instinct, which we have by heredity and which have been inculcated
into us wholly by our surroundings, which we drink in and accept
without any internal discussion of them: those are instinctive in
character. We go about our business, we transact the daily affairs of
life, we accept our religion and politics, not from any internal
conviction of our own or positive examination, but from our
surroundings. To that extent people are acting instinctively; and, as
such, they are on a lower stage of culture than those who arrive at
such results for themselves through intelligent personal effort. This
is a real distinction also, although somewhat more subtle, perhaps,
than the ones previously given. Therefore, the differentiation made by
the German ethnographers between wild people and the cultured peoples
is, in the main, right; but it does not admit of any sharp line of
distinction between the two. We cannot draw a fixed line and say, "On
this side are the cultured people and on that the wild," because there
are many tribes and nations who are about that line, in some respects
on one side of it, in others on the other; but in a broad, general way
this distinction (which is now universally adopted by the German
writers) is one we should keep in our minds as being based upon
careful studies and real distinctions.

Usually the writers in the English tongue prefer a different basis
than any of these which I have mentioned; they prefer the basis as to
whence is derived the food supply of a nation, or a tribe; and on the
source of that food supply they divide nations and tribes into the
more or less cultured. In earliest times (and among the rudest tribes
to-day) the food supply is furnished entirely by natural means; there
is little or no agriculture known to speak of; there is nothing in the
way of preserving domestic animals for food; hunting the wild beasts
of the forests and fishing in the streams are the two sources.