Page:The Native Races of the Pacific States, volume 2.djvu/39

Rh that the savage state is but a degeneration from something higher, can become tenable, the whole order of nature must be reversed. Races may deteriorate, civilized peoples relapse into barbarism, but such relapse cannot take place except under abnormal conditions. We cannot believe that any nation, once learning the use of iron would cast it away for stone. Driven from an iron-yielding land, the knowledge of iron might at last be forgotten, but its use would never be voluntarily relinquished. And so with any of the arts or inventions of man. Societies, like individuals, are born, mature, and decay; they grow old and die; they may pause in their progress, become diseased, and thereby lose their strength and retrograde, but they never turn around and grow backward or ungrow,&mdash;they could not if they would.

In the brute creation this element of progress is wanting. The bird builds its nest, the bee its cell, the beaver its dam, with no more skill or elaboration to-day, than did the bird or bee or beaver primeval. The instinct of animals does not with time become intellect; their comforts do not increase, their sphere of action does not enlarge. By domestication, stocks may be improved, but nowhere do we see animals uniting for mutual improvement, or creating for themselves an artificial existence. So in man, whose nature comprises both the animal and the intellectual, the physical organism neither perceptibly advances nor deteriorates. The features may, indeed, beam brighter from the light of a purer intellectuality cast upon them from within, but the hand, the eye, the heart, so far as we know, is no more perfect now than in the days of Adam.

As viewed by Mr Bagehot, the body of the accomplished man "becomes, by training, different from what it once was, and different from that of the rude man, becomes charged with stored virtue and acquired faculty which come away from it unconsciously." But the body of the accomplished man dies, and the son can