The Unity of Civilization by Various
page 36 of 319 (11%)
page 36 of 319 (11%)
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confessed, unwittingly perhaps, in the first humanist creed: 'I believe
in one Blood, one Speech, one Cult, one congruous Way of Living.'[2] Modern ethnology, indeed, tends to subsume cult under way-of-living, as a peculiarly delicate test of conformity--and to regard language, alongside of both cult and way-of-living, as another manifestation of the same human reason; distinguishing therefore two kinds of unity--one physical or morphological, as of one animal species in an animal kingdom, the other cultural or psychological, as of the sole incarnate occupant of a realm of mind; and classifying the 'Science of Man' accordingly. But, in essentials, that Athenian creed will serve: our latest ethnologists, and statesmen too, are faced with the same league of problems. THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS AN ANIMAL SPECIES Whatever Greek statesmen thought about the gulf between Greek and Persian, or Greek and Barbarian generally, Greek ethnologists raised no fundamental barrier between the different sorts of Man. Good naturalists as they were, and experienced breeders of farm-stock, they accepted white, brown, and black men; and were prepared to accept any other breed that Nearchus or Pytheas might confront them with, as members of one brotherhood, just as they accepted white, brown, or black sheep, with horns of Ammon or with none. Eratosthenes, most philosophical, and therewith most _political_ of them all, was bred in Cyrene, where some Greeks seem to have been black; and he worked in Alexandria, where the University was a human Zoo like that of London or Berlin. Their simple farmer's theory of natural selection attributed 'scorched-faced' Aethiopians to sunburn, and other racial types to large factors of region and régime. The classical treatise is that of Hippocrates 'On |
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