Bock: The Acceptance of Histories

71
commonly been regarded as a single category in nature, and any evi-
dence or ideas that suggested a revision of this conception were resisted.
Confronted with the obviously different in a newly discovered cultural
world, Europeans therefore sought immediately to assimilate the un-
familiar to the familiar by concentrating their attention upon similari-
ties between distant or exotic nations and what they knew of Old World
peoples through history or contemporary observation.82 Just as Euro-
peans at first refused to recognize the new geographical horizon and
insisted that they had merely discovered the other side of the Old
World, so they recoiled from a new cultural horizon and dressed Ameri-
can or Pacific nations in familiar European garb. They convinced them-
selves that there was really nothing new or different under the sun, that
all could be fitted into the old conceptual order, and that strange peoples
in faraway places were, after all, basically just like Europeans.
Cultural differences were first accepted, then, merely as a consequence
of an omnipotent God who, delighting in diversity, had manifested his
power in a profusion of forms. The only comprehensive theory of dif-
ferences was offered by polygenists. After this, the whole question of
differences was subordinated to disputes over the proper explanation
of alleged similarities. This basic reaction of a people to the rest of the
world has had profound consequences both in the practical arena of
European relations with other peoples and in the use to which informa-
tion about different cultures has been put in seeking a science of man.
Supposed cultural similarities were first explained by Europeans as
results of the common racial origin of culture-carrying peoples who had
spread over the earth from a single geographical point. Often the
specific object here was to refute the polygenetic argument and reconcile
sacred and secular history, but complex questions concerning the dif-
fusion of peoples and their cultures and the proper significance of
cultural similarities were commonly raised and answers offered. Hence
problems of concern to nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnologists
are frequently encountered in the seventeenth-century literature.
A notable effort to settle some of these issues was made by Sir Matthew
Hale in 1677. A stout supporter of the monogenist position, Hale began
with the observation that the recent discovery of America had "occa-
33 So Tylor, in the nineteenth century, could observe that the ethnographer ex-
pected to find similarities, and if an explorer reported something out of the ordi-
narynot "conformable to the general rules of civilization"his honesty or accu-
racy could be questioned. Primitive Culture, 1:10. Tillyard has presented a vivid
picture of the Elizabethan tendency to identify "great correspondences" in their
effort to "tame a bursting and pullulating world." "If, for instance," he remarks,
"the Red Indian could be referred to men of the traditional Golden Age, their
novelty was tamed and they could be fitted into the old pattern and enrich it." The
Elizabethan World Picture, pp. 92-93.
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