we still recognize, and which a race
like the Aryan people, scattered from the Ganges to the Hebrides,
established tinder all climates, ranged along every degree of
civilization, transformed by thirty centuries of revolutions, shows
nevertheless in its languages, in its religions, in its literatures,
and in its philosophies, the community of blood and of intellect
which still to-day binds together all its offshoots. However they may
differ, their parentage is not lost; barbarism, culture and grafting,
differences of atmosphere and of soil, fortunate or unfortunate
occurrences, have operated in vain; the grand characteristics of the
original form have lasted, and we find that the two or three leading
features of the primitive imprint are again apparent under the
subsequent imprints with which time has overlaid them. There is
nothing surprising in this extraordinary tenacity. Although the
immensity of the distance allows us to catch only a glimpse in a
dubious light of the origin of species,[1] the events of history throw
sufficient light on events anterior to history to explain the almost
unshaken solidity of primordial traits. At the moment of encountering
them, fifteen, twenty, and thirty centuries before our era, in an
Aryan, Egyptian, or Chinese, they represent the work of a much greater
number of centuries, perhaps the work of many myriads of centuries.
For, as soon as an animal is born it must adapt itself to its
surroundings; it breathes in another way, it renews itself
differently, it is otherwise stimulated according as the atmosphere,
the food, and the temperature are different. A different climate
and situation create different necessities and hence activities of a
different kind; and hence, again, a system of different habits, and,
finally, a system of different aptitudes and instincts. Man, thus
compelled to put himself in equilibrium with circumstances, contracts
a corresponding temperament and character, and his character, like
his temperament, are acquisitions all the more stable because of the
outward impression being more deeply imprinted in him by more frequent
repetitions and transmitted to his offspring by more ancient heredity.
So that at each moment of time the character of a people may be
considered as a summary of all antecedent actions and sensations; that
is to say, as a quantity and as a weighty mass, not infinite,[2] since
all things in nature are limited, but disproportionate to the rest and