The doctrine of development
means this,--that in unavoidable changes men like the new doctrine
which is most of a 'preservative addition' to their old doctrines.
The imitative and the persecuting tendencies make all change in
early nations a kind of selective conservatism, for the most part
keeping what is old, but annexing some new but like practice--an
additional turret in the old style.
It is this process of adding suitable things and rejecting
discordant things which has raised those scenes of strange manners
which in every part of the world puzzle the civilised men who come
upon them first. Like the old head-dress of mountain villages, they
make the traveller think not so much whether they are good or
whether they are bad, as wonder how any one could have come to think
of them; to regard them as 'monstrosities,' which only some wild
abnormal intellect could have hit upon. And wild and abnormal indeed
would be that intellect if it were a single one at all. But in fact
such manners are the growth of ages, like Roman law or the British
constitution. No one man--no one generation--could have thought of
them,--only a series of generations trained in the habits of the
last and wanting something akin to such habits, could have devised
them.
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