TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 155 



A'athi'opologj to some of the prevalent errors of the day, I should he glad to be 

 allowed to say a few words. The most important lesson as regards the future (I do 

 not say tlie immediate future) which the modern study of Human Progress (for such 

 all men who think, except the Duke of Argyll, are now agreed is the study of An- 

 thropology) teaches is the folly and impossibility of attempting to break abruptly 

 with the past. This principle is now enforced with persistent iteration from many 

 Anthropological platforms; and I cannot but think it might adveintageously be 

 substituted in certain portfolios for the older maxim, " Whatever is certainly new is 

 certainly ftilse," a maxim which seems at tirst sight somewhat like it, but which, as 

 being based on pure ignorance 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 philosophical, 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 civilization 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 observed, they are of a more recent importa- 

 tion than riiost 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 certainly 

 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 me- 

 moirs of a man whom one of his reviewers has called a " high-toned aristocrat," 

 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 foid 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 paltiy 

 disloyalty, which is forced upon us in the same history by the conduct of the chi- 

 valrous son of Zeruiah, who, when he bad fought against Rabbah and taken the 

 citv 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 Mr. Hughes, as the passage of Homer 

 just alluded to, and characterized by liim " as the most touching thing in Homer, 

 perhaps in all profane poetry put together " ? What answer can be made to all 

 this by those who maintain that the old times were not better than these, who 

 maintain the docti-ine of Progress, and hold that man has been graduiilly improving 

 from the earliest times, and may be expected to go on thus advancing in the future ? 

 An answer based upon the employment of simple scientific method, and upon the 

 observance of a very simple scientiiic rule — upon, to wit, the simple method of taking 

 averages, and the simple rule of enumerating all the circumstances of the case. 

 Noble actions, when we come to coimt them up, were not, after all, so very common 

 in the olden times ; and side by side %vith them there existed, and indeed flourished, 

 intertwined with them, practices which the moral senseof all civilized nations has now 

 definitely repudiated. It is a disagreeable task, that of learning the whole truth ; but 

 it is imfair to draw dark conclusions as to the futm'e, based on evidence di-awn from an 

 exclusive contemplation of the bright side of the past. A French work, published 

 only last year, was recommended to me recently by an eminent scholar as containing 

 a good account of the intellect uxl and moral condition of the Romans imder the 

 Empire. I liave the boolc, but have not been able to liud in it any mention of the 

 gladiatorial shows, though one might have thought the words Panem et Circenses 



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