CHAP, xn DARWINISM IN POLITICS: BAGEHOT I2/ 



the latter point, especially his closing chapters. On 

 the other hand, are we simply trying to explain the 

 origin, from one common stock, of the immensely 

 divergent assemblage of national constitutions which 

 history records or living experience manifests ? This 

 question is also in his view. Perhaps we ought to 

 say that he wishes to study both phases of his theme, 

 but that he is chiefly interested in the laws of true 

 progress. 



Before history, he tells us, there was a prehistoric 

 age, before morals, a non-moral age. If man was 

 created, he must have had everything to learn. If 

 man was evolved from purely animal forms this 

 Bagehot seems to regard as probable, but as non- 

 essential to his argument there must have been an 

 interregnum between the time when instinct guided 

 action and the time when reason became effective. 

 Instinct on the whole secures safety, but reason 

 weakens instinct, and custom, which is the equivalent 

 of instinct at a higher grade, which is the earliest 

 and most important safeguard of rational beings, 

 must have been very slowly and very gradually for- 

 mulated. Primitive savages were like modern savages 

 in almost all their defects ; they were ignorant, capri- 

 cious, passionate ; but their minds cannot have been 

 " tattooed over with customs " like the minds of their 

 remote posterity, the savages of to-day. While civil- 

 ised man is social, primitive man, according to Bage- 

 hot, was a being no longer guided by animal instinct, 

 but imperfectly human, and very hard to break to 

 the sway of society. Most men were wild; many 

 races were purely wild ; and the vital problem during 

 the emergence of society was to secure the formation 



