grounds of isolated Romans to sail beyond sea would have seemed to
the ancient Romans an impossibility. In still ruder ages the
religion of savages is a thing too feeble to create a schism or to
found a community. We are dealing with people capable of history
when we speak of great ideas, not with prehistoric flint-men or the
present savages. But though under very different forms, the same
essential causes--the imitation of preferred characters and the
elimination of detested characters--were at work in the oldest
times, and are at work among rude men now. Strong as the propensity
to imitation is among civilised men, we must conceive it as an
impulse of which their minds have been partially denuded. Like the
far-seeing sight, the infallible hearing, the magical scent of the
savage, it is a half-lost power. It was strongest in ancient times,
and IS strongest in uncivilised regions.

This extreme propensity to imitation is one great reason of the
amazing sameness which every observer notices in savage nations.
When you have seen one Euegian, you have seen all Fuegians--one
Tasmanian, all Tasmanians. The higher savages, as the New
Zealanders, are less uniform; they have more of the varied and
compact structure of civilised nations, because in other respects
they are more civilised. They have greater mental capacity--larger
stores of inward thought. But much of the same monotonous nature
clings to them too. A savage tribe resembles a herd of gregarious
beasts; where the leader goes they go too; they copy blindly his
habits, and thus soon become that which he already is. For not only
the tendency, but also the power to imitate, is stronger in savages
than civilised men. Savages copy quicker, and they copy better.
Children, in the same way, are born mimics; they cannot help
imitating what comes before them. There is nothing in their minds to