Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/146

134 of the simpler products from which they have been derived. Already an instance has been furnished by the interpretations of primitive religions given by the reigning school of mythologists. Possessed by the ideas which civilization has evolved, and looking back on the ideas which prevailed among the progenitors of the civilized races, they have used the more complex to interpret the less complex; and when forced to recognize the entire unlikeness between the inferred early religious ideas and the religious ideas found among the uncivilized who now exist, have assumed a fundamental difference in mode of action between the minds of the superior races and the minds of the inferior races: classing with the inferior, in pursuance of this assumption, certain ancient races to which the modern world is indebted for its present advance. Though to the teachings of so called Turanians the Aryans and Semites owe their civilizations; though the Accadians had great cities, settled laws, advanced industries, arts in which four metals were utilized, and writing that had already reached the phonetic stage, while the Semites were still nomadic hordes; though the Egyptians had for some thousands of years lived as an elaborately-organized nation, approaching in many of its appliances to modern nations, and producing monuments that remain a wonder to mankind, while the Aryans were wandering with their herds in scattered groups about the Hindoo Koosh—yet these peoples are, in company with the lowest barbarians, cavalierly grouped as having radically inferior intelligences, because they show in an unmistakable way the genesis of religious ideas irreconcilable with that genesis which mythologists are led by their method to ascribe to the superior races.

All who accept the conclusions set forth in the first part of this work, will see in this instance the misinterpretation caused by analysis of the phenomena from above downward, instead of synthesis of them from below upward. They will see that in search of explanations we must go below the stage at which men had learned to domesticate cattle and till the ground.

I make these remarks by way of introduction to a criticism on the doctrines of Sir Henry Maine. While valuing his works, and accepting as true within limits the views he sets forth respecting the family under its developed form, and respecting the part played by it in the evolution of European nations, it is possible to dissent from his assumptions concerning the earliest social states, and from the derived conceptions.

As leading to error, Sir Henry Maine censures "the lofty contempt which a civilized people entertains for barbarous neighbors," which, he says, "has caused a remarkable negligence in observing them." But he has not himself wholly escaped from the effects of this sentiment. While valuing the evidence furnished by barbarous peoples