342 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE EVOLUTION OF CIVILIZATION AND THE ARTS. 



By M. GUSTAVE LE BON. 



WE sought to show, in an address on the Influence of Euro- 

 pean Civilization on Colonies (1889), that civilized nations 

 can not impose their' civilization on the lower races, and to demon- 

 strate the insufficiency of education, institutions, or creeds to 

 change the social condition of inferior peoples. We maintained 

 that all the elements of a civilization correspond with certain 

 modes of feeling and thinking, or with a mental constitution rep- 

 resenting the past of a whole race, the hereditary motives of con- 

 duct resulting from the experience and acts of a long series of an- 

 cestors. Only centuries, not conquerors, can essentially transform 

 these. We held, further, that a people can rise in civilization only 

 by a series of steps ; and that, if we try by educating them to 

 evade those steps, we only confuse their morals, and leave them 

 at a lower level than the one they had themselves reached. And 

 we assumed that the Arabs are the only modern people capable 

 of civilizing inferior peoples, because they alone still have ex- 

 tremely simple institutions and creeds. I intend now to make the 

 question general, and to show that the higher races have never 

 been influenced by a foreign civilization more rapidly than the 

 lower races ; and that if they have sometimes adopted creeds, in- 

 stitutions, languages, and arts different from those of their ances- 

 tors, it was not till they had slowly and profoundly transformed 

 them and brought them into relation with their mental consti- 

 tution. 



History appears to contradict this proposition on every page, 

 and to show us peoples who have changed the elements of their 

 civilization and adopted new religions, languages, and institu- 

 tions ; but a closer examination of these supposed changes shows 

 us that, while the names of these things may have been changed 

 with great ease, the realities concealed behind the names have 

 continued to live, and have been transformed only with extreme 

 slowness. The theory is likely to appear most paradoxical in the 

 case of religious creeds ; but, in fact, we find some of the most 

 striking verifications of it in them. Everybody knows that all 

 the great religions — Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and 

 Islam — have provoked conversions of entire races, which have 

 come over to them all at once. But a close study will convince 

 us that in these cases it has been the name of the religion and not 

 the religion itself that has been changed; and that the newly 

 adopted creeds have suffered modifications that would bring them 

 into conformity with the old creeds they replaced, and of which 

 they were simply the continuation, and this sometimes to such an 



