14 THE HUMAN KINGDOM. 



which is the glory of humanity, which has raised to such a 

 height both science and art or only to the last from among 

 us, members of the great family rejoicing in a white skin, then 

 the transition is brutish, and it seems that an abyss separates 

 us from the famous wild man of the woods, so celebrated in the 

 travels of the last century. It is thus that the human king- 

 dom has been established, comparing the two extremes, with- 

 out taking account of the intermediate terms. 



Let us put on one side, for an instant, the question of 

 origin. A race, or a family, endowed with a characteristic 

 and united activity, by the form of mind peculiar to itself, with 

 a prepossession for reuniting in a cluster the work of every 

 individual intelligence, forms out of it a sort of thought com- 

 mon to all, and transmits this inheritance from generation to 

 generation. One can understand that, as time goes on, this 

 family, or this race, will arrive at a degree of civilisation very 

 different to that which it showed at the time of its origin. 

 The concurrence of so many intelligent modes of action will 

 gently, but naturally, lead it to purely metaphysical ideas to 

 the intricate idea of a divinity, etc. But, in such an arrange- 

 ment, each one is, after all, but the representative of a secular 

 intellectual work, accustomed since the cradle, without any 

 self-knowledge of the fact, to natural habits and language. 

 We ask if it is right to compare a being thus raised and 

 exalted by his own means with an animal which has no more 

 remote past than its own birth ? * Let us take, then, for the 

 sake of comparing them with animals, those people in whom 

 life is in some sort individual, among whom no person adds 

 anything to transmitted inheritance, among whom even this 

 inheritance has originally come from outside, and who, we 

 know not why, having arrived at the lowest ebb of civilisation, 

 have not been able to improve or perfect it. 



Some may say that they simply copy everything. Some 

 may say that the huge weapons used by the inhabitants of 

 Central Africa and Australia have only become known by 



* Courtet de 1'Isle has already made this remark. (Tableau Ethnographique 

 du Genre Humain, 1849, p. 8.) 



