278 RETROGRESSIVE MAN. 



are not to look to the revealed record for scientific forms of 

 statement, we are, nevertheless, from its character, entitled to 

 assume, that wherever statements are made in it, bearing on 

 the intellectual, moral, and religious departments of the 

 economy of man, in their relations to his material economy 

 and conditions of present and future existence, the sense or 

 bearing of these statements will not only not be contradictory 

 to, but, on the contrary, confirmatory of, the scientific results 

 of human research. 



8. We are informed in the revealed record that in the 

 primitive phase of his existence the economy of man presented 

 a more perfect form, and that he existed under conditions 

 commensurate with the complete fulfilment of his welfare. 

 We are also informed, in terms which, whatever their imme- 

 diate import may be, at least involve the statement, that man 

 lost his primitive form of economy, and his more favourable 

 conditions of welfare, by the erroneous use of his higher or 

 spiritual principle, by his preference of untruth to truth, of 

 error to rectitude ; and that thereupon humanity became 

 subject to all those ills which have chequered its progress. 



9. The statement which I have now made involves a truth 

 which belongs to the departments of the moralist and theolo- 

 gian. But it is one which cannot well be neglected by any 

 thoughtful mind ; and from our point of view, looking at it 

 as anthropologists, it is full of interest, as it is in fact a funda- 

 mental principle in the science of the human economy. 



10. As the time allotted to this course of lectures is too 

 brief to admit of detailed illustration, and as the inculcation 

 of sound and comprehensive principles is of primary import- 

 ance in such subjects as this course has been devoted to, I 

 shall, in concluding this lecture, merely indicate the tendency 

 of my previous statements. 



11. On the grounds already stated, we are bound to guard 

 ourselves against the conscious or unconscious assumption, 



