HOI-MES DISTRIBUTION OF THE HUMAN RACE. 35 



them, in respect of lineage, language, or first centres of origin, 

 must be deemed impracticable and utterly hopeless. Theoreti- 

 cally, there may as well have been two or more centres of origin 

 as one only : it is simply a matter of fact to be ascertained as 

 nearly as possible. 



We begin with an ethnographical description of peoples as 

 they now are ; we study them, ethnologically, in respect of race 

 or natural lineage, and anthropologically, as a pai't of the animal 

 kingdom. We mav trace them as peoples, or nations, as far back 

 as they have a national history, and as races as far back as we 

 can find materials for a natural history, and as man as far back 

 as zoological science may adm?t. But at both ends alike of the- 

 evolutionary lines and j^rocess we find ourselves unavoidably 

 entering upon the higher sphere of the intellectual, artistic, and 

 moral — into metaphysics — a kind of knowledge that is, after all, 

 not only the highest and the first, but the most certain and im- 

 portant of all. The terms physics and metaphysics^ like the 

 words natural and supernatural^ are commonly used ambigu. 

 ously : if physics be taken to mean only what can be perceived 

 by the senses, then metaphysics may properly mean what can be 

 seen only by the mind ; but, of course, if physics be taken to 

 mean both kinds of knowledge, then there might remain no 

 other use for the term metaphysics than to express that absolute 

 nothing that lies beyond all physics. And just so of natural and 

 supernatural. 



The progress of science may enable us to gain an insight into 

 the mode, manner, and law and fact of the process, if not into the 

 time and place and cause of it. Only the most comprehensive 

 philosophy can ever enable us to form an adequate conception of 

 the nature of that cause, or creative power, which could produce 

 such a work in any manner, at any time or place, under any con- 

 ditions, or under any law whatever. Taking the whole into one 

 view, and contemplating the almost infinite series of changes that 

 have taken place in geological time and over successive surfaces 

 in space, the notion may just dawn upon the imagination that the 

 ideal series of forms which actually existed in nature as a process 

 of thought in creation, is, by the power of thought in us, merely 

 shifted round, as it were, from the Mind of Nature into our minds, 

 however imperfect the reminiscence in us. 



