Their moral feeling, such as it is, is extremely circumscribed, 

 being limited in application to the tribe. In Europe we have happily 

 got further than that, since we are not, as savages are and our fore- 

 fathers probably were, divided into a multitude of tribes eager to in- 

 jure and even extirpate one another from motives of tribal patriotism ; 

 but mankind seems to be far off the goal of its high calling so long as, 

 divided into jealous and hostile nations, it suffers national divisions to 

 limit the application of moral feeling, counts it a high virtue to vio- 

 late it under the profaned name of patriotism, and uses the words 

 " humanitarianism " and " cosmopolitanism " as crushing names of 

 reproach. There is plainly room yet for a wider expansion of moral 

 feeling. 



Now, what do the discoveries of science warrant us to conclude re- 

 specting the larger and more complex brain of the civilized man and 

 its higher capacities of thought and feeling? They teach us this: 

 that it has reached its higher level not by any sudden and big creative 

 act, nor by a succession of small creative acts, but by the slow and 

 gradual operation of processes of natural evolution going on through 



