Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/694

 cruelty, or for the more abstract ideas. The native Australian, for example, who is in this case, having no words for justice, love, mercy, and the like, would not in the least know what remorse meant; if any one showed it in his presence, he would think probably that he had got a bad headache. He has no words to express the higher sentiments and thoughts because he has never felt and thought them, and has never had, therefore, the need to express them; he has not in his inferior brain the nervous substrata which should minister to such sentiments and thoughts, and can not have them in his present state of social evolution, any more than he could make a particular movement of his body if the proper muscles were wanting. Nor could any amount of training in the world, we may be sure, ever make him equal in this respect to the average European, any more than it could add substance to the brain of a small-headed idiot and raise it to the ordinary level. Were any one, indeed, to make the experiment of taking the young child of an Australian savage and of bringing it up side by side with an average European child, taking great pains to give them exactly the same education in every respect, he would certainly have widely different results in the end: in the one case he would have to do with a well-organized instrument, ready to give out good intellectual notes and a fine harmony of moral feeling when properly handled; in the other case, an imperfectly organized instrument, from which it would be out of the power of the most patient and skillful touch to elicit more than a few feeble intellectual notes and a very rude and primitive sort of moral feeling—a little better feeling, certainly, than that of its fathers, but still most primitive; for many savages regard as virtues most of the big vices and crimes, such as theft, rape, murder, at any rate when they are practiced at the expense of neighboring tribes. Their moral feeling, such as it is, is extremely circumscribed, being limited in application to the tribe. In Europe we have happily got further than that, since we are not, as savages are and our forefathers probably were, divided into a multitude of tribes eager to injure and even extirpate one another from motives of tribal patriotism; but mankind seems to be far off the goal of its high calling so long as, divided into jealous and hostile nations, it suffers national divisions to limit the application of moral feeling, counts it a high virtue to violate it under the profaned name of patriotism, and uses the words "humanitarianism" and "cosmopolitanism" as crushing names of reproach. There is plainly room yet for a wider expansion of moral feeling.

Now, what do the discoveries of science warrant us to conclude respecting the larger and more complex brain of the civilized man and its higher capacities of thought and feeling? They teach us this: that it has reached its higher level not by any sudden and big creative act, nor by a succession of small creative acts, but by the slow and gradual operation of processes of natural evolution going on through