There is yet another Nemesis—­the postulate that Aryans and Semites, or rather their ancestors, must have passed through the savage state.  Dr. Tylor writes:—­’So far as history is to be our criterion, progression is primary and degradation secondary. Culture must be gained before it can be lost.’  Now a person who has not gained what Dr. Tylor calls ‘culture’ (not in Mr. Arnold’s sense) is a man without tools, instruments, or clothes.  He is certainly, so far, like a savage; is very much lower in ‘culture’ than any race with which we are acquainted.  As a matter of hypothesis, anyone may say that man was born ’with everything handsome about him.’  He has then to account for the savage elements in Greek myth and rite.

For Us or Against Us?

We now hear that the worst and last penalty paid for De Brosses’ audacious comparison of savage with civilised superstitions is the postulate that Aryan and Semitic peoples have passed through a stage of savagery.  ’However different the languages, customs and myths, the colour and the skulls of these modern savages might be from those of Aryan and Semitic people, the latter must once have passed through the same stage, must once have been what the negroes of the West Coast of Africa are to-day.  This postulate has not been, and, according to its very nature, cannot be proved.  But the mischief done by acting on such postulates is still going on, and in several cases it has come to this—­that what in historical religions, such as our own, is known to be the most modern, the very last outcome, namely, the worship of relics or a belief in amulets, has been represented as the first necessary step in the evolution of all religions’ (i. 197).

I really do not know who says that the prehistoric ancestors of Aryans and Semites were once in the same stage as the ’negroes of the West Coast of Africa are to-day.’  These honest fellows are well acquainted with coined money, with the use of firearms, and other resources of civilisation, and have been in touch with missionaries, Miss Kingsley, traders, and tourists.  The ancestors of the Aryans and Semites enjoyed no such advantages.  Mr. Max Muller does not tell us who says that they did.  But that the ancestors of all mankind passed through a stage in which they had to develop for themselves tools, languages, clothes, and institutions, is assuredly the belief of anthropologists.  A race without tools, language, clothes, pottery, and social institutions, or with these in the shape of undeveloped speech, stone knives, and ’possum or other skins, is what we call a race of savages.  Such we believe the ancestors of mankind to have been—­at any rate after the Fall.

Now when Mr. Max Muller began to write his book, he accepted this postulate of anthropology (i. 15).  When he reached i. 197 he abandoned and denounced this postulate.

I quote his acceptance of the postulate (i. 15):—­