I have elaborated the evidence for this conclusion at what may seem
needless and tedious length, but I have done so on account of its
importance. If we accept it, and if we are sure of it, it will help
us to many most important conclusions. Some of these I have dwelt
upon in previous papers, but I will set them down again.

First, it will in part explain to us what the world was about, so to
speak, before history. It was making, so to say, the intellectual
consistence--the connected and coherent habits, the preference of
equable to violent enjoyment, the abiding capacity to prefer, if
required, the future to the present, the mental pre-requisites
without which civilisation could not begin to exist, and without
which it would soon cease to exist even had it begun. The primitive
man, like the present savage, had not these pre-requisites, but,
unlike the present savage, he was capable of acquiring them and of
being trained in them, for his nature was still soft and still
impressible, and possibly, strange as it may seem to say, his
outward circumstances were more favourable to an attainment of
civilisation than those of our present savages. At any rate, the
pre-historic times were spent in making men capable of writing a
history, and having something to put in it when it is written, and
we can see how it was done.

Two preliminary processes indeed there are which seem inscrutable.
There was some strange preliminary process by which the main races
of men were formed; they began to exist very early, and except by
intermixture no new ones have been formed since. It was a process
singularly active in early ages, and singularly quiescent in later
ages. Such differences as exist between the Aryan, the Turanian, the
negro, the red man, and the Australian, are differences greater--