NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN, 527 



hair, which are, after all, only crystals, more or less dear. And as to 

 our pomades, wliatever name we give them, they always have, for 

 foundation, the oil of almonds, or the fat of pork. You see that, be- 

 tween the article used by savages and that w^e make ourselves, there is 

 no great difference. 



III. Moral and Religious Characters. — We pass to another order 

 of characters. By his body, I repeat, man i-s an animal, nothing more, 

 nothing less ; by his intelligence he is infinitely superior to animals. 

 But, to judge by fundamental phenomena, the nature of our intelli- 

 gence does not differ from that which they manifest. 



Are we, then, only a more intelligent kind of animal ? I have al- 

 ready answered this question. No ; we are not animals, we are 

 something else ; for, besides the phenomena which we have in common 

 with them, we have our special character, connected with faculties, of 

 which we find not the least trace in the most elevated animals. These 

 faculties are morality and religion. 



I. Morality. — Among all people, in all races, there are expressions 

 which mean good and bad, honest man and scoundrel ; consequently, 

 all men have the abstract notion of good and evil. 



Objections have been made to this idea that morality was an attri- 

 bute of man ; or, rather, difficulties have been raised on the subject. 

 Some say, for example, that animals know also what is good and what 

 is bad. This is true for our most perfect domestic animals, as the dog. 

 Thanks to our superior intelligence, we have accustomed them to that 

 which is good and bad/br us. But leave them in a savage state, and 

 you will never find them doing any thing to which you can attach the 

 notion here implied. Man is certainly the only being that we see war 

 against pain — physical evil — that he may reach moral good. 



It has been said again that morals differ from people to people, 

 and the attempt has been made to draw from this an inference that 

 morality is not characteristic of man. The faculty itself is here con- 

 founded with its manifestations. We forget that the same sentiment 

 can be expressed by very different and sometimes opposite acts. I 

 will take, for example, those which testify to politeness and the re- 

 spect we pay to superiors. In the same case, the European rises and 

 uncovers his head ; the Turk, on the contrary, remains with the head 

 covered, and the Polynesian sits. These contrary acts are not less, 

 the one than the other, acts of deference. 



We must place ourselves at this point of view to judge of morality. 

 We must, in such cases, and, above all, when it is a question of inferior 

 peoples, forget our own notions on this subject, and seek after the 

 general ideas of the people we are studying. We must recur to what 

 has taken place with us at certain epochs, and then we shall find that 

 there is not as much difference as we imagined between the most civil- 

 ized and the most savage people. We shall return to the subject in 

 treating the history of races. To-day I can only say a few words rela* 



