altogether than any causes now active are capable of creating in
present men, at least in any way explicable by us. And there is,
therefore, a strong presumption that (as great authorities now hold)
these differences were created before the nature of men, especially
before the mind and the adaptive nature of men had taken their
existing constitution. And a second condition precedent of
civilisation seems, at least to me, to have been equally inherited,
if the doctrine of evolution be true, from some previous state or
condition. I at least find it difficult to conceive of men, at all
like the present men, unless existing in something like families,
that is, in groups avowedly connected, at least on the mother's
side, and probably always with a vestige of connection, more or
less, on the father's side, and unless these groups were like many
animals, gregarious, tinder a leader more or less fixed. It is
almost beyond imagination how man, as we know man, could by any sort
of process have gained this step in civilisation. And it is a great
advantage, to say the least of it, in the evolution theory that it
enables us to remit this difficulty to a pre-existing period in
nature, where other instincts and powers than our present ones may
perhaps have come into play, and where our imagination can hardly
travel. At any rate, for the present I may assume these two steps in
human progress made, and these two conditions realized.

The rest of the way, if we grant these two conditions, is plainer.
The first thing is the erection of what--we may call a custom-making
power, that is, of an authority which can enforce a fixed rule of
life, which, by means of that fixed rule, can in some degree create
a calculable future, which can make it rational to postpone present
violent but momentary pleasure for future continual pleasure,
because it ensures, what else is not sure, that if the sacrifice of