There are people in the world who are very fond of asking what they
call point-blank questions. They generally profess to hate all
shilly-shallying, and they are at no pains to hide their suspicion that
anyone who declines to say yes or no to any question which they choose
to ask has either his intellect clouded by metaphysics or has not the
courage of his opinions. The idea that it is often more difficult to
ask a sensible question than to answer it, and that a question, however
pointed it may sound, may for all that be so blunt and vague that no
accurate and honest thinker would care or dare to answer it, never
enters their mind; while the thought that there are realms of knowledge
where indefinite language is more appropriate, and in reality more
exact and more truthful than the most definite phraseology, is scouted
as mere fencing and intellectual cowardice.
One of those point-blank questions which has been addressed to me
by several reviewers of my books is this, “Tell us, do you hold that
man began as a savage or not?” To say that man began as a savage, and
that the most savage and degraded races now existing present us with
the primeval type of man, seems to be the shibboleth of a certain
school of thought, a school with which on many points I sympathize, so
long as it keeps to an accurate and independent inquiry into facts,
and to an outspoken statement of its discoveries, regardless of all
consequences, but from which I totally dissent as soon as it tries to
make facts subservient to theories. I am told that my own utterances
on this subject have been ambiguous. Now even granting this, I could
never understand why a certain hesitation in answering so difficult a
question should rouse such angry feelings, till it began to dawn on me
that those who do not unreservedly admit that man began as a savage
are supposed to hold that man was created a perfect and almost angelic
being. This would amount to denying the gospel of the day, that man was
the offspring of a brute, and hence, I suppose, the Anathema.
Now I may say this, that though I have hesitated to affirm that man
began as a savage, whatever that may mean, I have been even more
careful not to commit myself to the opinion that man began as an angel,
or as a child, or as a perfect rational being. I strongly object to
such alternatives as that if man did not begin as a savage he must
have begun as a child. It would be dreadful if, because there is no
sufficient evidence to enable us to form a decided opinion on any given
subject, we were to be driven into a corner by such alternatives,
instead of preserving our freedom of judgment until we have the
complete evidence before us.
But in our case the evidence is as yet extremely scanty, and, from the
nature of the case, will probably always remain so. If we want to prove
that man began as a child, what evidence can we produce? If we appealed
to history, history is impossible before the invention of language; and
what language could the primitive child have spoken, what life could
it have lived, without a father and without a mother? If we give up
history and appeal to our inner consciousness, our reason, nay, our
very imagination, collapses when approaching the problem how such a
child could have been born, how such a child could have been nourished,
reared, and protected from wild animals and other dangers. We feel we
have come to the end of our tether, and are running our head against a
very old, but a very solid, wall.
Has Kant then written in vain; and is it still supposed that our senses
or our reason can ever reach transcendent truths? Has the lesson to
be taught again and again that both our senses and our reason have
their limits; that we are indeed tethered, and that it is no proof
of intellectual strength or suppleness to try to stand on our own
shoulders? We are so made that neither can our senses perceive nor can
our reason conceive the real beginning and end of anything, whether in
space or in time. And yet we imagine we can form a definite conception
of the true beginning of mankind.
Then what remains? There remains the humbler and yet far nobler task
of studying the earliest records of man's life on earth: to go back as
far as literature, language, and tools will allow us, and for a time to
consider that as primitive which, whether as a tool, or as a word, or
as a proverb, or as a prayer, is the last we can reach, and seems at
the same time so simple, so rational, so intelligible, as to require
no further antecedents. That is the true work of the historian, and of
the philosopher too; and there is plenty of work left for both of them
before they dive into the whirlpool of their inner consciousness to
find there the primordial savage.
Instead of allowing ourselves to be driven into a corner by such a
question as “Did man begin as a savage or as a child?” we have a
perfect right to ask the question, What is meant by these two words,
_savage_ and _child_?
Has any one ever attempted to define the meaning of savage, and to
draw a sharp line between a savage and a non-savage? Has any one ever
attempted to define the meaning of child, if used in opposition to
savage or brute? Have we been told whether by child is meant a suckling
without a mother, or a boy who can speak, and count, and reason
without a father? Lastly, are savage and child really terms that
mutually exclude each other? May not a savage be a child, and may not a
child be a savage?
How, then, is any one who has given serious thought to the problem of
the origin of mankind to answer such a question as “Tell me, do you
hold that man began as a savage or as a child?”
When we read some of the more recent works on anthropology, the
primordial savage seems to be not unlike one of those hideous
india-rubber dolls that can be squeezed into every possible shape, and
made to utter every possible noise. There was a time when the savage
was held up to the civilised man as the inhabitant of a lost paradise—a
being of innocence, simplicity, purity, and nobility. Rousseau ascribed
to his son of nature all the perfection which he looked for in vain
in Paris and London. At present, when so many philosophers are on the
lookout for the missing-link between man and beast, the savage, even
if he has established his right to the name of man, cannot be painted
black enough. He must be at least a man who maltreats his women,
murders his children, kills and eats his fellow-creatures, and commits
crimes from which even animals would shrink.
This devil-savage, however, of the present anthropologist is as much
a wild creation of scientific fancy as the angel-savage of former
philosophers. The true Science of Man has no room for such speculations.
Sometimes the history of a name can take the place of its definition,
but this is hardly so in our case. The Greeks spoke of barbarians
rather than of savages, and the Romans followed their example, though
they might possibly have called the national heroes and sages of
Germany and Britain not only _barbari_ but _feri_—that is, savages not
very far removed from _feræ_, or wild beasts. Our own word _savage_,
and the French _sauvage_, meant originally a man who lived in the
woods, a _silvaticus_. It was at first applied to all who remained
outside the cities, who were not _cives_, or civilised, and who in
Christian times were also called _heathen_—that is, dwellers on the
heath.
But all this does not help us much. Of course the Spaniards called
the inhabitants of America savages, though it is now quite generally
conceded that the Spanish conquerors supplanted a higher civilisation
than they established.[10] The first discoverers of India called the
naked Brahmans savages, though they could hardly have followed them
in their subtle arguments on every possible philosophical topic. Even
by us New Zealanders and Zulus are classed as savages. And yet a Zulu
proved a match for an English bishop; and some of the Maori poems and
proverbs may rightly claim a place by the side of English popular
poems and proverbs. Nothing is gained if it is said that a savage is
the opposite of a civilised man. Civilisation is the product of the
uninterrupted work of many generations; and if savage meant no more
than an uncivilised man, it is no great discovery to say that the first
man must have been a savage. No doubt he could not have been acquainted
even with what we consider the fundamental elements of civilisation,
such as the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic. His dress must
have been very scanty, his food very primitive, his dwelling very
uncomfortable, his family life very unrestrained. And yet, for all
that, he might have been very far removed from the brute; nay, he might
have been a perfect man, doing his duty in that state of life into
which it pleased God to call him.
Civilisation, as it is well known, is as vague a term as savagery.
When Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, the representative of Greek
civilisation, stood before the naked philosophers of India, who were
ὑλόβιοι dwellers in the forest, can we hesitate to say which of the
two was the true savage and which the sage? To the New Zealander
who has been brought into contact with European civilisation, his
former so-called savage life seems to have gained little by recent
improvements. A grand Maori chief, reputed to have been one of the
strongest men in his youth, thus speaks of the old days:[11]—
In former times we lived differently; each tribe had its territory;
we lived in _pas_ placed high upon the mountains. The men looked
to war as their only occupation, and the women and the young people
cultivated the fields. We were a strong and a healthy people then.
When the Pakeha came, everything began to die away, even the natural
animals of the country. Formerly, when we went into a forest, and
stood under a tree, we could not hear ourselves speak for the noise
of the birds—every tree was full of them. Then we had pigeons and
everything in plenty; now many of the birds have died out.... In
those times the fields were well tilled, there was always plenty of
provisions, and we wore few clothes—only our own mats of feathers.
Then the missionaries came and took our children from the fields, and
taught them to sing hymns: they changed their minds, and the fields
were untilled. The children came home and quoted Gospel on an empty
stomach. Then came the war between the Pakeha and the Maori that split
up our homes, and made one tribe fight against the other; and after
the war came the Pakeha settlers, who took our lands, taught us to
drink and to smoke, and made us wear clothes that brought on disease.
What race could stand against them? The Maori is passing away like
the _Kiwi_, the _Tui_, and many other things, and by-and-by they will
disappear just like the leaves of the trees, and nothing will remain
to tell of them but the names of their mountains and their rivers!
This is the view which a so-called savage takes of the benefits of
European civilisation as contrasted with the contentment and happiness
in which his forefathers had passed through this life. Let us now hear
what a highly educated American, a scholar and a philosopher, Mr.
Morgan, says of the character of the Iroquois, who are often quoted as
specimens of extreme savagery:—
No test of friendship was too severe; no sacrifice to repay a favor
too great; no fidelity to an engagement too inflexible for the red
man. With an innate knowledge of the freedom and dignity of man, he
has exhibited the noblest virtues of the heart, and the kindest deeds
of humanity, in those sylvan retreats we are wont to look upon as
vacant and frightful solitudes.
No one would suspect Morgan of exaggeration or sentimentality. And
if it should be objected that these were private virtues only, and
no proof of true civilisation or a well-organised society among the
Iroquois, the same writer tells us:[12]—
They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and
acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other race of Indian
lineage, except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European
colonisation they stood for nearly two centuries with an unshaken
front against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of
foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of
a restless and advancing border population. Under their federal
system, the Iroquois flourished in independence, and were capable of
self-protection long after the New England and Virginia races had
surrendered their jurisdictions and fallen into the condition of
dependent nations; and they now stand forth upon the canvas of Indian
history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil institutions,
their sagacity in the administration of the league, and their courage
in its defence.