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arrive at the same principle.  There is the highest reason to believe that the primitive man received from his Creator, along with his existence, such a knowledge of the qualities, powers, and uses of the various objects around him, together with such oral and religious principles, as would lay in his family, and among his immediate descendants the true foundations of civilized society. Hence the primitive nations are, at their first appearance, in history, already civilized. Savagism was an after growth, which took its origin from idle, or disorderly men who, abhorring the constraints of society, sought, in the bosom of boundless forests, that freedom from control, and from labor, which was congenial with their wandering disposition. By rapidly extending themselves over the uncultivated regions of Europe, and the North of Asia, they there prepared the elements of future nations. This mankind, either in a civilized, or savage sate, became diffused in time over the surface of the whole globe. In every position suffering the influences of the climate, of the sterility or richness of the soil, of the elevation or depression of the face of their country, of the vicinity of the seas or desarts, of their insular, or continental situation: or the modification of these, 


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resulting from their occupations, and their habits of living. Hence they now present to the eye an almost infinite variety in their complexation, their form and features, and their whole personal aspect.

If we compare together only those varieties of human nature by which the several sections of mankind differ most widely from one another, the difference is so great that, on the first view, it might very naturally lead to the conclusion that they must belong to distinct species. But when we come to examine more particularly the intermediate grades which connect the extremes, and observe by what minute difference they approach, or recede from, one another; and when we observe further, that each of these minute graduations can be traced to obvious and natural causes, forming so many links, as it were, in the great chain connecting the extremes, we are ready to call in question our first impressions, and perceive the necessity of subjecting them to a new and more rigorous examination.
  
I have already remarked, that it is contrary to the laws of true philosophy to resort to the hypothesis of different original species of men in order to explain varieties which can otherwise be accounted for from

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