208 THE POSITION OF MAN IN THE SCALE OF BEING. 



to be undervalued or denied in the general discussion of the 

 subject. The tendency of anthropologists to undervalue this 

 source of evidence depends, in the first place, on the illegiti- 

 mate application of a legitimate principle, that a question in 

 science should be decided by science alone. In the second 

 place, the tendency arises from that reserve in regard to our 

 higher beliefs, which is the result of the varied and conflict- 

 ing forms which religious belief and thought present in the 

 present personal, social, political, and ecclesiastical phase of 

 humanity. In the third place, the tendency to dissociate the 

 evidence of sacred history from anthropological research, is 

 due to that deep-rooted and prevalent prejudice, which, dis- 

 sociating the revealed record from the book of nature, leads 

 to the assumption that those higher truths and beliefs, which 

 are involved in our human constitution, and the purposes and 

 results of which are recorded in the book of God's word, for 

 the direct information and enlightenment of our higher 

 faculties, towards our final development, should be considered 

 a department of knowledge and belief quite apart from the 

 truths contained in the book of nature ; for the attainment of 

 which truths, and in corroboration of revealed truth, our 

 intellectual faculties were bestowed upon us. 



5. I may here observe, that although I have deemed it 

 necessary, for the full exposition of the subject of this course 

 of lectures, to put prominently forward an aspect of our 

 subject, which may be termed non-scientific by those who 

 differ from us, I am not thereby called upon to establish the 

 legitimacy of that aspect. For, in my opinion, those who 

 consider it untenable are bound to take one of two courses — 

 either to refrain from viewing a non-scientific subject through 

 a scientific medium, and to have recourse to the method of 

 inquiry proper to a non-scientific department of human know- 

 ledge, or to act upon that sound principle in philosophy and 

 science which withholds those who may not have made them- 



