Chap. 111. Mental Powers. 93 



highly disagreeable, as every one will admit who has listened at 

 night to the irregular flapping of a rope on board ship. The 

 same principle seems to come into play with vision, as the 

 eye prefers symmetry or figures with some regular recurrence. 

 Patterns of this kind are employed by even the lowest savages 

 as ornaments; and they have been developed through sexual 

 selection for the adornment of some male animals. Whether we 

 can or not give any reason for the pleasure thus derived from 

 vision and hearing, yet man and many of the lower animals are 

 alike pleased by the same colours, graceful shading and forms, 

 and the same sounds. 



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

 concerned, is not of a special nature in the human mind; for it 

 differs widely in the different races of man, 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, as in birds. Obviously no animal would be capable of 

 admiring such scenes as the heavens at night, a beautiful land- 

 scape, or refined music ; but such high tastes are acquired 

 through culture, and depend on complex associations ; they are 

 not enjoyed by barbarians or by uneducated 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 undefined sense of beauty, 

 a tendency to imitation, and the love of excitement or novelty, 

 could hardly fail to lead to capricious changes of customs and 

 fashions. 1 have alluded to this point, because a recent writer 73 

 has oddly fixed on Caprice " as one of the most remarkable and 

 " typical differences between savages and brutes." But not 

 only can we partially understand how it is that man is from 

 various conflicting influences rendered capricious, but that 

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

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

 is also reason to suspect that they love novelty, for it 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 there is ample evidence, 

 derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long 

 resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still 

 exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no 



73 'The Spectator,' Dec. 4th, 1869, p. 1430. 



