98 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



5. The light of scientific research and reasoning has 

 lately been thrown far back upon the condition of our 

 half-human progenitors in pre-historic times; and the 

 picture which we have been thence assisted to sum- 

 mon up in imagination of our ancestors, is one strange 

 and wonderful and not altogether agreeable to contem- 

 plate. It is with mingled feelings of pity and wonder, 

 and aversion, and yet with a strange sympathy and 

 fascination, that we are drawn to the portrait, which 

 scientific inquirers have sketched for us, of the primitive 

 man. He appears extremely selfish, in the narrow 

 animal sense of the word, ferociously cruel, visited at 

 moments with a gleam of terror and superstition which 

 may one day develop into religion, and with an oc- 

 casional touch of the faint elements of pity which may 

 hereafter facilitate moral development ; yet in the main, 

 a creature destitute of sympathy, affection, or pity, and 

 with nothing that could be properly regarded as religion, 

 or morality ; in fact, in a state far below that of the 

 lowest savages of to-day, and scarcely one remove from 

 the brute from whom he had become separated thousands 

 of years previously. But happily, the light of historical 

 research first falls upon him in a state of society, which, 

 indeed, may have been his natural state, as it is that of 

 some species of apes, according to Darwin ; or he may 

 have been forced into it from necessity, from experiencing 

 the danger of living alone, then infinitely greater than 

 after the invention of weapons. Natural selection certainly 

 would favour the social life ; at all events, whether he 

 had previously existed in the isolation of the family or 

 no, at the moment that science takes him up, man is 

 shown to us as a member of a community, and a com- 

 munity in the widest conceivable sense, in which property, 

 women, and children pertained to all. It is, however, 



