al context. But Greece, in
teaching the world the meaning of intellectual freedom, paved a way
towards that most comprehensive form of freedom which is termed moral.
Moral freedom is the will to give out more than you take in; to repay
with interest the cost of your social education. It is the will to
take thought about the meaning and end of human life, and by so doing
to assist in creative evolution.

[Footnote 7: Political freedom, which is rather a different matter,
is perhaps pre-eminently the discovery of England.]

CHAPTER X
MAN THE INDIVIDUAL

By way of epilogue, a word about individuality, as displayed amongst
peoples of the ruder type, will not be out of place. There is a real
danger lest the anthropologist should think that a scientific view
of man is to be obtained by leaving out the human nature in him. This
comes from the over-anxiety of evolutionary history to arrive at
general principles. It is too ready to rule out the so-called
"accident," forgetful of the fact that the whole theory of biological
evolution may with some justice be described as "the happy accident
theory." The man of high individuality, then, the exceptional man,
the man of genius, be he man of thought, man of feeling, or man of
action, is no accident that can be overlooked by history. On the
contrary, he is in no small part the history-maker; and, as such, should
be treated with due respect by the history-compiler. The "dry bones"
of history, its statistical averages, and so on, are all very well
in their way; but they correspond to the superficial truth that history
repeats itself, rather than to the deeper truth that history is an
evolution. Anthropology, then, should not disdain what might be termed
the method of the historical novel. To study the plot without studying
the characters will never make sense of the drama of human life.

It may seem a truism, but is perhaps worth recollecting at the start,
that no man or woman lacks individuality altogether, even if it cannot
be regarded in a particular case as a high individuality. No one is
a mere item. That useful figment of the statistician has no real
existence under the sun. We need to supplement the books of abstract
theory with much sympathetic insight directed towards men and women
in their concrete selfhood. Said a Vedda cave-dweller to Dr. Seligmann
(it is the first instance I light on in the first book I happen to
take up): "It is pleasant for us to feel the rai