26. Nor is there anything to disturb this view, in the fact of the existence of the uncultured and barbarous tribes which occupy, and always have occupied, a large portion of the earth's surface. For, in the first place, there is not, in the aspect of the fact, or in the information which history gives us, any reason to believe that such tribes exhibit a form of human existence, which, in the natural order of progress, is earlier than the forms of civilized life, of which we have spoken. The opinion that the most savage kind of human life, least acquainted with arts, and least provided with resources, is the state of nature out of which civilized life has everywhere gradually emerged, is an opinion which, though at one time popular, is unsupported by proof, and contrary to probability.[4] Savage tribes do not so grow into civilization; their condition is, far more probably, a condition of civilization degraded and lost, than of civilization incipient and prospective. Add to this, that if we were to assume that this were otherwise; if man thus originally and naturally savage, did also naturally tend to become civilized; this _tendency_ is an endowment no less wonderful, than those endowments which civilization exhibits. The capacity is as extraordinary as the developed result; for the capacity involves the result. If savage man be the germ of the most highly civilized man, he differs from all other animal germs, as man differs from brute. And add to this again, that in the tribes which we call savage, and whose condition most differs, in external circumstances, from ours, there are, after all, a vast mass of human attributes: thought, purpose, language, family relations; generally property, law, government, contract, arts, and knowledge, to no small extent; and in almost every case, religion. Even uncivilized man is an intellectual, moral, social, religious creature; nor is there, in his condition, any reason why he may not be a spiritual creature, in the highest sense in which the most civilized man can be so.