368 COSMOS. 



feelings, by depriving this general picture of nature of those 

 brighter lights and tints, which may be borrowed from con- 

 siderations, however slightly indicated, of the relations exist- 

 ing between races and languages. 



Whilst we maintain the unity of the human species, we at 

 the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior 

 and inferior races of men.* There are nations more suscep- 

 tible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more ennobled by 

 mental cultivation than others but none in themselves nobler 

 than others. All are in like degree designed for freedom; a 

 freedom which in the ruder conditions of society belongs 

 only to the individual, but which in social states enjoying 

 political institutions appertains as a right to the whole body 

 of the community. " If we would indicate an idea which 

 throughout the whole course of history has ever more and 

 more widely extended its empire or which more than any 

 other, testifies to the much contested and still more decid- 

 edly misunderstood perfectibility of the whole human race 

 it is that of establishing our common humanity of striving 

 to remove the barriers which prejudice and limited views of 

 every kind have erected amongst men, and to treat all mankind 

 without reference to religion, nation, or colour, as one frater 

 nity, one great community, fitted for the attainment of one 

 object, the unrestrained development of the phychical powers. 

 This is the ultimate and highest aim of society, identical with 

 the direction implanted by nature in the mind of man towards 

 the indefinite extension of his existence. He regards the 

 earth in all its limits, and the heavens as far as his eye can scan 

 their bright and starry depths, as inwardly his own, given 

 to him as the objects of his contemplation, and as a field 

 for the development of his energies. Even the child longs 

 to pass the hills or the seas which enclose his narrow home; 

 yet when his eager steps have borne him beyond those limits, 

 he pines, like the plant, for his native soil : and it is, by this 

 touching and beautiful attribute of man this longing for that 

 which is unknown, and this fond remembrance of that which 

 is lost that he is spared from an exclusive attachment 



* The very cheerless, and in recent times too often discussed, doctrine 

 of the unequal rights of men to freedom, and of slavery as an institu- 

 tion in conformity with nature, is unhappily found most systematically 

 developed in Aristotle's Politico,, i. 3, 5, 6. 



