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liar development and transmission by education , speech , tradition and art ; not only must the threads of a humanity thus fashioned , spreading through all nations and to all the ends of the earth , ultimately unite in a common origin , but they must also , to make human nature what it is , from the very first have been artfully woven together . As a child cannot for many years be left to itself without either perishing or undergoing a depravation of nature , so the human race , in the first blossoming of its education , could not with safety be abandoned to its own guidance .
Men who have been once accustomed to live like the ourangoutang , will never , from the spontaneous workings of their own minds , overcome their degradation , and pass from a speechless and hardened brutality to the enjoyment of the gifts of humanity . If , then , it was the will of the Deity that man should exercise
reason and foresight , the Deity himself must have watched over the commencement of his career with reason and foresight . From the first moment of his existence , art , education , and culture were indispensable to him ; and thus the specific characteristic of humanity is itself a pledge for the essential truth of this oldest philosophy of our history * . '
The ensuing observations on the flood , though not orthodox , are well deserving of attention ; and the spirit of them may be profitably applied to some other passages of the Mosaic history . * Though there can be no doubt , from the researches of natural history , and from traces still subsisting , especially in Asia , that the inhabited portions of the globe have been subjected to a violent inundation ; yet , what Moses has delivered to us on this subject is neither more nor less than a national narrative .. With
great judgment , the collector has gathered together many traditions ., and delivers to the reader even the journal which his tribe possessed of this terrible catastrophe . The tone of the relation is so completely in the style of thinking peculiar to this tribe , that it would be a perversion of it to take it out of the limits within which the proofs of its credibility must be found . In the same way as one family of this tribe , with a numerous stock and household , saved itself , other families in other tribes might also save themselves , as their own traditions show . Thus in Chaldsea ,
Xisuthrus and his race were preserved , with a number of animals , without which men could not then subsist ; and in India , Vishnou himself was the steersman of the bark which conveyed those who were rescued from the waves to land . Similar traditions exist among all the ancient nations of this part of { he world , —in each ,
varied according to their usages and situation ; and , while they furnish convincing proofs that the deluge of which they speak was general in Asia , they help us at once out of the difficulty in , which we should unnecessarily place ourselves , were we to interpret every incident in a family history as belonging exclusively to * Bgok £ ., ch . vi ., p . 294—297 ,
Untitled Article
The Philosophy of the History of Mankind 169
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1832, page 169, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1808/page/25/
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