The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-10-12

rules of living than the inexorable power of
habit had imposed on thelower animals. The
fruits of a past eternity of slowly-improved
babits-supposing toat to be the Darwinian
history assigned to the ancestors of man
could not result in this burst of wild caprice,
in these haphazard attempts to make his lot
happier, and to beautify his person, by arbi-
trary and mischievous rules. You can only
account for those wild lashings-out against
nature, which are observable in the first
moral and social experiments of barbarous
man, by his dim consciousness of possessing
power of ruling himself and ruling the world
around him, which is neither observable in
any other animal, nor yet justified by its
first tentative efforts even in man himself.
If the savage is more loaded physically with
ugly ornaments and morally with still uglier
laws than any civilized being, is it not clear
that his blind sense of power was not, in its
initial state, an advantage to him, but dis
advantage, and yet that it was so strong
within him that it would image itself in all
sorts of arbitrary whims in spite of that dis
advantage? Now, what is utterly incompati-
BILE with all the laws of nature, including those
of animal life, is anything arbitrary or capri
cious. Mr.. Darwin shows that the moment
any variety of type develops itself which is
disadvantageous to the race to which it
belongs, in the circumstances in which
it is placed, there is an immediate tendency
to extinguish it. How, then, could variety
arise and prosper whose distinctive charac-
teristic was an arbitrary self-will-a
disposition to cast about in the world for q
larger measure of happiness than the average
of that species could enjoy, and to adopt the
most iniudicieus methods for securing that
happiness? Surely, unless such character
istic were accompanied by some great and
critical rise in the dead level of his intelli-
gence above that of other animals, such a
creature would be Immediately eXtinguished
in the struggle for existence? You can in no
wise imagine the gradual rise of self-will, and
vanity, and superstition, and other distinctive
forms of savage life, as animal tendencies
simply engrafted upon the ordinary animal
cunning-for they would be SO adverse to the
existence of the creatures in whom they
sprang up as to cause their extinction. An
elephant impeded by bit of wood stuck
through his trunk by way of ornament, or a
baboon subject to the superstition that par
ticular stones had the power to kill it, would
clearly have a very bad chance with other
elephants and balloons. What we seem to
see in Sir John Lubbocks Investigations is
the proof that man is a species raised a whole
stratum of intelligence above the animals next
in intelligence to him, or he would not
survive the enormous disadvantage of the
growth of an imagination and of social pas
sions the first STRINGS of which are not
advantageous, but dangerous and anarchical.
To our minds, the new lights we are getting
upon savage life go a great way towards
proving that the human race cannot be
variety produced by the Darwinian law from
lower races, simply because the varieties of
living introduced into the universe by the
germinal human fnculties are so distinctly
unfavorable varieties of living, varieties
which have all to be cleared away as reason
takes its fuller development, and the imagina-
tion begins to understand the limits within
which it works under the divine law.