162 LESSONS FROM NATURE. [CHAP. VI. 



what Mr. Herbert Spencer calls &quot;inverted anthropomor 

 phism ;&quot; and with respect to which some good remarks* are 

 made by Mr. Tylor, who tells us : 



&quot; Uncivilised man deliberately assigns to apes an amount of human 

 quality which to modern naturalists is simply ridiculous. Every one 

 has heard the story of the negroes declaring that apes can speak, but 

 judiciously hold their tongues lest they should be made to work ; but 

 it is not generally known that that is found as serious matter of belief in 

 several distant regions West Africa, Madagascar, South America, &c. 

 where monkeys or apes are found. . . . On the other hand, popular 

 opinion has under-estimated the man as much as it has over-estimated 

 the monkey. We know how sailors and emigrants can look on savages 

 as senseless, ape-like brutes, and how some writers on anthropology 

 have contrived to make out of the moderate intellectual difference 

 between an Englishman and a negro something equivalent to the 

 immense interval between a negro and a gorilla. Thus we can have no 

 difficulty in understanding how savages may seem mere apes to the 

 eyes of men who hunt them like wild beasts in the forests, who can 

 only hear in their language a sort of irrational gurgling and barking, 

 and who fail totally to appreciate the real culture which better 

 acquaintance always shows among the rudest tribes of man.&quot; 



Again, he adds : f 



&quot; The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and 

 beast, so prevalent in the civilised world, is hardly to be found among 

 the lower races.&quot; 



Thus the view, so popular to-day, as to the community of 

 nature between man and brutes is really a reversion towards 

 savage thought. As to man, considered without reference to 

 lower animals, Mr. Tylor declares himself very decidedly in 

 favour of the substantial community of nature existing in the 

 most divergent human races. He pronounces $ as follows : 

 &quot; The state of things amongst the lower tribes which presents 

 itself to the student, is a substantial similarity in knowledge, 

 arts and customs, running through the whole world. Not 

 that the whole culture of all tribes is alike far from it ; but 

 if any art or custom belonging to a low tribe is selected at 

 random, it is twenty to one that something substantially like 



* Primitive Culture, pp. 342, 343. t Op. cit. vol. i. p. 423. 



% Researches into the Early History of M.mkind, p. 1G9. 



