Walter Bagehot

It cannot yet tell us our first ancestor, but it can tell us much of an ancestor very high up in the line of descent.

We cannot get the least idea (even upon the full assumption of the theory of evolution) of the first man; but we can get a very tolerable idea of the Paulo-prehistoric man, if I may so say--of man as he existed some short time (as we now…

And the reasons for these conclusions as to a race too ancient to leave a history, but not too ancient to have left memorials, are briefly these:--First, that we cannot imagine a strong reason without attainments; and, plainly…

It is utterly incredible that whole races of men in the most distant parts of the world (capable of counting, for they quickly learn to count) should have lost the art of counting, if they had ever possessed it.

It is incredible that whole races could lose the elements of common sense, the elementary knowledge as to things material and things mental--the Benjamin Franklin philosophy--if they had ever known it.

Again, it is certain that races of men capable of postponing the present to the future (even if such races were conceivable without an educated reason) would have had so huge an advantage in the struggles of nations, that no others would…

A single Australian tribe (really capable of such a habit, and really practising it) would have conquered all Australia almost as the English have conquered it.

Suppose a race of long-headed Scotchmen, even as ignorant as the Australians, and they would have got from Torres to Bass's Straits, no matter how fierce was the resistance of the other Australians.

Thirdly, we may be sure that the morality of pre-historic man was as imperfect and as rudimentary as his reason.

Exactly also like a shrewd far-sightedness, a sound morality on elementary transactions is far too useful a gift to the human race ever to have been thoroughly lost when they had once attained it.

But innumerable savages have lost all but completely many of the moral rules most conducive to tribal welfare.

If any reasoning is safe as to pre-historic man, the reasoning which imputes to him a deficient sense of morals is safe, for all the arguments suggested by all our late researches converge upon it, and concur in teaching it.

Indeed, only a most shallow disputant who did not understand even the plainest facts of human nature could ever have maintained it; if men differ in anything they differ in the fineness and the delicacy of their moral intuitions, however…

We need not go as far as savages to learn that lesson; we need only talk to the English poor or to our own servants, and we shall be taught it very completely.

The lower classes in civilised countries, like all classes in uncivilised countries, are clearly wanting in the nicer part of those feelings which, taken together, we call the SENSE of morality.

All this an intuitionist who knows his case will now admit, but he will add that, though the amount of the moral sense may and does differ in different persons, yet that as far as it goes it is alike in all.

He likens it to the intuition of number, in which some savages are so defective that they cannot really and easily count more than three.

There is a felt necessity in them if in anything, and it would be pedantry to say that any proposition of morals was MORE certain than that five and five make ten.

The truths of arithmetic, intuitive or not, certainly cannot be acquired independently of experience nor can those of morals be so either.

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…

A modern savage is anything but the simple being which philosophers of the eighteenth century imagined him to be; on the contrary, his life is twisted into a thousand curious habits; his reason is darkened by a thousand strange prejudices…

The whole mind of a modern savage is, so to say, tattooed over with monstrous images; there is not a smooth place anywhere about it.

In his nature, it may be said, pre-historic man was the same as a modern savage; it is only in his acquisition that he was different.

The curious 'counting boys,' the arithmetical prodigies, who can work by a strange innate faculty the most wonderful sums, lose that faculty, always partially, sometimes completely, if they are taught to reckon by rule like the rest of…

First, it is plain that the first pre-historic men had the flint tools which the lowest savages use, and we can trace a regular improvement in the finish and in the efficiency of their simple instruments corresponding to that which we see…