Note 12 — Chapter I · The Dawn of Civilization
Reading edition
Professor Elliot Smith will have none of what Dr. W. H. R. Rivers refers to as “crude evolutionary ideas”. “The history of man”, he writes, “will be truly interpreted, not by means of hazardous and mistaken analogies with biological evolution, but by the application of the true historical method. The causes of the modern actions of mankind are deeply rooted in the past. But the spirit of man has ever been the same: and the course of ancient history can only be properly appreciated when it is realized that the same human motives whose nature can be studied in our fellow-men to-day actuated the men of old also.”12