GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. 1041 



their intellectual faculties and to call forth the higher parts of their moral 

 nature, no adequate reason can be assigned why the same method should not 

 succeed with the latter, if employed with sufficient perseverance. It will be 

 only when the effect of education, intellectual, moral, and religious, shall have 

 been fairly tested by the experience of many generations, in conjunction with 

 the influence of a perfect equality in civilization and social position, that we 

 shall be entitled to speak of any essential and constant psychical difference be- 

 tween ourselves and the most degraded beings clothed in a human form. All 

 the evidence which we at present possess leads to the belief that, under a vast 

 diversity in degree and in modes of manifestation, the same intellectual, moral, 

 and religious capabilities exist in all the Eaces of Mankind ; so that, whilst we 

 may derive from this conformity a powerful argument for their zoological Unity 

 as a species, we are also directly led to recognize their community of moral 

 nature with ourselves, and to admit them to a participation in our own rights. 



1049. Most important assistance is afforded in the determination of the real 

 affinities of different Races, by the study of their Languages. This, however, 

 is a department of the inquiry so far beyond the limits of Physiological science, 

 that it must be here dismissed with a bare mention of the results, to which the 

 zealous pursuit of it by a large number of philosophic philologists seems un- 

 doubtedly to tend. There can be no reasonable doubt that, as a general princi- 

 ple, the affinities of races are more surely indicated by their languages, than by 

 their physical features ; and the experienced philologist is generally able to dis- 

 criminate those resemblances which may have arisen out of the introduction of 

 words or of modes of construction from the one into the other, by conquest, 

 commercial intercourse, or absolute intermixture, from those which are the re- 

 sult of a community of origin. And thus are supplied those means of tracing 

 the past history of races, which are seldom afforded by historical records, or 

 even (at least with any degree of certainty) by traditional information. It is to 

 be borne in mind, that the affinities of languages are indicated, not merely by 

 verbal resemblance, but by the similarity of their modes of grammatical con- 

 struction, or the methods by which the relation between different words that 

 constitute sentences is indicated. The most positive evidence is of course 

 afforded, when a conformity exists both in the vocabularies and in the types of 

 construction of two languages ; but it frequently happens that although the con- 

 formity exists in regard to one of these alone, yet the evidence which it affords 

 is perfectly satisfactory. Thus, there are many cases in which these vocabularies 

 are so continually undergoing important changes (the want of written records 

 not permitting them to acquire more than a traditional permanence), that their 

 divergence becomes so great, even in the course of a few generations, as to pre- 

 vent tribes which are by no means remotely descended from a common ancestry, 

 from understanding one another; whilst yet the system of grammatical con- 

 struction, which depends more upon the grade of mental development and upon 

 habits of thought, exhibits a remarkable permanence. Such appears to be true 

 of the whole group of American languages, which seem, as a whole, to be legi- 

 timately referable to a common stock, notwithstanding their complete verbal 

 diversity. On the other hand, when two languages or groups of languages 

 differ greatly in construction, but present that kind of verbal correspondence on 

 which the philologist feels justified in placing most reliance (namely, an essen- 

 tial conformity in those "primary words/' which serve to represent the universal 

 ideas of a people in the most simple state of existence), that correspondence may 

 be held to indicate a community of origin, if it can be proved that it has not 

 been the result of intercourse between the two families of nations subsequently 

 to their first divergence, and if it seems probable on other grounds that their 

 separation took place at a period when as yet the grammatical development of 

 both languages was in its infancy. Such appears to have been the case with 

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