The Native Races [of the Pacific states], Volume 2, Civilized Nations: The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume 2Bancroft, Hubert Howe
History
The Native Races [of the Pacific states], Volume 2, Civilized Nations: The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume 2
Bancroft, Hubert Howe
Indians -- Bibliography; Indians of Central America; Indians of Mexico; Indians of North America -- Pacific Coast of North America
Nor, as we have seen, is this act of civilizing the effect of
volition; nor, as will hereafter more clearly appear, does it arise
from an inherent principle of good any more than from an inherent
principle of evil. The ultimate result, though difficult of proof, we
take for granted to be good, but the agencies employed for its
consummation number among them more of those we call evil than of
those we call good. The isolated individual never, by any possibility,
can become civilized like the social man; he cannot even speak, and
without a flow of words there can be no complete flow of thought.
Send him forth away from his fellow-man to roam the forest with the
wild beasts, and he would be almost as wild and beastlike as his
companions; it is doubtful if he would ever fashion a tool, but would
not rather with his claws alone procure his food, and forever remain
as he now is, the most impotent of animals. The intellect, by which
means alone man rises above other animals, never could work, because
the intellect is quickened only as it comes in contact with intellect.
The germ of development therein implanted cannot unfold singly any
more than the organism can bear fruit singly. It is a well-established
fact that the mind without language cannot fully develop; it is
likewise established that language is not inherent, that it springs up
between men, not in them. Language, like civilization, belongs to
society, and is in no wise a part or the property of the individual.
"For strangely in this so solid-seeming World," says Carlyle, "which
nevertheless is in continual restless flux, it is appointed that
Sound, to appearance the most fleeting, should be the most continuing
of all things." And further, as remarked by Herbert Spencer: "Now that
the transformation and equivalence of forces is seen by men of science
to hold not only throughout all inorganic actions, but throughout all
organic actions; now that even mental changes are recognized as the
correlatives of cerebral changes, which also conform to this
principle; and now that there must be admitted the corollary, that all
actions going on in a society are measured by certain antecedent
energies, which disappear in effecting them, while they themselves
become actual or potential energies from which subsequent actions
arise; it is strange that there should not have arisen the
consciousness that these higher phenomena are to be studied as lower
phenomena have been studied--not, of course, after the same physical
methods, but in conformity with the same principles."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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