ecause it springs, not from a spontaneous
impulse, but from a learned teaching, it is therefore necessarily
foolish, mischievous, perhaps unnatural? It may perhaps be safer to hold
that, like many other doctrines, many other sentiments, it is neither
universally good nor universally bad, neither inherently wise nor
inherently foolish. It may be safer to hold that it may, like other
doctrines and sentiments, have a range within which it may work for
good, while in some other range it may work for evil. It may in short be
a doctrine which is neither to be rashly accepted, nor rashly cast
aside, but one which may need to be guided, regulated modified,
according to time, place, and circumstance. I am not now called on so
much to estimate the practical good and evil of the doctrine as to work
out what the doctrine itself is, and to try to explain some difficulties
about it, but I must emphatically say that nothing can be more shallow,
nothing more foolish, nothing more purely sentimental, than the talk of
those who think that they can simply laugh down or shriek down any
doctrine or sentiment which they themselves do not understand. A belief
or a feeling which has a practical effect on the conduct of great masses
of men, sometimes on the conduct of whole nations, may be very false and
very mischievous; but it is in every case a great and serious fact, to
be looked gravely in the face. Men who sit at their ease and think that
all wisdom is confined to themselves and their own clique may think
themselves vastly superior to the great emotions which stir our times,
as they would doubtless have thought themselves vastly superior to the
emotions which stirred the first Saracens or the first Crusaders. But
the emotions are there all the same, and they do their work all the
same. The most highly educated man in the most highly educated society
cannot sneer them out of being.

But it is time to pass to the more strictly scientific aspect of the
subject. The doctrine of race, in its popular form, is the direct
offspring of the study of scientific philology; and yet it is just now,
in its popular form at least, somewhat under the ban of scientific
philologers. There is nothing very wonderful in this. It is in fact the
natural course of things which might almost have been reckoned on
beforehand. When the popular mind gets hold of a truth, it seldom gets
hold of it with strict scientific precision. It commonly gets hold of
one side of th