But suppose that he has not settled in his own mind his meaning on this point, as is most likely the case; that he has not asked himself whether man on the earth has a beginning or an end, and that he regards the race as a natural evolution, revolving always in the same circle, and takes, therefore, the infancy he speaks of as the infancy of a nation or a given community. Then his doctrine is, that the earliest stage of every civilized nation or community is the savage state, that the ancestors of the civilized in every age are savages, and that all civilization has been developed under the control of physical conditions from the savage state. {166} The germ of all civilization then must be in the savage, and civilization then must be evolved from the savage as the chicken from the egg, or the egg from the sperm. But of this there is no evidence; for, as we have seen, there is no nation known that has sprung from exclusively savage ancestors, no known instance of a savage people developing, if we may so speak, into a civilized people. The theory rests on no historical or scientific basis, and is perfectly gratuitous. In the savage state we detect reminiscences of a past civilization, not the germs of a future civilization, or if germs--germs that are dead, and that never do or can germinate. There are degrees of civilization; people may be more or less civilized; but we have no evidence, historical or scientific, of a time when there was no civilized people extant. There are civilized nations now, and contemporary with them are various savage tribes, and the same may be said of every epoch since history began. The civilized nations whose origin we know have all sprung from races more or less civilized, never from purely savage tribes. The physiologists overlook history, and mistake the evening twilight for the dawn.