62 THE DESCENT OF MAN. [Part I. 



same colors and the same sounds are admired by us and 

 by many of the lower animals. 



The taste for the beautiful, at least as far as female 

 beauty is concerned, is not of a special nature in the hu- 

 man mind ; for it differs widely in the different races of 

 man, as wull hereafter be shown, and is not quite the same 

 even in the different nations of the same race. Judging 

 from the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music 

 admired by most savages, it might be urged that their 

 aesthetic faculty was not so highly developed as in certain 

 animals, for instance, in birds. Obviously no animal 

 would be capable of admiring such scenes as the heavens 

 at night, a beautiful landscape, or refined music ; but such 

 high tastes, depending as they do on culture and complex 

 associations, are not enjoyed by barbarians or by unedu 

 cated persons. 



Many of the faculties, which have been of inestimable 

 service to man for his progressive advancement, such as 

 the powers of the imagination, wonder, curiosity, an un- 

 defined sense of beauty, a tendency to imitation, and the 

 love of excitement or novelty, could not fail to have led 

 to the most capricious changes of customs and fashions. 

 I have alluded to this point, because a recent writer B0 has 

 oddly fixed on Caprice " as one of the most remarkable 

 and typical differences between savages and brutes." But 

 not only can we perceive how it is that man is capricious, 

 but the lower animals are, as we shall hereafter see, capri- 

 cious in their affections, aversions, and sense of beauty. 

 There is also good reason to suspect that they love nov- 

 elty, for its own sake. 



Belief in God — Religion. — There is no evidence that 

 man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief 

 in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary, 



60 ' The Spectator,' Dec. 4, 1860, p. 1430. 



