Though, as already said, the latest stage of Barbarism, _i.e._, that just preceding Civilisation, is unrepresented on the earth to-day, yet we have in the Homeric and other dawn-literature of the various nations indirect records of this stage; and these records assure us of a condition of man very similar to, though somewhat more developed than, the condition of the existing races I have mentioned above. Besides this, we have in the numerous traditions of the Golden Age,[9] legends of the Fall, etc., a curious fact which suggests to us that a great number of races in advancing towards Civilisation were conscious at some point or other of having lost a primitive condition of ease and contentment, and that they embodied this consciousness, with poetical adornment and licence, in imaginative legends of the earlier Paradise. Some people indeed, seeing the universality of these stories, and the remarkable fragments of wisdom embedded in them and other extremely ancient myths and writings, have supposed that there really was a general pre-historic Eden-garden or Atlantis; but the necessities of the case hardly seem to compel this supposition. That each human soul, however, bears within itself some kind of reminiscence of a more harmonious and perfect state of being, which it has at some time experienced, seems to me a conclusion difficult to avoid; and this by itself might give rise to manifold traditions and myths. II However all this may be, the question immediately before us--having established the more healthy, though more limited, condition of the pre-civilisation peoples--is, why this lapse or fall? What is the meaning of this manifold and intensified manifestation of Disease--physical, social, intellectual, and moral? What is its place and part in the great whole of human evolution? And this involves us in a digression, which must occupy a few pages, on the nature of Health. When we come to analyse the conception of Disease, physical or mental, in society or in the individual, it evidently means, as already hinted once or twice, _loss of unity_. Health, therefore, should mean unity, and it is curious that the history of the word entirely corroborates this idea. As is well known, the words health, whole, holy, are from the same stock; and they indicate to us the fact that far back in the past those who created this group of words had a conception of the meaning of Health very different from ours, and which they embodied unconsciously in the word itself and its strange relatives. These are, for instance, and among others: heal, hallow, hale, holy, whole, wholesome; German heilig, Heiland (the Saviour); Latin salus (as in salutation, salvation); Greek kalos; also compare hail! a salutation, and, less certainly connected, the root _hal_, to breathe, as in inhale, exhale--French haleine--Italian and French alma and âme (the soul); compare the Latin spiritus, spirit or breath, and Sanskrit âtman, breath or soul.