CH. xx. J CONDITIONS OF PEOGEESS. 265 



this capacity could by no possibility yield ground to the 

 races lacking it, unless overwhelmed by sheer weight of 

 vastly superior numbers, a case which the hypothesis of a 

 universal primitive civilization does not leave room for. Or 

 take the ready belief in omens by which the life of the 

 savage is so terribly hampered. Could a single tribe in old 

 Australia have surmounted the necessity of searching for 

 omens before undertaking any serious business, it would 

 inevitably, says Mr. Bagehot, have subjugated all the other 

 tribes on the continent. In like manner it is obvious that 

 such implements as the bow and arrow and the iron swords 

 or hatchets could never have given place to the boomerang 

 and the knives and hatchets of stone or bronze ; and 

 the intellectual capacity implied in monotheism and the 

 discovery of elementary geometry could never have been 

 conquered out of existence by the intellectual capacity im 

 plied in fetishism and the inability to count above three or 

 four. So, because the men who possess the attributes of 

 civilization must necessarily prevail, in the long run, over 

 the men who lack these attributes, it follows that there 

 cannot have been, in prehistoric times, a general loss of the 

 attributes, external and internal, of civilization. 



Now one of the attributes which will most surely give to 

 any group of men an advantage in the competition with 

 neighbouring groups, is the presence of a powerful bond of 

 union between its members. Our entire survey of social 

 evolution shows that one of the most distinctive character 

 istics of civilized men is their capacity for acting in concert 

 with one another over wider and wider areas. The next 

 chapter will enable us more fully to understand that the 

 acquirement of this capacity is simply a further prolonging 

 of the extension of correspondences in time and space which 

 has been shown to be a leading characteristic of psychical 

 progress throughout the organic world. The growth of this 

 capacity, during historic times, has been a complex result of 



