Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/67

Rh the subject. Such is too often the case with many writers on the Continent of what may be called the German school, and also of many in this country who adopt German scholarship for a model. With a vast amount of learning they show it to be not so much the learning of books as of indexes. They string together as best suits their purpose every reference of every ancient author who has even named the subject matter of their enquiry, without reference to the date or character of their quotations, or even connexion with the point at issue, at the same time adopting a positiveness of true and assertion of correctness amounting to an assumed sense of superiority, before which all doubt or dissent shall be denounced as proof of ignorance or stupidity. Thus in the instance of the question before us, though the whole testimony of history runs in a clear and consistent course from Herodotus downwards with only one solitary exception to the contrary, these writers choose to take that one exception as the only trustworthy guide, and thereupon raise a superstructure of mystery, to make a marvel of a natural order of events, and give an air of profoundness to researches which thereby are only rendered confused and perplexing. Supposing their theory to be well founded they would seem to me naturally to result in the certainty of a spontaneous indigenous civilization, and this is a point on which I venture to enter on a short digression, though it can hardly be considered a digression, inasmuch as it is a part of my argument to contend that all history and experience may be pronounced in accordance with probability respecting it. Under this consideration I maintain that we cannot suppose its coming within the verge of probability for any uncivilized race to emerge from barbarism merely by their own unaided efforts. On the contrary those writers of whom one of the Vice-Presidents of this Society certainly the most profound thinker and writer of our day, the illustrious Archbishop Whately, may be named the chief, appear to me as unhesitatingly to be followed, who contend that man was created with a certain knowledge of and aptitude for civilized life, from which state all subsequent stages of barbarism have in effect been degenerations. That to extricate him from those degenerations some extraneous appliances were rendered necessary, so that civilization is not and cannot be of spontaneous growth, but either a continuation or improvement of some previous like condition, or a communication from some other quarter to any race requiring it, and which had so become degraded from the exalted state in which man had been placed by his Creator on the earth.