Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/545

Rh hair, which are, after all, only crystals, more or less dear. And as to our pomades, whatever name we give them, they always have, for foundation, the oil of almonds, or the fat of pork. You see that, between the article used by savages and that we make ourselves, there is no great difference.

III. Moral and Religious Characters.—We pass to another order of characters. By his body, I repeat, man is an animal, nothing more, nothing less; by his intelligence he is infinitely superior to animals. But, to judge by fundamental phenomena, the nature of our intelligence does not differ from that which they manifest.

Are we, then, only a more intelligent kind of animal? I have already answered this question. No; we are not animals, we are something else; for, besides the phenomena which we have in common with them, we have our special character, connected with faculties, of which we find not the least trace in the most elevated animals. These faculties are morality and religion.

I. Morality.—Among all people, in all races, there are expressions which mean good and bad, honest man and scoundrel; consequently, all men have the abstract notion of good and evil.

Objections have been made to this idea that morality was an attribute of man; or, rather, difficulties have been raised on the subject. Some say, for example, that animals know also what is good and what is bad. This is true for our most perfect domestic animals, as the dog. Thanks to our superior intelligence, we have accustomed them to that which is good and bad for us. But leave them in a savage state, and you will never find them doing any thing to which you can attach the notion here implied. Man is certainly the only being that we see war against pain—physical evil—that he may reach moral good.

It has been said again that morals differ from people to people, and the attempt has been made to draw from this an inference that morality is not characteristic of man. The facility itself is here confounded with its manifestations. We forget that the same sentiment can be expressed by very different and sometimes opposite acts. I will take, for example, those which testify to politeness and the respect we pay to superiors. In the same case, the European rises and uncovers his head; the Turk, on the contrary, remains with the head covered, and the Polynesian sits. These contrary acts are not less, the one than the other, acts of deference.

We must place ourselves at this point of view to judge of morality. We must, in such cases, and, above all, when it is a question of inferior peoples, forget our own notions on this subject, and seek after the general ideas of the people we are studying. We must recur to what has taken place with us at certain epochs, and then we shall find that there is not as much difference as we imagined between the most civilized and the most savage people. We shall return to the subject in treating the history of races. To-day I can only say a few words