do not find, however, in Rousseau any serious attempt to analyse the
composition of human nature in its primitive stages. Though constantly
warning his readers very impressively against confounding domesticated
with primitive men, he practically assumes that the main elements of
character must always have been substantially identical with such
elements and conceptions as are found after the addition of many ages of
increasingly complex experience. There is something worth considering in
his notion that civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to those
of domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency enough
to enable him to adhere to his own idea, and work out conclusions
from it.

It might further be pointed out in another direction that he takes for
granted that the mode of advance into a social state has always been one
and the same, a single and uniform process, marked by precisely the same
set of several stages, following one another in precisely the same
order. There is no evidence of this; on the contrary, evidence goes to
show that civilisation varies in origin and process with race and other
things, and that though in all cases starting from the prime factor of
sociableness in man, yet the course of its development has depended on
the particular sets of circumstances with which that factor has had to
combine. These are full of variety, according to climate and racial
predisposition, although, as has been justly said, the force of both
these two elements diminishes as the influence of the past in giving
consistency to our will becomes more definite, and our means of
modifying climate and race become better known. There is no sign that
Rousseau, any more than many other inquirers, ever reflected whether the
capacity for advance into the state of civil society in any highly
developed form is universal throughout the species, or whether there are
not races eternally incapable of advance beyond the savage state.
Progress would hardly be the exception which we know it to be in the
history of communities if there were not fundamental diversities in the
civilisable quality of races. Why do some bodies of men get on to the
high roads of civilisation, while others remain in the jungle and
thicket of savagery; and why do some races advance along one of these
roads, and others advance by different roads?

Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim theory
with which Rousseau advan