PATTERNS OF CULTURE 
disproved man's ancestry in the animal kingdom. No lack 
of continuity in the argument, no doubts of the nature of 
this ‘soul’ not even the fact that the nineteenth century 
did not care in the least to defend its brotherhood with 
any group of aliens—none of these facts counted against 
the first-rate excitement that raged on account of the 
indignity evolution proposed against the notion of man's 
uniqueness. 
Both these battles we may fairly count as won—if not 
yet, then soon; but the fighting has only massed itself 
upon another front. We are quite willing to admit now 
that the revolution of the earth about the sun, or the 
animal ancestry of man, has next to nothing to do with 
the uniqueness of our human achievements. If we inhabit 
one chance planet out of a myriad solar systems, so much 
the greater glory, and if all the ill-assorted human races 
are linked by evolution with the animal, the provable dif- 
ferences between ourselves and them are the more extreme 
and the uniqueness of our institutions the more remark- 
able. But ozr achievements, ozr institutions are unique; 
they are of a different order from those of lesser races and 
must be protected at all costs. So that today, whether it is 
a question of imperialism, or of race prejudice, or of a 
comparison between Christianity and paganism, we are 
still preoccupied with the uniqueness, not of the human 
institutions of the world at large, which no one has ever 
cated about anyway, but of our own institutions and 
achievements, our own civilization. 
Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical 
circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any 
other local group that has so far been known. It has 
standardized itself over most of the globe, and we have 
been led, therefore, to accept a belief in the uniformity of 
human behaviour that under other circumstances would 
not have arisen. Even very primitive peoples are some- 
times far more conscious of the role of cultural traits than