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Show {34 THE DESCENT OF 1\IAN. Pan.T I. ()f their male partners, all the labour and anxiety exhi~ bited by them in displaying their charms befo.re . th.e females would have been thrown away; and this It IS impossible to admit. Why certain bright. colours and certain sounds should excite pleasure, when m harmony, cannot, I presume, be explained any more than why certain flavours and scents are agreeable; but assuredly the same colours and the same sounds are admired by us and by many of the lower animals. The taste for the beautiful, at least as far as female beauty is concerned, is not of a special nature in the human mind; for it differs widely in the different races of man, as will hereafter be shewn, and is not quite the same even in the different nations of the same race. Judging from the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages, it might be urged that their resthetic faculty was not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds. Obviously no animal would be capable of ad~ miring such scenes as the heavens at night, a beautiful landscape, or refined music; but such high tastes, de~ pending as they do on culture and complex associations, are not enjoyed by barbarians or by uneducated persons. Many of the faculties, which have been of inestimable service to man for his progressive advancement, such as the powers of the imagination, wonder, curiosity, an undefined sense of beauty, a tendency to imitation, and the love of excitement or novelty, could not fail to have led to the most capricious changes of customs and fashions. I have alluded to this point, because a recent writer 50 has oddly fixed on Caprice "as one of the most remarkable and 50 ' The Spectator,' DPc. 4th, 18G9, p. 1430. CHAP. II. MENTAL POWERS. 65 " typical differences between savages and brutes." But not only can we perceive how it is that man is capricious, but the lower animals are, as we shall hereafter see, capricious in their affections, aversions, and sense of beauty. There is also good reason to suspect that they love novelty, for its own sake. Belief in God-Religion.-There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea.51 The question is of course wholly distinct from that higher one, whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe ; and this has been answered in the affirmative by the highest intellects that have ever lived. If, however, we include under the term "religion " the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies, the case is wholly diff~rent; for this belief seems to be almost universal with the less civilised races. Nor is it difficult to comprehend how it arose. As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally have craved ,to understand what was passing around him, and have vaguely speculated on his own existence. As ~ ~ See an excellent articl e on this subject by the Rev. F. W. Farrar, in the ' Anthropological Review,' Aug. 1864, p. ccxvii. For further facts see Sir J. Lubbock, 'Prehistoric Times,' 2nd edit. 1869, p. 564; :and especially the chapters on Religion in his 'Origin of Civilisation,• 1870. VOL. I. F |