Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/182

knows to his discomfiture, resembling in this the modesty of Arab ladies as regards their faces.^[1] Yet the English infant exhibits no corporal modesty, and the English-born adult reared among savages has none of it. Nothing indeed can be plainer than that moral natures, or so-called moral natures, are acquired, not inborn. But because in man, the highest and mentally (perhaps physically also) the most variable of animals, the most responsive mentally to appropriate stimulation, that which is mentally acquired so greatly predominates over that which is mentally inborn, because in him instinct is so overpowered by reason (or perverted reason), his acquired traits often possess all the -strength that instincts do in the lower animals. How many instincts, for example, are overmastered and set at nought by the abstemious monk or nun?

Speaking of moral systems the historian Buckle observes—

 

"Applying this test to moral motives, or to the dictates of what is called moral instinct, we shall at once see how extremely small is the influence those motives have exercised over the progress of civilization. For there is unquestionably nothing to be found in the world which has undergone so little change as those great dogmas of which moral systems are composed. To do good to others, to sacrifice for their benefit your own wishes, to love your neighbour as yourself, to forgive your enemies, to restrain your passions, to honour your parents, to respect those who are set over you—these and a few others are the sole essentials of morals; but they have been known for thousands of years, and not one jot or one tittle has been added to

1. I have read somewhere, though I cannot lay hands on my authority, of a traveller, I think in the island of Socotra, who unexpectedly met an Arab woman. He relates that she immediately covered her face with her petticoats, thus completely exposing the lower half of her body.