202 The Morality of Nature 



of knowledge, all the nations of the earth are enabled for the 

 first time in history, and probably for the first of all times, 

 to observe one another, and to compare the purposes and 

 effects of their ways of living. Some are revealed as pos- 

 sessed of ethical ideas of such old establishment, that in 

 their very excellence there is torpor, others are seen endowed 

 with a restless energy and variability which have achieved 

 so far momentum rather than profitable position. And 

 others again are found deficient and utterly wanting in the 

 comparison, or irredeemably committed to a wrong course 

 of activity. 



Still others are evidently blank, as tablets upon which 

 no writing appears, of which some are receptive and ready 

 for new impressions and new responses, and others, equally 

 blank, are incapable of receiving impression. These 

 primitive men may be examples of persistence of the earliest 

 types, or they may be evolutions of a newer primitive type, 

 or they may be regressive races reverting from higher to 

 primary conditions. There is probability that those per- 

 sistent in barbarism, are so not only because of environment, 

 but because of an inherent incapacity for higher develop- 

 ment, which hitherto has been no bar to their occupation of 

 their territory, simply because in the abundance of the 

 world's space there was room for them and their wasteful 

 system. There is probability that the strains of humanity 

 which show superior intellectual capacity now, are those 

 which were differentiated from inferiority in the remote 

 past of human evolution, and are not merely temporary 

 beneficiaries of better opportunity. This view is in harmony 

 with that afforded by the broader view of the descent of 



