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Huron, and all the five dialects of Iroquois. Lafitau’s personal experience was 
mainly among the Iroquois; he did not, however, confine himself to the Redskins 
of French Canada; he ranged as far as the Eskimo and the Peruvians, and put 
together an immense amount of information. For all his protestations to the 
contrary, Lafitau starts with a theory. ‘I have not been satisfied to understand 
the character of the savages, and to make myself acquainted with their customs 
and practices. I have searched among these customs and these practices for 
traces of the most distant antiquity; I have read with care those of the most 
ancient writers who have treated of the manners, laws, and usages of the peoples 
with whom they had some acquaintance; I have compared these manners with 
one another, and I confess that while the ancient writers have given me lights on 
which to base some lucky guesses concerning the savages, the customs of the 
savages have given me light to understand more easily, and to explain, many 
things which are in the ancient authors.’ He regards the Odyssey, for example, 
as a collection of sketches of primitive peoples, strung together on the thread of 
an interrupted voyage from Troy, but having as their object to recommend the 
study of ethnology. Manners, moreover, are to be studied to form—perhaps even 
to reform—manners, and also to reform people’s ideas. ‘I have seen,’ for example, 
he says, ‘ with extreme pain, in the majority of the Relations, that those who 
have written of the manners of barbarous nations have depicted them as people 
who have no religious feelings, no knowledge of God, no object of worship; as 
people who have neither laws nor administration nor forms of government ; in a 
word, as men who have little human about them except their faces... . I 
Imow’ (he goes on) ‘that in these latter days people have wanted to shake the 
proof of the unanimous agreement of the nations to recognise a Deity, as if this 
unanimous agreement could possibly be a mistake. But the sophisms and 
subtleties of some individual who has no religion, or whose religion is highly 
suspect, cannot shatter a truth which has been recognised by the Pagans them- 
selves, which has been received from all time without contradiction, and which 
we can assume as an axiom,’ 
Having said that it is an axiom, Lafitau proceeds rather inconsistently to 
declare it his task to prove this unanimity of opinion among all nations, by 
showing that there is in fact no ane so barbarous as not to have areligion and not 
to have morals. ‘And I flatter myself that I make the matter so obvious that no 
one can doubt it, unless he wishes to be blind in the midst of light.’ He has a 
long chapter, also, on their form of government, again with one eye upon Locke. 
‘Of all the forms of government, that which has seemed to me most curious is that 
of the Hurons and the Iroquois, because it is most like that of the ancient 
Cretans and Lacedemonians, who had themselves preserved the longest the laws 
and usages which they received from the first ages of the world. Though this 
oligarchic form of government is peculiar to them, the manner of dealing with 
business is pretty general in all the states of barbarous nations; the nature of the 
business almost the same, as well as their public assemblies, their feasts and their 
dances,’ His conviction that human nature is the same all the world over 
comes out again later on.? ‘The time which I spent among the Iroquois has 
tempted me to describe their manners in greater detail, because I know them 
better and am more confident of what I assert. Nevertheless one may say that 
the manners of the natives in general are pretty much alike.’ 
We are here already in the middle of a reaction, on the one hand, against 
Locke’s disproof of innate ideas, and, on the other, against the belief that the 
savages of the New World represent, in any essential, a lower stage of culture than 
is to be traced in survivals in classical antiquity. In fact, we are on the straight 
road to the noble savage as we get him in Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ (1783), which 
uses Lafitau freely. But we are also very much further still on the road to a 
synthetic ethnology. Locke had pointed the way, in his Thucydidean comparison 
of the modern Indian kings to the ‘most ancient kings of Europe,’ by which, 
presumably, he meant the Homeric Monarchy. When, therefore, the first curiosity 
and wonder began to subside, and the real similarity in the performances of human 
reason under similar circumstances began to be perceived, the foundations began 
Lafitau, i. p. 20. 2 Lafitau, iv p. 25. 
