298 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY 



everywhere much the same. The Malay of the Eastern 

 Archipelago is about as high in the scale of civilization, but 

 no higher than the Moor of Fez, the Turcoman raider in 

 Siberia, or the Arab slave-dealer on the Congo. All these 

 widely-separated peoples of such diverse races have much 

 the same degree of prosperity and enlightenment, and practi- 

 cally they all think alike. Being under the influence of 

 a dominant educational factor, their acquired knowledge 

 and acquired impulses, their modes of thought and motives 

 for action, and the state of society resulting therefrom are 

 much the same. The Turks alone have received a thin 

 veneer of the civilization of the Christians. Forced by the 

 exigencies of their position, they have adopted the quick- 

 firing rifles, the big guns and the ironclad ships of their 

 Western neighbours. But everything they have in excess 

 of other Mahomedans is imported, purchased by the superior 

 command of money, which the extent and populous condition 

 of their territories bestows. At the bottom the Turks remain 

 the men that Mahomet made them ; and if the pressure of 

 Christian civilization were removed they would lapse back 

 to what they were in the days of Osman. All the swarming 

 millions of the Buddhists think and act much alike to one 

 another, but differently from the peoples of other religions. 

 Their strange civilization is unlike all other civilizations, and 

 their various communities have about an equal degree of 

 prosperity. The same is true of the Hindoos, and the 

 adherents of all other religions. 



473. We have here a law of civilization so uniform in 

 action that it has all the force of a natural law ; namely, 

 that a civilization or state of society invariably conforms to 

 the religion with which it is associated, and that quite 

 irrespective of race. The degree of civilization achieved is, 

 in fact, the sum-total of the progress permitted by the 

 associated religion, which, in most cases, sets such limits to 

 further progress as cannot be passed unless the religion first 

 be abandoned or modified. Thus a believer in Fetishism 

 cannot be other than savage; he cannot achieve a higher 

 civilization unless he first eliminates the principal cause of 

 his degradation, his beliefs with their associated moral and 

 social codes. No doubt just as the action of a natural law 

 is modified by external causes, as, for instance, the action 

 of the law of the expansion of gases may be modified by 

 pressure, so the action of a law which connects a civilization 

 with a religion may be modified by the pressure of other 

 civilizations. In all cases, however, the change is more 



