ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 125 



it were next to impossible for a single art to be wholly lost. And 

 so it is. Every age has known all that was known by the age that 

 preceded it and has added something to this. Every age has pos- 

 sessed all the arts of the age that preceded it, and has added some- 

 thing to them. And this in spite of the most prolonged moral 

 reactions, such, for example, as that of the middle ages. 



If we examine the arts, implements,- utensils, and weapons of any 

 of the lower tribes, as, for example, the Esquimaux of the extreme 

 north, we shall find that they represent a high degree of skill, a 

 large amount of inventive thought, and a considerable real knowl- 

 edge of the laws of nature and of physical forces. A comparison 

 of many such tribes also shows that these devices represent, like 

 those of the most enlightened peoples, a series of steps in invention 

 answering to our improvements. But a better implement is never 

 abandoned for a poorer one, and here, as in the higher races, pro- 

 gress has been constant — always forward. We may therefore safely 

 conclude that the present high state of material advancement in 

 scientific nations is the result of a series of intellectual conceptions 

 materially embodied in art, stretching back into that dim past when 

 the club embodied the highest mechanical principles known to man. 



Such is material progress, and such are the essential particulars 

 in which it so widely differs in nature and method from moral pro- 

 gress. But, great as these differences seem and are, there is a point 

 toward which they may be made, hypothetically at least, to con- 

 verge. This point is where the human activities are conceived as 

 natural phenomena, and their control through the normal inventive 

 process is contemplated as a true art. If the power to do this shall 

 ever be attained, there is no reason why morals may not progress 

 in the same manner and at the same rate as material civilization. 

 The true interpreters of human history now understand that it is to 

 material progress, /. <?., to science and art, that what moral progress 

 has actually taken place is indirectly due. It is knowledge of the 

 universe enlarging the mental horizon that has dispelled the bigotry 

 of pre-scientific ages and thrown the mantle of charity over indi- 

 vidual conduct and. opinion. And it is the arts of intercommuni- 

 cation that have really civilized the modern world, as compared with 

 the world before their introduction. 



But since morals, from the point of view of social science, are 

 concerned exclusively with the welfare of men, and since material 

 progress, both physical and intellectual, is also directed exclusively 



