es to
confirm our own observation from history and ethnography in general,
apart from any bias for a religious and scientific system. We believe
that in this way alone there can be any true progress in the science
which we have undertaken to consider in this essay.

The result of the inquiry shows that by a slow yet inevitable evolution
man rose from his primeval condition of error, illusion, and servitude
to his fellow man, to that degree of truth and liberty of which he is
capable: he was so made that he necessarily advanced to the grand height
which has been attained by the most laborious and intelligent of the
human race. He rises higher, and is more sensible of his own dignity, in
proportion as he becomes, within the limits of his nature, the artificer
of his own greatness and civilization. While many peoples have become
extinct, others have, owing to their natural incapacity, remained in a
savage and barbarous condition, while others again have attained to a
certain amount of civilization, but their mental evolution has stopped
short. Our own race, originally, as I believe, Aryo-Semitic, for it is
possible that these two powerful branches were derived from a common
stock, has persisted without interruption in spite of many adversities
and revolutions, and has displayed in successive generations the
progress of general civilization, and the goal which man is able to
reach in his highest perfection of mind and body, favoured by the
physical and biological conditions of climate. In this race, whether
with respect to myth and science or to civilization, the theory of
evolution has practically been carried out in all its phases and
degrees.

Science and freedom were the great factors of civilization, or of
progress in every kind of conceptions, sentiments, and social
conditions: the first dissolved and destroyed the matrix of myth in
which the intelligence was at first enveloped, and liberty, which was
wholly due to science, made steady progress a matter of certainty. So
that it may be said that the whole web of human history, so far as it
consists in civilization or the progress of all good things, of the
arts, and of every intellectual and material achievement, was the
conflict of science, and her offspring freedom, against ignorance, and
the despotism which results from ignorance, under all the social forms
in which they are manifested. So that all good and wise men, sincere
lovers of the dignity of mankind and of