conscience of his pre-historic ancestor as imperfect, rudimentary, or
hardly to be discerned, for he has to admit much the same so as to
square his theory to plain modern facts, and that theory in the modern
form may consistently be held along with them. Of course if an
intuitionist can accept this conclusion as to pre-historic men, so
assuredly may Mr. Spencer, who traces all morality back to our
inherited experience of utility, or Mr. Darwin, who ascribes it to an
inherited sympathy, or Mr. Mill, who with characteristic courage
undertakes to build up the whole moral nature of man with no help
whatever either from ethical intuition or from physiological instinct.
Indeed of the everlasting questions, such as the reality of free will,
or the nature of conscience, it is, as I have before explained,
altogether inconsistent with the design of these papers to speak. They
have been discussed ever since the history of discussion begins; human
opinion is still divided, and most people still feel many difficulties
in every suggested theory, and doubt if they have heard the last word
of argument or the whole solution of the problem in any of them. In the
interest of sound knowledge it is essential to narrow to the utmost the
debatable territory; to see how many ascertained facts there are which
are consistent with all theories, how many may, as foreign lawyers
would phrase it, be equally held in condominium by them.

But though in these great characteristics there is reason to imagine
that the pre-historic man--at least the sort of pre-historic man I am
treating of, the man some few thousand years before history began, and
not at all, at least not necessarily, the primitive man--was identical
with a modern savage, in another respect there is equal or greater
reason to suppose that he was most unlike a modern savage. A modern
savage is anything but the simple being which philosophers of the
eighteenth century imagined him to be; on the contrary, his life is
twisted into a thousand curious habits; his reason is darkened by a
thousand strange prejudices; his feelings are frightened by a thousand
cruel superstitions. The whole mind of a modern savage is, so to say,
tattooed over with monstrous images; there is not a smooth place
anywhere about it. But there is no reason to suppose the minds of
pre-historic men to be so cut and marked; on the contrary, the creation
of these habits, these superstitions, these prejudices, must have take