The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1884Various
History
The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1884
Various
Massachusetts -- Periodicals; New England -- Periodicals
Let me now turn back the page of history. A little more than one million
years ago this earth was covered, as now, with vegetable forms, and was
the dwelling of animals, as numerous, perhaps, and as various as now;
but there was no humanity. The time was come when man, who had passed
already three times round the planetary chain, and was nearly half way
through his fourth round, should again make his appearance on the scene.
Nature works only in her own way, and that way is uniform. The first man
must be born of parents already living. As there are no human parents,
he must be born of lower animals, and of those lower animals most nearly
resembling the coming human animal. Darwin has told us what the animal
was, yet the new being was a man and not an ape, because, in addition to
its animal soul, it was possessed also of a human soul. We all know that
man is an animal. Those modern students of science, who affirm that that
is the whole truth of human nature, take a lower view of their own being
than the Indian philosophers. Man is an animal plus a human and a
spiritual soul.
Behold, now, the earth peopled by man. Through seven races must he pass,
each with its various branches. Yet these races are not contemporaneous;
for Nature is in no hurry. One race comes forward at a time, reaches
the height of its possibility, then passes away during great physical
transformations, and leaves but a wreck behind to live, and witness,
in some new part of earth, the coming of another race. These races
and branch races and sub-branch races are to be animated by the same
identical souls. Hence, one race at a time; at first, even, one sub-race
only, for the next is to be of a higher order. After each root-race has
run its course, the earth has always been prepared by a great geological
convulsion for the next. In this convulsion has perished all that makes
up what we call civilization, yet not all men then living. Since some
souls are slower than others, all are not ready to pass into the second
race, when the time for that race has come. Hence fragments of old races
survive, kept up for a time by the incarnation of the laggard souls
whose progress has been too slow. Thus, we are told, although the first
and second root-races have now entirely disappeared, there still remain
relics of the third and fourth. The proper seat of this third root-race
was that lost continent which Wallace told us, long ago, stood where now
roll the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, south and southwest of
Asia. Here we have, in the degraded Papuan and Australian, the remainder
of the third race. Degraded I call him, because his ancestors, though
inferior to the highest races of to-day, were far in advance of him. So
it must always be. Destroy the accumulations of the highest race of men
now living, and the next generation will be barbarians; the second,
savages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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