— 840 THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION 
both, or might not differ in a greater proportion than 
as 5 to 6; whence we may fairly infer that the savage 
possesses a brain capable, if cultivated and developed, 
of performing work of a kind and degree far beyond 
what he ever requires it to do. 
Again, let us consider the power of the higher or 
even the average civilized man, of forming abstract 
ideas, and carrying on more or less complex trains 
of reasoning. Our languages are full of terms to 
express abstract conceptions. Our business and our 
pleasures involve the continual foresight of many con- 
tingencies. Our law, our government, and our science, 
continually require us to reason through a variety of 
complicated phenomena to the expected result. Even 
our games, such as chess, compel us to exercise all 
these faculties in a remarkable degree. Compare this 
with the savage languages, which contain no words 
for abstract conceptions; the utter want of foresight 
of the savage man beyond his simplest necessities ; his 
inability to combine, or to compare, or to reason on 
any general subject that does not immediately appeal 
to his senses. So, in his moral and esthetic faculties, 
the savage has none of those wide sympathies with all 
nature, those conceptions of the infinite, of the good, 
of the sublime and beautiful, which are so largely 
developed in civilized man. Any considerable develop- 
ment of these would, in fact, be useless or even hurtful 
to him, since they would to some extent interfere with 
the supremacy of those perceptive and animal faculties 
on which his very existence often depends, in the 
