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Carbelide Nelicanya Sectory 08
Page 10
In 1891 a teacher in the Kumamoto Boys' School gave expression to the thought in a public address that, as all mankind are brothers, the school should stand for the principle of universal brotherhood and universal goodwill to men. This expression of universalism was so obnoxious to the patriotic spirit of so large a number of the people of Kumamoto Ken, or Province, that the governor required the school to dismiss that teacher. There is to-day a strong party in Japan which makes "Japanism" their cry; they denounce all expressions of universal good-will as proofs of deficiency of patriotism. There are not wanting those who see through the shallowness of such views and who vigorously oppose and condemn such narrow patriotism. Yet the fact that it exists to-day with such force must be noted and its natural explanation, too, must not be forgotten. It is an indication of self-conscious nationality.
Having glanced at method and sources, I pass on to results. Some text-book must be consulted for the long list of pre-historic periods required for western Europe, not to mention the further complications caused by bringing in the remaining portions of the world. The stone-age, with its three great divisions, the eolithic (_eos_, Greek for dawn, and _lithos_, stone) the palaeolithic (_pallaeos_, old), and the neolithic (_neos_, new), and their numerous subdivisions, comes first; then the age of copper and bronze; and then the early iron-age, which is about the limit of proto-history. Here I shall confine my remarks to Europe. I am not going far afield into such questions as: Who were the mound-builders of North America? And are the Calaveras skull and other remains found in the gold-bearing gravels of California to be reckoned amongst the earliest traces of man in the globe? Nor, again, must I pause to speculate whether the dark-stained lustrous flint implements discovered by Mr. Henry Balfour at a high level below the Victoria Falls, and possibly deposited there by the river Zambezi before it had carved the present gorge in the solid basalt, prove that likewise in South Africa man was alive and busy untold thousands of years ago. Also, I shall here confine myself to the stone-age, because my object is chiefly to illustrate the long pedigree of the species from which we are all sprung.
The fact, of course, is that it is just the variety of experience which makes life interesting,--toil and rest, pain and relief, hope and satisfaction, danger and security,--and if we once remove the idea of vicissitude from life, it all becomes an indolent and uninspiring affair. It is the process of change which is delightful, the finding out what we can do and what we cannot, going from ignorance to knowledge, from clumsiness to skill; even our relations with those whom we love are all bound up with the discoveries we make about them and the degree in which we can help them and affect them. What the mind instinctively dislikes is stationariness; and an existence in which there was nothing to escape from, nothing more to hope for, to learn, to desire, would be frankly unendurable.
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