Savage thought, then, is not able, because it does not try, to break up custom into separate pieces.  Rather it plays round the edges of custom; religion especially, with its suggestion of the general sacredness of custom, helping it to do so.  There is found in primitive society plenty of vague speculation that seeks to justify the existing.  But to take the machine to bits in order to put it together differently is out of the reach of a type of intelligence which, though competent to grapple with details, takes its principles for granted.  When progress comes, it comes by stealth, through imitating the letter, but refusing to imitate the spirit; until by means of legal fictions, ritual substitutions, and so on, the new takes the place of the old without any one noticing the fact.

Freedom, in the sense of intellectual freedom, may perhaps be said to have been born in one place and at one time—­namely, in Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.[7] Of course, minglings and clashings of peoples had prepared the way.  Ideas begin to count as soon as they break away from their local context.  But Greece, in teaching the world the meaning of intellectual freedom, paved a way towards that most comprehensive form of freedom which is termed moral.  Moral freedom is the will to give out more than you take in; to repay with interest the cost of your social education.  It is the will to take thought about the meaning and end of human life, and by so doing to assist in creative evolution.

[Footnote 7:  Political freedom, which is rather a different matter, is perhaps pre-eminently the discovery of England.]

CHAPTER X MAN THE INDIVIDUAL

By way of epilogue, a word about individuality, as displayed amongst peoples of the ruder type, will not be out of place.  There is a real danger lest the anthropologist should think that a scientific view of man is to be obtained by leaving out the human nature in him.  This comes from the over-anxiety of evolutionary history to arrive at general principles.  It is too ready to rule out the so-called “accident,” forgetful of the fact that the whole theory of biological evolution may with some justice be described as “the happy accident theory.”  The man of high individuality, then, the exceptional man, the man of genius, be he man of thought, man of feeling, or man of action, is no accident that can be overlooked by history.  On the contrary, he is in no small part the history-maker; and, as such, should be treated with due respect by the history-compiler.  The “dry bones” of history, its statistical averages, and so on, are all very well in their way; but they correspond to the superficial truth that history repeats itself, rather than to the deeper truth that history is an evolution.  Anthropology, then, should not disdain what might be termed the method of the historical novel.  To study the plot without studying the characters will never make sense of the drama of human life.