CIVILIZATION AS THE RESULTANT OF ETHNIC DEVELOPMENT.
Were we to select any one of the elements of national life which we have been considering—the food-supply, the sexual relation, government, religion, arts, or language—and study in detail the part it has played in raising man from a savage to a cultured condition, we should be apt to think that it alone had been the efficient cause of his improvement—that it alone is the golden strand in the cord which has lifted nations from the unconscious abasement of their primitive state to the conscious enlighten ment of the present age. But a broader study of the nature and the his tory of man will correct this impression; ethnology will teach us the error of those who, dazzled by the power of some one faculty of mind, have attributed to it alone the progress of the race.
All the faculties and all their expressions are to a great degree cor relative. Each demands for its cultivation that the others shall not be neglected. Those who dream that all the ills of society are to be cured by a perfected social rule will be shown not less in error than those who see in the arts—the useful or the fine arts—the one guide through the labyrinth of life; and both will be led into an equal fallacy should they believe that the time has come, or ever will come, when the cultured nations of the world may profitably dispense with religion. All these represent and are the expression of essential parts of the psychology of the species; only by their symmetrical development can a nation advance, iu accordance with the laws of progress, up to a complete civilization.
Definition of Progress and words, progress and ciz'ilz:ation, may with advantage arrest our attention.
Persons often speak of the "Law of Progress" as if it were one of the fixed laws of nature which the race is bound to follow. There is nothing to justify this view. Some nations are progressive, some are not; some ages have witnessed a rapid growth of man's powers, others have seen them withering. Neither history nor ethnology authorizes the assump
tion that man will continue indefinitely to advance in his conquests over nature. On the other hand, geology points out many species which have manifested extreme viability for a period and extended themselves over wide areas, and then by some change of conditions or in themselves have lost this energy and have become wholly extinct. Chemists inform us that a very slight change in the constitution of our atmosphere would work disastrous consequences to our health and life. Such considerations teach us that it is quite unscientific to assume an indefinite continuance of advancement for the race. We should content ourselves in the study of the past, and discard applying its lessons to any distant future.
In its historic sense we may define progress to be the development of the energies and resources of a nation, and the condition of civilization to be where all these energies and resources are developed symmetrically and to a high degree.
It is evident from this definition that we cannot separate civilization from those conditions which approach but fall short of it, by any sharp distinctions, by any hard and fast lines. The process is a growth, whose separate stages blend one into the other, and do not permit us to put our finger on a dividing-line, and say, On this side is civilization, on the other is its absence. Nevertheless, the recognition of stages of progress is so indispensable to the ready understanding of History and Ethnography that they have very generally been adopted in both these sciences. They have been based on different features of social life, usually either on (r) the artistic development, (2) the mode of subsistence, or (3) on the general con dition. Nations in almost all these stages exist at present on the earth, and there is not the slightest doubt that even the most civilized began at the lowest; and this not very long ago, compared with the epochs of geologic time.