progress of humanity. The short span of history, which, of course, does not afford us sufficient material to admit of even a probable empirical law, to say nothing of a 'law' properly speaking, has shown us already more than once how external development and internal mortality may go in a nation hand in hand, and the inclination of the masses as well as of the cultured' to care only for their material welfare and to submit to despotism, has been in antiquity, and perhaps, too, in several Oriental peoples, a symptom of such internal mortality. We have thus indicated the theoretical position of a question which we propose in the last Section to consider from a very different point of view. As the question of the Age of the Human Race concerns Materialism at bottom only as the most obvious and palpable opponent against vague theological ideas, while it has little to do with the innermost basis of specific Materialism, so is it also with the question of the Unity of the Human Race. This question is merely another form of the question of Descent from a Single Pair, as Cuvier's theory of the Revolutions of the Earth was another form of the tradition of the Creative Days, and as the doctrine of the Immutability of the Species may be referred to Noah's Ark. But for our very gradual deliverance from these traditions, science, which professes to be so unprejudiced, would never have treated these questions so passionately, and the conflict of the greater error with the less has here too been a source of much profitable knowledge. In order to determine a matter of which no one has a clear conception, namely, whether mankind is a unity, skulls have been measured, skeletons studied, proportions. compared; and at all events ethnography has been enriched, the sphere of physiology widened, and innumerable facts of history and anthropology gathered and saved from oblivion. But as to the main point all this industry has decided nothing, except perhaps this, that the innermost spring of these discussions lies not in a purely scientific interest, but in great party questions. The matter was the more complicated in that, besides the supposed religious interest, the North American slave question has occupied a great share in this controversy. In such cases men easily content themselves with the cheapest and most threadbare arguments, to which emphasis is then lent by pomp of erudition and the varnish of scientific form. Thus the work of Nott and Gliddon in particular (Types of Mankind,' 1854), is completely saturated with the American tendency to represent the negroes as creatures of the lowest possible kind and of almost brutish organisation; but as previously the opposite tendency had dominated the treatment of these questions, this very book contributed greatly to a sharper appreciation of the characteristic features of races. The in many respects excellent Anthropologie der Naturvölker' of Waitz (too early lost to science) suffers, on the contrary, from a constant exaggeration of the arguments for the unity' of mankind. This goes so far that Waitz frequently appeals to the utterly untrustworthy and unscientific Prichard; that he still regards Blumenbach (1795) as the first authority on questions of the differences between species and races; that he honours Wagner's collection of cases of hybridism (in Prichard) with the epithet "careful," and finally commits himself to this sentence: "What importance, in fact, could be attributed even to specific differences in nature, and how fortuitous would their fixity appear, if their effacement were possible by continuous hybrid productions!" That from such a standpoint nothing can be accomplished for the main point, even if its solution were in itself possible, needs no proof. What may happen in fact when people attempt by painful periphrases to prove things that may any minute be refuted by experience, may appear from the single illustration that Waitz quite calmly adduces hares and rabbits as different species, while M. Roux in Angoulême for eight years had been attaining excellent results with his three-eighth hares-a new species of animal, or race, if it is preferred, invented by him.18 The idea of the unity of mankind no longer needs the support which it may once have found in the doctrine of a common descent; although we may doubt whether the myth of Adam and Eve exercised any softening influence on the relations of the Spaniards with the Indians, or the Creoles with their Negro slaves. The essential points -the extension of the claim to humanity to men of every race, the maintenance of equality before the law in the national commonwealth, the application of international law in neighbourly intercourse-may very well be established and maintained, without therefore bargaining for absolute equality in the capacities of different races. But the descent from a common primitive stock by no means guarantees equal capacities, since to lag behind in development for thousands of years might finally lead to any given degree of inferiority. Only so much seems to be guaranteed by the concurrent descent, that a backward race, or even one that has become hardened and perverted in its lower qualities, might yet, by circumstances which we cannot calculate, be led to a higher development. But this, on the principles of the doctrine of descent, must always be conceded as a possibility not only for backward human races but even for the animals. The descent from the ape,' which is most bitterly denied by those who are least raised by inner dignity of 18 It has been attempted to make this very case of successful crossing a witness for this immutability of species, by asserting that M. Roux's three-eighth hares, by continued breeding in, return entirely to the maternal rabbit-type (Rev. des Deux Mondes, 15 Mar. 1869, p. 413 ff.). But this is by no means to refute the persistence of the crossed race, and as little can it be said that the new 'rabbits' do not differ very essentially and permanently from the pri mitive maternal stock, for otherwise there would be no object in breeding them. It is not necessary to waste a single word on this main point, since these creatures, as well as similar productions, form a notable article of commerce. But as to the tendency of the middle form to return to one of the two types maintained and consolidated for thousands of years, this is entirely in harmony with what has been said above, p. 43 ff. mind above the sensual basis of our existence, is of course in the strict sense not a consequence of Darwin's theory. This goes rather to indicate in the earlier history of man a common stock,19 from which on one side, tending upwards, man branched off, and on the other, persisting in the animal form, the ape. Thus the ancestors of man must be conceived as being indeed formed like the ape, but already endowed with the disposition to a higher development, and something like this appears to have been Kant's idea. Things look still more favourable for the traditional pedigree of man on the hypothesis of polyphyletic descent. Here we may carry back man's advantage in the capacity for development to the first beginnings of organic life. It is, nevertheless, obvious that this advantage, which is at bottom merely a convenience in the arranging of our thoughts and feelings, cannot throw the least weight into the scale in favour of the polyphyletic theory; for otherwise the scientific grounds would be corrupted by the admixture of subjective and ethical motives, 19 The descent from the ape' derives its hatefulness in the popular objection to Darwinism, of course, only from the comparison with the now existing apes, on which alone the popular idea of the nature of an ape is formed. It may here, therefore, be quite indifferent whether or not this obsolete ancestral form is in the zoological sense described as an 'ape,' as it had at all events very different qualities from the present apes. Oscar Schmidt (Doctrine of Descent, &c., E.T. p. 292 f.) says on this: "The development of the anthropoid apes has taken a lateral course from the nearest human progenitors, and man can as little be transformed into a gorilla as a squirrel can be exchanged into a rat. The bony skull of these apes has reached an extreme comparable to that of our domestic cattle. But this extreme ... And, in fact, much is not appears only gradually in the course gained for the pride of man, on a closer examination, by this merely superficial removal from the animal stock; and much need not be gained for this pride, since it is but an unjustifiable rebellion against the idea of the unity of nature and of the uniformity of the formative principle in the great whole of organic life, of which we form only a part. Let us give up this unphilosophical rebellion, and it will be found that to proceed from an already highly organised animal, in which the light of thought manifests itself creatively, is fitter and more agreeable than to proceed from an inorganic clod of earth. However far we may, on scientific grounds, remove man from the existing apes, we shall not be able to refrain from carrying back into his earlier history a number of characteristics of the ape which are now most repulsive to us. Snell, who in his clever treatise on the 'Schöpfung des Menschen' (Jena, 1863), has very nearly attained his object of combining the most rigorous requirements of science with the conservation of our moral and religious ideas, is at all events wrong in believing that humanity must have announced itself, even in the earlier animal forms from which it arose, by something salient and presentient in look and gesture. We must by no means confound the conditions of perfectibility with an early appearance of their results. What now appears to us most noble and sublime may very well only unfold itself as the last blossom of a calmly and safely passing life, richly saturated with familiar impressions, while the possibility of such a life must be attained by very different qualities. The first step towards the possibility of the civilisation of man was presumably the attaining of superiority over all other animals, and it is not probable that he employed for this end essentially different means from those which he now employs with the object of lording it over his kind. Cunning and cruelty, savage violence and lurking knavery, must have played an important part in those struggles; nay, the fact that even now, when he might succeed so |