ial inequalities, natural and habitual deference to the law.
Similarly in a race, just as there is a difference of aptitude for
general ideas, so will its religion, art, and philosophy be different.
If man is naturally fitted for broader universal conceptions and
inclined at the same time to their derangement, through the nervous
irritability of an over-excited organization, we find, as in India, a
surprising richness of gigantic religious creations, a splendid bloom
of extravagant transparent epics, a strange concatenation of subtle,
imaginative philosophic systems, all so intimately associated and so
interpenetrated with a common sap, that we at once recognize them, by
their amplitude, by their color, and by their disorder, as productions
of the same climate and of the same spirit. If, on the contrary,
the naturally sound and well-balanced man is content to restrict his
conceptions to narrow bounds in order to cast them in more precise
forms, we see, as in Greece, a theology of artists and narrators,
special gods that are soon separated from objects and almost
transformed at once into substantial personages, the sentiment of
universal unity nearly effaced and scarcely maintained in the vague
notion of destiny, a philosophy, rather than subtle and compact,
grandiose and systematic, narrow metaphysically[5] but incomparable
in its logic, sophistry, and morality, a poesy and arts superior to
anything we have seen in lucidity, naturalness, proportion, truth, and
beauty. If, finally, man is reduced to narrow conceptions deprived
of any speculative subtlety, and at the same time finds that he is
absorbed and completely hardened by practical interests, we see, as
in Rome, rudimentary deities, mere empty names, good for denoting the
petty details of agriculture, generation, and the household, veritable
marriage and farming labels, and, therefore, a null or borrowed
mythology, philosophy, and poesy. Here, as elsewhere, comes in the law
of mutual dependencies.[6] A civilization is a living unit, the parts
of which hold together the same as the parts of an organic body. Just
as in an animal, the instincts, teeth, limbs, bones, and muscular
apparatus are bound together in such a way that a variation of one
determines a corresponding variation in the others, and out of which
a skillful naturalist, with a few bits, imagines and reconstructs an
almost complete body, so, in a civilization, do religion, philosophy,
the family scheme, l