of mankind in all its members.
As in the realm of irrational organisms, so in the history of mankind; it
has to assume the most various ramifications with progress, stand-still,
and retrogradation. It is true, it sees in the nations of culture progress
in an upward rising line; but besides, stand-still and retrogradations in
great variety. It also sees in mankind in general a labor of upward rising
development; but it also sees many hindrances of development, and many
shavings which the work throws to one side. But exactly the same thing was
also seen in every religious or profane contemplation of history, long
before the evolution theory was born.

Therefore, the different views of the earliest primitive history of man,
the theory of depravation and that of elevation, do not stand so opposed to
one another--the former representing the Biblical and religious, the latter
the anti-religious, view of the history--but the question as to the
primitive history is not yet solved in that respect; the depravation
theory, as well as the elevation theory, indicates rather the _directions_
in which investigation has to put its questions to the archaeological
sources. Investigation, on the other hand, has free scope in both
directions; and the primitive history of man shows itself to be a realm in
which religious and scientific interest, {344} opponents and advocates of
the descent theory, can peacefully join hands for common labor. Up to the
present, the investigations reach results which seem to fall now more into
one, now more into the other, scale of the balance. On the one hand, the
older the products of human skill are, the more simple they are; on the
other hand, even the oldest remains show man in full possession of that
which distinguishes him from the animal, and attests a spiritual life. The
reader may think of the before mentioned sketches of the reindeer and
mammoth (page 90). If we finally come down to historic times, and to the
present, in order to try to draw conclusions from the comparisons of the
remotest times of which we have historic knowledge, with the present, as to
prehistoric times, we likewise find on the one side vestiges of the lowest
barbarism in the past and present; but on the other side we find that the
oldest written monuments afford a glance into a perfection of intellectual
reflection and into a nobility of moral and religious views which permits
us to draw the highest conclusions as to the intellect