to rule the
inferior nature, the predominance of which is evidently abnormal, and
the effects of which, in this abnormal predominance, are expressed by
terms full of evil, although their functions in due subordination are
useful and absolutely necessary.

In applying this principle, we realize that such a faculty as
Conscientiousness must be near the very summit, and that propensities
to theft and murder must belong to the base. That such propensities
exist in many, we know, and it is an absurd optimism which would
ignore such facts because they are abnormal. The world is full of
human abnormality, because it is not yet above the juvenile age of its
growth, which is the age of feebleness and folly, disease and crime.
The imperfect organism of childhood is incapable of resisting either
temptation or disease. The twenty-five millions destroyed by the black
death, in the fourteenth century, and the countless millions destroyed
by war in all centuries, including the present, show how little we
have advanced beyond the spirit of savage life. The ferocity of
nations is as much the product of their cerebral organization, as the
ferocity of the tiger, and springs from the same region of the
brain,--lying on the ridge of the temporal bone,--a region that
delights in fierce destruction, and is large in all the carnivora. It
would be contrary to the spirit of science to ignore the fact that man
has an element of ferocity similar to that of the tiger, because in
the fully developed man that fierce element is overruled by the higher
powers and confined to the destruction of that which does not suffer.
The unwillingness to recognize anything evil comes not from the spirit
of science, but from the _a priori_ assumptions of sentimental
theology, which presumes that it thoroughly comprehends the Deity (who
is beyond all human comprehension), and, out of its imaginative
ignorance, fabricates _a priori_ philosophies and doctrines that
everything in man is good, or that everything in man is evil.
Anthropology has not thus been evolved from _a priori_ speculation,
but presents its systematic doctrines as generalizations of the facts
and experiments which have been carefully acquired and studied through
the last half-century. The facts and experiments are too numerous to
be recorded and published now, and had no channel for publication when
they occurred.

Everything in the lower half of the brain has a tendency to evil, in
proportion to