Igg MR STARK ON THE SUPPOSED PROGRESS OF HUMAN SOCIETY 



Him whom he was to obey, his first work and duty would not have been actual 

 obedience, but a search whether there was any supreme, infinite, eternal Being, 

 or no, and whereon his duty to him was founded, and what might be sufficient 

 declaration of his will and laws, according to which he must regulate his obe- 

 dience."* And in another passage, after some important observations on man's 

 knowledge as respects his fellow-creatures, and of the nature, being, and proper- 

 ties of those things which he was to use, he concludes as to the first man, that, 

 " as he was the first in his kind, so was he to be the standard and measure of all 

 that followed, and, therefore, could not want any thing of the due perfections of 

 human nature."! 



It thus appears, that the brutal or savage origin of man, and his gradual at- 

 tainment, through ages of experiment, of the faculty of speech, and the use of 

 his intellectual powers, is not warranted by any thing recorded of his origin or 

 early history. Had he been created a dumb savage, a dumb savage he must for 

 ever have remained. Had the spontaneous fruits of the forest been his instinctive 

 food, he never could have learned to use any other ; for instinct only teaches to 

 take what nature provides, and with the instruments which she has furnished. 

 No process of thought or reflection could be able to convey to a frugiverous ani- 

 mal the idea that living creatures might be converted into food. The classical 

 theory, besides, in advancing from feeding on acorns and fruits to pursuing wild 

 animals for their flesh, and taming them in numbers, goes much too far at one 

 step to render it in the slightest degree probable. An acorn-eating savage might, 

 by some possibility or chance, take to the rearing of the fruits or seeds that pro- 

 duced his accustomed food ; and thus step from the first to the last link in the 

 progressive chain of civilization, without altering the nature of his food. But the 

 step from fruits to flesh from roots to living fibre is one which involves, even 

 in its supposition, such a violation of all probability, as to forbid the idea that 

 this can be the process followed by nature. 



Those authors who represent the first pair to have been created mute sa- 

 vages, living on the spontaneous productions of the garden or forest, forget that, 

 if such had been the case, they never could, by their unaided exertions, have risen 

 beyond that state. If the hunter's state, according to others, was the earliest 

 form of human society, how, it may be asked, did man discover that the objects 

 of his pursuit would serve him as food ? Is there any analogy between feeding 

 on acorns or apples, and the raw flesh of animals procured by hunting ? Had man 

 an instinctive predilection for carnage an irresistible appetite for living prey ? 

 It is impossible to answer these questions in the affirmative. If this were indeed 

 Man's destination, his physical conformation would have been adapted to this 



* Origines Sacrse, &c. i. 2. By EDWABD STILLINGFLEET, D.D. late Bishop of Worcester. 

 t Ibid. i. 4. 



