h made nearly all that was
written about primitive men by him and everybody else of the same
school, utterly false, worthless, and deluding. "It is not in
possibilities," said De Brosses, "it is in man himself that we must
study man: it is not for us to imagine what man might have done, or
ought to have done, but to observe what he did." Of the origin and
growth of a myth, for example, Raynal had no rational idea. When he
found a myth, what he did was to reduce it to the terms of human action,
and then coolly to describe it as historical. The ancient Peruvian
legend that laws and arts had been brought to their land by two divine
children of the Sun, Manco-Capac and his sister-wife Manca-Oello, is
transformed into a grave and prosaic narrative, in which Manco-Capac's
achievements are minutely described with as much assurance as if that
sage had been Frederick the Great, or Pombal, or any statesman living
before the eyes of the writer. Endless illustrations, some of them
amusing enough, might be given of this Euhemeristic fashion of dealing
with the primitive legends of human infancy.

On the other hand, if Raynal turns myth into history, he constantly
resorts to the opposite method, and turns the hard prose of real life
into doubtful poetry. If he reduces the demi-gods to men, he delights
also in surrounding savage men with the joyous conditions of the
pastoral demi-gods. He can never resist an opportunity of introducing an
idyll. It was the fashion of the time, begun by Rousseau and perfected
by the author of _Paul and Virginia_. The taste for idylls of savage
life had at least one merit; it was a way of teaching people that the
life of savages is something normal, systematic, coherent, and not mere
chaos, formless, and void, unrelated to the life of civilisation. A
recent traveller had given an account of an annual ceremony in China,
which Raynal borrowed without acknowledgment.[167] M. Poivre had
described how the Emperor once every year went forth into the fields,
and there with his own hand guided the plough as it traced the long
furrows. Raynal elaborated this formality into a characteristic rhapsody
on peace, simplicity, plenty, and the father of his people. As a
caustic critic of M. Poivre remarked, if a Chinese traveller had arrived
at Versailles on the morning of Holy Thursday, he would have found the
King of France humbly washing the feet of twelve poor and aged men, yet,
as Frenchmen knew, this would be no oc