umstances, but the essential traits of
his being. Now this supposition is entirely valid. All we know of
mankind justifies the statement that, as regards all the qualities and
motives with which the primal sympathies deal, men are remarkably alike.
Their loves, hates, fears, and sorrows are alike in their essentials; so
that the postulate of sympathy that the other man is essentially like
one's self is no idle fancy but an established truth. It not only
embodies the judgment of all men in thought and action but has its
warrant from all the science we can apply to it.

It is easy to see how by means of sympathy we can at once pass the gulf
which separates man from man. All the devices of the ages in the way of
dumb or spoken language fail to win across the void, and leave the two
beings apart; but with a step the sympathetic spirit passes the gulf. In
this strange feature we have the completion of the series of differences
between the inorganic and the organic groups of individualities. In the
lower or non-living isolations there is no reason why the units should
do more than mechanically interact. All their service in the realm can
be best effected by their remaining forever completely apart. But when
we come to the organic series, the units begin to have need of
understanding their neighbors, in order that they may form those
beginnings of the moral order which we find developing among the members
even of the lowliest species. Out of this sympathetic accord arises the
community, which we see in its simple beginnings in the earlier stages
of life; it grows with the advance in the scale of being, and has its
supreme success in man. Human society, the largest of all organic
associations, requires that its units be knit together in certain common
purposes and understandings, and the union can only be made effective by
the ways of sympathy--by the instinctive conviction of essential
kinship.

3. Historical Continuity and Civilization[126]

In matters connected with political and economical institutions we
notice among the natural races very great differences in the sum of
their civilization. Accordingly we have to look among them, not only for
the beginnings of civilization, but for a very great part of its
evolution, and it is equally certain that these differences are to be
referred less to variations in endowment than to great differences in
the conditions of their development. Exchange has also played its part,
and