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to hold that the cases in which mankind has fallen from a 
comparatively lofty and civilised state into a low and bar- 
barous one are very numerous indeed,—far more numerous 
than Darwinian evolutionists care to admit. 
They do indeed admit theoretically the possibility of such 
lapses ; but they minimise them as much as possible, as very 
injurious to their pet hypothesis, and assert that they are 
very exceptional. 
But what if it can be proved almost to demonstration by 
innumerable examples that, independently of Christianity, 
and the intervention of highly civilised nations, man’s progress 
has not been upward and onward, but, to a very great extent, 
the reverse? What if deterioration should almost seem to be 
the rule, and elevation almost the exception ? 
Then, the brilliant French writer, De Maistre, who died only 
some half-century ago, would seem to be largely correct in 
his surmise, that the belief, that the history of our race had 
been a history of progress, was the ‘‘errewr mere”? of the 
eighteenth century. 
On the contrary, he maintained the doctrine that the human 
race once occupied a position of intellectual and moral great- 
ness now inconceivable, in which men were able to discern 
general ideas of truth directly by the efforts of their own 
minds, and so descend deductively to the truth upon questions 
of detail, instead of being obliged, as at present, to follow 
the inductive process. 
This state of things he considered to have been destroyed 
by awful catastrophes—moral, intellectual, and physical— 
which left vestiges behind in the shape of a variety of 
traditions spread over the whole face of the earth—traditions 
which can only be understood on the supposition that they 
are the relics of some higher system of knowledge, so much 
do they shock all common notions, although unexpectedly 
confirmed by the highest and widest experience—such as the 
traditions of sacrifice and expiation. 
He lays the scene of this wonderful diffusion of @ priori 
knowledge before the flood, and the theory has this in its 
favour, that enormous and complicated wickedness almost 
demands a complex civilisation to produce it. 
That catastrophe, he thinks, destroyed it, though Noah and 
his family preserved and transmitted some vestiges of it, 
which the priests of Egypt and the old kings learned and 
evinced in the wonderful genius and skill displayed in the 
Cyclopean architecture of pre-historic days, and the science 
of the Chaldean and Egyptian priesthood, which they also 
wrapped up in their mysterious symbols, and, above all, in 
K2 
