ages is born to a certain obedience, and cannot extricate himself
from an inherited government. Society then is made up, not of
individuals, but of families; creeds then descend by inheritance in
those families. Lord Melbourne once incurred the ridicule of
philosophers by saying he should adhere to the English Church BECAUSE
it was the religion of his fathers. The philosophers, of course, said
that a man's fathers' believing anything was no reason for his
believing it unless it was true. But Lord Melbourne was only uttering
out of season, and in a modern time, one of the most firm and accepted
maxims of old times. A secession on religious grounds of isolated
Romans to sail beyond sea would have seemed to the ancient Romans an
impossibility. In still ruder ages the religion of savages is a thing
too feeble to create a schism or to found a community. We are dealing
with people capable of history when we speak of great ideas, not with
prehistoric flint-men or the present savages. But though under very
different forms, the same essential causes--the imitation of preferred
characters and the elimination of detested characters--were at work in
the oldest times, and are at work among rude men now. Strong as the
propensity to imitation is among civilised men, we must conceive it as
an impulse of which their minds have been partially denuded. Like the
far-seeing sight, the infallible hearing, the magical scent of the
savage, it is a half-lost power. It was strongest in ancient times, and
IS strongest in uncivilised regions.

This extreme propensity to imitation is one great reason of the amazing
sameness which every observer notices in savage nations. When you have
seen one Euegian, you have seen all Fuegians--one Tasmanian, all
Tasmanians. The higher savages, as the New Zealanders, are less
uniform; they have more of the varied and compact structure of
civilised nations, because in other respects they are more civilised.
They have greater mental capacity--larger stores of inward thought. But
much of the same monotonous nature clings to them too. A savage tribe
resembles a herd of gregarious beasts; where the leader goes they go
too; they copy blindly his habits, and thus soon become that which he
already is. For not only the tendency, but also the power to imitate,
is stronger in savages than civilised men. Savages copy quicker, and
they copy better. Children, in the same way, are born mimics; they
cannot help imitating what c