Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/212

200 eternal unfolding; another recognizes in the soul-element the vital principle of progress, and attributes to religion all the benefits of enlightenment; one builds a theory on the groundwork of a fundamental and innate morality; another discovers in the forces of Nature the controlling influence upon man's destiny; while yet others, as we have seen, believe accumulative and inherent nervous force to be the media through which culture is transmitted. Some believe that moral causes create the physical; others, that physical causes create the moral.

Thus Mr. Buckle attempts to prove that man's development is wholly dependent upon his physical surroundings. Huxley points to a system of reflex actions—mind acting on matter, and matter on mind—as the possible culture-basis. Darwin advances the doctrine of an evolution from vivified matter as the principle of progressive development. In the transmutation of nerve-element from parents to children, Bagehot sees "the continuous force which binds age to age, which enables each to begin with some improvement on the last, if the last did itself improve; which makes each civilization not a set of detached dots, but a line of color, surely enhancing shade by shade." Some see in human progress the ever-ruling hand of a Divine Providence, others the results of man's skill; with some it is free-will, with others necessity; some believe that intellectual development springs from better systems of government, others that wealth lies at the foundation of all culture; every philosopher recognizes some cause, invents some system, or brings human actions under the dominion of some species of law.

As in animals of the same genus or species, inhabiting widely-different localities, we see the results of common instincts, so in the evolutions of the human race, divided by time or space, we see the same general principles at work. So, too, it would seem, whether species are one or many, whether man is a perfectly created being or an evolution from a lower form, that all the human races of the globe are formed on one model and governed by the same laws. In the customs, languages, and myths, of ages and nations far removed from each other in all social, moral, and mental characteristics, innumerable and striking analogies exist. Not only have all nations weapons, but many who are separated from each other by a hemisphere use the same weapon; not only is belief universal, but many relate the same myth; and to suppose the bow and arrow to have had a common origin, or that all flood-myths, and myths of a future life, are but offshoots from Noachic and Biblical narratives, is scarcely reasonable.

It is easier to tell what civilization is not, and what it does not spring from, than what it is and what its origin. To attribute its rise to any of the principles, ethical, political, or material, that come under the cognizance of man, is fallacy, for it is as much an entity as any other primeval principle; nor may we, with Archbishop Whately,