The Peruvian customs were certainly more gentle than the Mexican; and their religious ideas were as inoffensive as those of Montezuma’s subjects were ferocious. In spite of this, their social condition was marked by far less energy and variety. Their crude despotism never developed into more than a dull kind of communism; whereas the Aztec civilization had made various political experiments of great complexity. Its military system was far more vigorous; and though the use of writing was equally unknown in both empires, it seems that poetry, history, and ethics, which were extensively studied at the time of Cortes, would have advanced further in Mexico than in Peru, the institutions of which were coloured by an Epicurean indifferentism that was highly unfavourable to intellectual progress. Clearly we must regard the more active people as superior. Von Humboldt’s view is simply a consequence of the way in which he defines civilization.[126] Without going over the same ground again, I was yet bound to clear up this point; for if two civilizations had really been able to develop in inverse ratio to the merits of their respective languages, I should have had to give up the idea of any necessary connexion between the intelligence of a people and the value of the language spoken by it. But I cannot do this, in view of what I have already said about Greek and Sanscrit, as compared with English, French, and German. It would be, however, a very difficult task to assign a reason, along these lines, for the exact course taken by the language of a hybrid people. We have seldom sufficient knowledge either of the quantity or quality of the intermixture of blood to be able properly to trace its effects. Yet these racial influences persist, and if they are not unravelled, we may easily come to false conclusions. It is just because the connexion between race and language is so close, that it lasts much longer than the political unity of the different peoples, and may be recognized even when the peoples are grouped under new names. The language changes with their blood, but does not die out until the last fragment of the national life has disappeared. This is the case with modern Greek. Sadly mutilated, robbed of its wealth of grammar, impoverished in the number of its sounds, with the pure stream of its vocabulary troubled and muddy, it has none the less retained the impress of its original form.[127] In the intellectual world it corresponds to the sullied and deflowered Parthenon, which first became a church for the Greek popes, and then a powder-magazine; which had its pediments and columns shattered in a thousand places by the Venetian bullets of Morosini; but which still stands, for the wonder and adoration of the ages, as a model of pure grace and unadorned majesty.