904 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 



of the past and teaching only distrust of the future, is really 

 quite different from it. I am not sure that Prichard ever put 

 forward the former of these two doctrines, though it is just the 

 doctrine which would have commended itself to his large, philo- 

 sophical, many-sided, well-balanced judgment. He died in 1848 — 

 the very year which perhaps, of all save one in history, and that 

 one the year 1793 (a year in which he was yet a child), showed in 

 the most palpable way the absurdity of attempting to make civil- 

 isation by pattern, and of hoping to produce a wholesome future in 

 any other way than that of evolution from the past. 



What have been called the senile, what could equally well have 

 been called the cynical. Ethics of Pessimism, had not in Prichard's 

 time found any advocates in this country ; indeed, so far as I have ob- 

 served, they are of a more recent importation than most other modern 

 heresies. I do not deny that at times it is possible to give way to 

 certain pressing temptations to think that we are living in a cer- 

 tainly deteriorated and a surely deteriorating age, and that it is 

 hopeless and useless to set up, or look up to, aspirations or ideals. 

 When, for example, we take stock of the avidity with which we 

 have, all of us, within the last twelve months read the memoirs of 

 a man whom one of his reviewers has called a ' high-toned aristo- 

 crat,' but whom I should call by quite another set of epithets, we 

 may think that we are not, after all, so much the better for the 

 3000 years which separate us from the time when it was considered 

 foul play for a man to enact the part of a familiar friend, to eat of 

 another man's bread, and then to lay great wait for him. Or can we, 

 in these days, bear the contrast to this miserable spectacle of mean 

 treachery and paltry disloyalty, which is forced upon us in the 

 same history by the conduct of the chivalrous son of Zeruiah, who, 

 when he had fought against Rabbah and taken the city of waters, 

 sent for his king who had tarried in Jerusalem, lest that city 

 should thenceforward bear the name, not of David, but of Joab ? 

 Or again, as I have been asked, have we got very far above the level 

 of sentiment and sympathy which Helen, an unimpeachable witness, 

 tells us the Trojan Hector had attained to and manifested in his 

 treatment of her, 



* With tender feeling and with gentle words ' ? 



Would the utterances of any modern epic poet have so surely 

 brought tears into the eyes of the noble-hearted boy depicted by 



