Edward Burnett Tylor

“ Upheld by the perfect fitting of the inner mind to the outer world, the progress of truth will be firmer and more majestic than in the ancient days. If, in time to come, the grand old disputation before King Darius were to be reënacted, to decide again the question, "What is the strongest of all things?" it would be said, as then, that "Truth abides, and is strong for evermore, living and conquering from age to age." And the people as of old would say again with one voice, "Truth is great, and prevails!" ”

“ Cowering or crouching is a natural gesture of fear or inability to resist that belongs to the brutes as well as man; its extreme form is lying prostrate face to ground. In barbaric society, as soon as distinctions are marked between master and slave, chief and commoner, these tokens of submission become salutations. The sculptures of Egypt and Assyria show the lowly prostrations of the ancient East, while in Dahomey or Siam subjects crawl before the king, and even Siberian peasants grovel and kiss the dust before a noble. ”

“ It is not enough to look at a race of men as a mere body of people happening to have a common type or likeness. For the reason of their likeness is plain, and indeed our calling them a race means that we consider them a breed whose common nature is inherited from common ancestors. Now, experience of the animal world shows that a race or breed, while capable of carrying on its likeness from generation to generation, is also capable of varying. It must be admitted that our knowledge of the manner and causes of race-variation among mankind is still very imperfect. ”

“ It is undoubted that comparative anatomy and physiology, by treating the human species as one member of a long series of related organisms, have gained a higher and more perfect understanding of man himself and his place in the universe than could have been gained by the narrower investigation of his species by and for itself. It is to be regretted that hitherto certain other sciences psychology, ethics, and even philology and sociology have so little followed so profitable an example. ”

“ And lastly, the ancient Vedic Books of India, which so often supply the means of tracing the most florid developments of mythology back to mere simple child-like views of nature, present, as really existing in very early times, the original idea out of which the whole series of myths of the World-Tortoise seems to have grown. To man in the lower levels of science, the earth is a flat plain over which the sky is placed like a dome, as the arched upper shell of the tortoise stands upon the flat plate below, and this is why the tortoise is the symbol and representative of the world. ”

“ In the apparently primitive forms the curse on the perjurer is to take effect in this world. But as nations became more observant, experience must have shown that bears and tigers were as apt to kill truth-tellers as perjurers, and that even the lightning-flash falls without moral discrimination. In the Clouds of Aristophanes, indeed, men have come openly to ridicule such beliefs, the Socrates of the play pointing out that notorious perjurers go unharmed, while Zeus hurls his bolts at his own temple, and the tall oaks, as if an oak-tree could perjure itself. ”

“ Philosophy seeking knowledge for its own sake ; morality, manifested in the sense of truth, right, and virtue; and religion, the belief in and communion with superhuman powers ruling and pervading the universe, are human characters, of which it is instructive to trace, if possible, the earliest symptoms in the lower animals, but which can there show at most only faint and rudimentary signs of their wondrous development in mankind. ”

“ To go upon the broadest ground, the mere fact that teachers can take children who have no means of uttering their thoughts but the gesture-language, and teach them to articulate words, to recognise them by sight when uttered by others, to write them, and to understand them as equivalents for their own gestures, is sufficient to bridge over the gulf which lies between the gesture-language and, at least, a rudimentary form of word-language. ”

“ Shall we wonder that the world, slowly trying its institutions by the experience of ages, has at last come to the stage of casting out the judicial ordeal; or shall we rather wonder at the constitution of the human mind, which for so many ages has set up the creations of delusive fancy to hold sway over a world of facts? ”