Darwin, who ascribes it to an
inherited sympathy, or Mr. Mill, who with characteristic courage
undertakes to build up the whole moral nature of man with no help
whatever either from ethical intuition or from physiological
instinct. Indeed of the everlasting questions, such as the reality
of free will, or the nature of conscience, it is, as I have before
explained, altogether inconsistent with the design of these papers
to speak. They have been discussed ever since the history of
discussion begins; human opinion is still divided, and most people
still feel many difficulties in every suggested theory, and doubt if
they have heard the last word of argument or the whole solution of
the problem in any of them. In the interest of sound knowledge it is
essential to narrow to the utmost the debatable territory; to see
how many ascertained facts there are which are consistent with all
theories, how many may, as foreign lawyers would phrase it, be
equally held in condominium by them.
But though in these great characteristics there is reason to imagine
that the pre-historic man--at least the sort of pre-historic man I
am treating of, the man some few thousand years before history
began, and not at all, at least not necessarily, the primitive man--
was identical with a modern savage, in another respect there is
equal or greater reason to suppose that he was most unlike a modern
savage.
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