discussed by reference to the primitive man, or the man in the state of nature; and so they must be discussed. The only difference is that we may depend for our notions of the primitive man and his ways either on speculation or on positive investigation. The eighteenth-century plan was to reach a notion of the primitive man by abstracting one after another the attributes of the civilized man, until a sort of residuum was obtained. It was thought that that must be what the original man in the state of nature was. Rousseau, in his "Reasons for the Inequalities Among Men," took the American Indian as his type of the primitive man; he took the notion of the red man as European travelers had described him before the middle of the eighteenth century, and, having rounded off the notion with some poetical additions, he went on to make his deductions as to civilization. He reached the result that the causes of social inequality were wheat and iron. To his imagination, the red men lived in blissful and Arcadian simplicity, and it was the introduction of agriculture, and the use of tools, which destroyed all that and introduced emulation, selfishness, and consequent inequality.
Rousseau has gone out of fashion, but his method and his ideas are repeated under a new form by the latest social speculators. But the error was not in seeking to find the origin of civilization or to compare the course of its development with the point of its beginning. Our latest science has to continue that effort; the origin of civilization has all the interest to us which belongs to the germs or beginnings of all great movements which we want to study. The wider the range of development which we can study, the more correct the knowledge which we obtain of it; modern scholars have therefore
