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Indirect evidence that early human nature differed from later human nature, by having this extreme emotional variability, is yielded us by the contrast between the child and the adult among ourselves. For, on the hypothesis of evolution, the civilized man, passing through phases representing phases passed through by the race, will, early in life, betray this impulsiveness which the early race had. The saying that the savage has the mind of a child with the passions of a man—or, as it would be more correctly put, has adult passions which act in a childish manner—thus possesses a deeper meaning than appears. There is a genetic relationship between the two natures, such that, allowing for differences of kind and degree in the emotions, we may regard the coördination of them in the child as fairly representing the coördination in the primitive man.

The more special emotional traits are in large part dependent on, and further illustrative of, this fundamental trait. This relative impulsiveness—this smaller departure from primitive reflex action, this lack of the re-representative emotions which hold the simpler ones in check—is accompanied by improvidence.

The Australians are described as "incapable of any thing like persevering labor the reward of which is in futurity." According to Kolben, the Hottentots are "the laziest people under the sun;" and we are told that with the Bushmen it is "always either a feast or a famine." Passing to the indigenes of India, it is said of the Todas that they are "indolent and slothful;" of the Bhils, that they have "a contempt and dislike to labor"—will half-starve rather than work; while of the Santals we read that they have not "the unconquerable laziness of the very old Hill-tribes." So, from Northern Asia, the Kirghiz may be taken as exemplifying idleness; and in America we have the fact that none of the aboriginal peoples, if uncoerced, show capacity for industry. In the North, cut off from his hunting life, the Indian, capable of no other, decays and disappears; and in the South the tribes disciplined by the Jesuits lapsed into their original state, or a worse, when the stimuli and restraints ceased. All which facts are in part ascribable to inadequate consciousness of the future—feeble grasp of distant results. Where, as among the Sandwich-Islanders, and in some of the Malay societies, we find considerable industry, it goes along with such a social state as implies discipline throughout a long past—conditions have caused considerable divergence from the primitive nature. It is true that perseverance with a view to remote benefit occurs among savages. They bestow much time and pains on their weapons: six months to make as many arrows, immense patience in drilling holes through stones. But in these cases, beyond the fact that the benefits are simple, proximate, and