We might quote whole pages from this naturalist philosopher in which the elevation of his style strives with the grandeur of his ideas. “I never used my self-love,” he says, “in bringing forward other opinions against those of the visitors to the orang-outang ... I never drove back the torrent of information which I had the happiness of receiving from each separate mind.... I have faith in the soundness of popular opinions, the masses rejoicing in an instinctive good sense which makes them clear-headed, and renders them peculiarly able to seize the salient point of any question.” This was an excellent method, and showed the power of Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. It is curious to compare with him another writer who, from within his study, invoked upon these questions, at least, that which we may call _universal acquiescence_,--it is Maupertuis. Speaking of the characteristics which make man different from animals, he says, “Simple good sense seizes these differences; they have always been felt, and there we behold one of those convictions which the _universality and uniformity of all men_ characterise as the truth.”[50] Maupertuis did not certainly know that the orang-outang,--a word which means _wild-man_,--is no metaphor for the inhabitants of the Indian Archipelago, and that in the country inhabited by the “long-nosed” Guenon,[51] the popular belief is that, being sharper than the others, he only keeps silent in order to preserve his liberty. Nothing can be more fallacious than these pretended truths, sustained merely by _universal acquiescence_. At first it was invoked as a proof, at a time when scarcely one-tenth of the inhabited world was known:[52] but let us proceed. In our own day, we know a little better what to make of this kind of proof, which science has abandoned to theologians. Experience has proved, day by day, what will become of this pretended universality among mankind, of certain thoughts, certain sentiments, and certain aspirations.[53] We shall see, farther on, that the _community_ of some of those intellectual manifestations, which many have wished to regard as general, is often restricted to one race alone amongst mankind, and limited in space by the boundaries of the continent occupied by this race. And now we see how anthropology in her turn, can, in all these points, assist even philosophy itself. For example, do we not feel that, from henceforward, the words _beautiful_ and _right_ can mean nothing absolute; since whatever is _beautiful_ and _right_ upon a hemisphere, for any given intelligence, cannot be so in an opposite hemisphere,--_cannot possibly be so_ in a mind otherwise formed and belonging to another race. To these two words we must, by means of anthropology, restore an exclusively relative value.[54] The _True_ alone is absolute, unchangeable in both time and space. That alone reigns universally, and let us not forget this, it flourishes in science alone,--it is only to be found there.[55]