was inexhaustible, when there was no cold nor heat, no envy nor old age.[1] The Buddhist looks back to the age of glorious soaring beings who had no sin, no sex, no want of food, till the unhappy hour when, tasting a delicious scum that formed upon the surface of the earth, they fell into evil, and in time became degraded to eat rice, to bear children, to build houses, to divide property, and to establish caste. In after ages, record preserves details of the continuing course of degeneration. It was King Chetiya who told the first lie, and the citizens who heard of it, not knowing what a lie was, asked if it were white, black or blue. Men's lives grew shorter and shorter, and it was King Maha Sagara who, after a brief reign of 252,000 years, made the dismal discovery of the first grey hair.[2]
Admitting the imperfection of the historical record as regards the lowest stages of culture, we must bear in mind that it tells both ways. Niebuhr, attacking the progressionists of the 18th century, remarks that they have overlooked the fact 'that no single example can be brought forward of an actually savage people having independently become civilized.'[3] Whately appropriated this remark, which indeed forms the kernel of his well-known Lecture on the Origin of Civilisation: 'Facts are stubborn things,' he says, 'and that no authenticated instance can be produced of savages that ever did emerge, unaided, from that state is no theory, but a statement, hitherto never disproved, of a matter of fact.' He uses this as an argument in support of his general conclusion, that man could not have risen independently from a savage to a civilized state, and that savages are degenerate descendants of civilized men.[4] But he omits to ask the counter-question, whether we find one recorded intance of a civilized people falling independently into a savage
- ↑ 'Avesta,' trans. Spiegel & Bleeck, vol. ii. p. 50.
- ↑ Hardy, 'Manual of Budhism,' pp. 64, 128.
- ↑ Niebuhr, 'Römische Geschichte,' part i. p. 88: 'Nur das haben sie übersehen, dasz kein einziges Beyspiel von einem wirklich wilden Volk aufzuweisen ist, welches frey zur Cultur übergegangen wäre.'
- ↑ Whately, 'Essay on Origin of Civilisation.'
