280 PROGRESSIVE MAN. 



LECTURE X. 



PROGRESSIVE MAN. 



1. In my last iecture, after showing yon that the discus- 

 sion of any fundamental question in anthropology must 

 necessarily be based on three convergent lines of evidence — 

 the physiological, psychological, and theological — I proceeded 

 to the consideration of the question of primitive man. From 

 the comprehensive character of the evidence afforded us, I 

 laid before you what appeared to me sufficient grounds for 

 believing primitive man to have been, not a savage, but man 

 in his originally perfect form, fitted by the undegraded 

 character of his spiritual element for immediate converse 

 with his Creator, in whose image his spirit had been framed, 

 and by whose instruction he was initiated in regard to 

 his moral and spiritual nature ; guided to the use of his 

 faculty of speech, and to the application of his intellectual 

 powers, in the investigation and appropriation for his own 

 welfare of the objects and living beings by which he was sur- 

 rounded* 



I also submitted for your consideration the grounds on 

 which we must, in my opinion, hold that the phase of 

 humanity in which we ourselves live is a secondary phase, 

 in which man has lost the completeness of his primitive 

 economy, and his more favourable primitive conditions of 



* It may not be out of place to refer to the recently published work On 

 the Antiquity of Intellectual Man, by Frof. C. Tiazzi Smyth, in which a con- 

 clusion similar to that expressed in the text has been arrived at from the con- 

 sideration of a different line of evidence to that employed in these lectures. — Eds. 



