Let us endeavour to obtain an exact idea of this barrier, apparently impossible to be overcome, which separates man from the brute creation. Whether we compare him to the highest order of primates living on trees--this genius which is the glory of humanity, which has raised to such a height both science and art--or only to the last from among us, members of the great family rejoicing in a white skin, _then_ the transition is brutish, and it seems that an abyss separates us from the famous _wild man of the woods_, so celebrated in the travels of the last century. It is thus that the human kingdom has been established, comparing the two extremes, without taking account of the intermediate terms. Let us put on one side, for an instant, the question of origin. A race, or a family, endowed with a characteristic and united activity, by the form of mind peculiar to itself, with a prepossession for reuniting in a cluster the work of every individual intelligence, forms out of it a sort of thought common to all, and transmits this inheritance from generation to generation. One can understand that, as time goes on, this family, or this race, will arrive at a degree of civilisation very different to that which it showed at the time of its origin. The concurrence of so many intelligent modes of action will gently, but naturally, lead it to purely metaphysical ideas--to the intricate idea of a divinity, etc. But, in such an arrangement, each one is, after all, but the representative of a secular intellectual work, accustomed since the cradle, without any self-knowledge of the fact, to natural habits and language. We ask if it is right to compare a being thus raised and exalted by his own means with an animal which has no more remote past than its own birth?[30] Let us take, then, for the sake of comparing them with animals, those people in whom life is in some sort individual, among whom no person adds anything to transmitted inheritance,--among whom even this inheritance has originally come from outside, and who, we know not why, having arrived at the lowest ebb of civilisation, have not been able to improve or perfect it. Some may say that they simply copy everything. Some may say that the huge weapons used by the inhabitants of Central Africa and Australia have only become known by importation; that the savage is civilised at a given moment by contact with some foreign nation--by imitation, a faculty which is possessed, within well marked limits, by the highest order of apes; and then, that progress has been stopped when these people return to their own homes. How can we explain otherwise, for example, that the Northern Esquimaux, living on the ice by the borders of creeks and bays, can make dresses and arms, and have never been able to construct a machine capable of bearing them upon the waters?[31]