But to return to the theory the professor borrows from the positivists. As the professor excludes from his physiology the idea of creation, we cannot easily understand how he determines what is the infancy of the human race, or when the human race was in its infancy. If the race had no beginning, if, like Topsy, "it didn't come, but grow'd," it had no infancy; if it had a beginning, and you assume its earliest stage was that of infancy, then it is necessary to know which stage is the earliest, and what man really was in that stage. Hence, chronology becomes all-important, and, as the author's science rejects all received chronology, and speaks of changes and events which took place millions and millions of ages ago, and of which there remains no record but that chronicled in the rocks; but, as in that record exact dates are not given, chronology, with him, whether of the earth or of man, must be very uncertain, and it seems to us that it must be very difficult for science to determine, with much precision, when the race was, or what it was, in its infancy. Thus he says:
"In the intellectual infancy of the savage state, man transfers to nature his conceptions of himself, and, considering that everything he does is determined by his own pleasure, regards all passing events as depending on the arbitrary volition of a superior but invisible power. He gives to the world a constitution like his own. The tendency is _necessarily_ to superstition. Whatever is strange, or powerful, or vast, impresses his imagination with dread. Such objects are only the outward manifestations of an indwelling spirit, and, therefore, worthy of his veneration." (_Intellect. Devel_. p. 2.)
We beg the professor's pardon, but he has only imperfectly learned his lesson. In this which he regards as the age of fetich worship, and the first stage of human development, he includes ideas and conceptions which belong to the second, or metaphysical age of his masters. But let this pass for the present. The author evidently assumes that the savage state is the intellectual infancy of the race. But how knows he that it is not the intellectual old age and decrepitude of the race? The author, while he holds, or appears to hold, like the positivists, to the continuous progress of the race, does not hold to the continuous progress of any given nation.