DEFINITION OF THE WORD “CIVILIZATION”; SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT HAS A TWOFOLD
ORIGIN
Here I must enter on a digression vital to my argument. At every turn I
am using a word involving a circle of ideas which it is very necessary
to define. I am continually speaking of “civilization,” and cannot help
doing so; for it is only by the existence in some measure, or the
complete absence, of this attribute that I can gauge the relative merits
of the different races. I refer both to European civilization and to
others which may be distinguished from it. I must not leave the
slightest vagueness on this point, especially as I differ from the
celebrated writer who alone in France has made it his special business
to fix the meaning and province of this particular word.
Guizot, if I may be allowed to dispute his great authority, begins his
book on “Civilization in Europe” by a confusion of terms which leads him
into serious error. He calls civilization an _event_.
The word _event_ must be used by Guizot in a less positive and accurate
way than it usually is—in a wide, uncertain, elastic sense that it never
bears; otherwise, it does not properly define the meaning of the word
_civilization_ at all. Civilization is not an event, it is a _series_, a
_chain_ of events linked more or less logically together and brought
about by the inter-action of ideas which are often themselves very
complex. There is a continual bringing to birth of further ideas and
events. The result is sometimes incessant movement, sometimes
stagnation. In either case, civilization is not an event, but an
assemblage of events and ideas, a _state_ in which a human society
subsists, an _environment_ with which it has managed to surround itself,
which is created by it, emanates from it, and in turn reacts on it.
This state is universal in a sense in which an event never is. It admits
of many variations which it could not survive if it were merely an
event. Further, it is quite independent of all forms of government; it
makes as much progress under a despotism as under the freest democracy,
and it does not cease to exist when the conditions of political life are
modified or even absolutely changed by civil war.
This does not mean that we may more or less neglect the forms of
government. They are intimately bound up with the health of the social
organism; its prosperity is impaired or destroyed if the choice of
government is bad, favoured and developed if the choice is good. But we
are not concerned here with mere questions of prosperity. Our subject is
more serious. It deals with the very existence of peoples and of
civilization; and civilization has to do with certain elemental
conditions which are independent of politics, and have to look far
deeper for the motive-forces that bring them into being, direct, and
expand them, make them fruitful or barren and, in a word, mould their
whole life. In face of such root-questions as these, considerations of
government, prosperity, and misery naturally take a second place. The
first place is always and everywhere held by the question “to be or not
to be,” which is as supreme for a people as for an individual. As Guizot
does not seem to have realized this, civilization is to him not a state
or an environment, but an _event_; and he finds its generating principle
in another event, of a purely political character.
If we open his eloquent and famous book, we shall come upon a mass of
hypotheses calculated to set his leading idea into relief. After
mentioning a certain number of situations to which human societies might
come, the author asks “whether common instinct would recognize in these
the conditions under which a people _civilizes_ itself, in the natural
sense of the word.”
The first hypothesis is as follows: “Consider a people whose external
life is easy and luxurious. It pays few taxes, and is in no distress.
Justice is fairly administered between man and man. In fact, its
material and moral life is carefully kept in a state of inertia, of
torpor, I will not say of oppression, because there is no feeling of
this, but at any rate of repression. The case is not unexampled. There
have been a large number of little aristocratic republics, where the
subjects have been treated in this way, like sheep, well looked after
and, in a material sense, happy, but without any intellectual or moral
activity. Is this civilization? And is such a people civilizing itself?”
I do not know whether it is actually civilizing itself; but certainly
the people of whom he speaks might be very “civilized.” Otherwise, we
should have to rank among savage tribes or barbarians all the
aristocratic republics, of ancient and modern times, which Guizot
confessedly includes as instances of his hypothesis. The general
instinct would certainly be offended by a method that forbids not only
the Phœnicians, the Carthaginians, and the Spartans to enter the temple
of civilization, but also the Venetians, the Genoese, the Pisans, and
all the free Imperial cities of Germany, in a word all the powerful
municipalities of the last few centuries. This conclusion seems in
itself too violently paradoxical to be admitted by the common sense to
which it appeals; but besides this, it has, I think, to face a still
greater difficulty. These little aristocratic States which, owing to
their form of government, Guizot refuses to accept as capable of
civilization, have never, in most cases, possessed a special and unique
culture. However powerful many of them may have been, they were in this
respect assimilated to peoples who were differently governed, but very
near them in race; they merely shared in a common civilization. Thus,
though the Carthaginians and the Phœnicians were at a great distance
from each other, they were nevertheless united by a similar form of
culture, which had its prototype in Assyria. The Italian republics took
part in the movement of ideas and opinions which were dominant in the
neighbouring monarchies. The Imperial towns of Swabia and Thuringia were
quite independent politically, but were otherwise wholly within the
sweep of the general progress or decadence of the German race. Hence
while Guizot is distributing his orders of merit among the nations
according to their degree of political liberty and their forms of
government, he is really making cleavages, within races, that he cannot
justify, and assuming differences that do not exist. A more detailed
discussion of the point would hardly be in place here, and I pass on. If
I did open such an argument, I should begin (and rightly I think) by
refusing to admit that Pisa, Genoa, Venice, and the rest were in any way
inferior to towns such as Milan, Naples, and Rome.
Guizot himself anticipates such an objection. He does not allow that a
people is civilized, “which is governed mildly, but kept in a state of
repression”; yet he also refuses civilization to another people “whose
material life is less easy and luxurious, though still tolerable, yet
whose moral and intellectual needs have not been neglected.... In the
people I am supposing,” he says, “pure and noble sentiments are
fostered. Their religious and ethical beliefs are developed to a certain
degree, but the idea of freedom is extinct. Every one has his share of
truth doled out to him; no one is allowed to seek it for himself. This
is the condition into which most of the Asiatic nations, the Hindus, for
example, have fallen; their manly qualities are sapped by the domination
of the priests.”
Thus into the same limbo as the aristocratic peoples must now be thrust
the Hindus, the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Peruvians, the Tibetans,
the Japanese, and even the districts subject to modern Rome.
I will not touch on Guizot’s last two hypotheses, for the first two have
so restricted the meaning of civilization that scarcely any nation of
the earth can rightly lay claim to it any more. In order to do so a
people would have to live under institutions in which power and freedom
were equally mingled, and material development and moral progress
co-ordinated in one particular way. Government and religion would have
strict limits drawn round them, beyond which they would not be allowed
to advance. Finally, the subjects would necessarily possess rights of a
very definite kind. On such an assumption, the only civilized peoples
would be those whose government is both constitutional and
representative. Thus, I should not be able to save any of the European
nations from the indignity of being thrust into barbarism; and, as I
should be always measuring the degree of civilization with reference to
one single and unique political standard, I should gradually come to
reject even those constitutional states that made a bad use of their
Parliaments, and keep the prize exclusively for those which used them
well. In the end I should be driven to consider only one nation, of all
that have ever lived, as truly civilized—namely, the English.
I am, of course, full of respect and admiration for the great people
whose power and prodigious deeds are witnessed in every corner of the
world by their victories, their industry, and their commerce. I do not,
however, feel that I am bound to respect and admire no other. It seems
to me a confession altogether too cruel and humiliating to mankind, to
say that, since the beginning of the ages, it has only succeeded in
producing the full flower of civilization on a little island in the
western ocean, and that even there the true principle was not discovered
before the reign of William and Mary. Such a conception seems, you must
allow, a little narrow. And then consider its danger. If civilization
depends on a particular form of government, then reason, observation,
and science will soon have no voice in the question at all;
party-feeling alone will decide. Some bold spirits will be found to
follow their own preferences, and refuse to the British institutions the
honour of being the ideal of human perfection; all their enthusiasm will
be given to the system established at Petrograd or Vienna. Many people,
perhaps the majority of those living between the Rhine and the Pyrenees,
will hold that, in spite of some defects, France is still the most
civilized country in the world. The moment that a decision as to culture
becomes a matter of personal feeling, agreement is impossible. The most
highly developed man will be he who holds the same views as oneself as
to the respective duties of ruler and subjects; while the unfortunate
people who happen to think differently will be barbarians and savages.
No one, I suppose, will question the logic of this, or dispute that a
system that can lead to such a conclusion is, to say the least of it,
very incomplete.
For my own part, Guizot’s definition seems to me inferior even to that
given by William von Humboldt: “Civilization is the humanizing of
peoples both in their outward customs and institutions, and in the
inward feelings that correspond to these.”[38]
The defect here is the exact opposite of that which I have ventured to
find in Guizot’s formula. The cord is too loose, the field of
application too wide. If civilization is acquired merely by softness of
temper, more than one very primitive tribe will have the right to claim
it in preference to some European nation that may be rather rough in its
character. There are some tribes, in the islands of the South Pacific
Ocean and elsewhere, which are very mild and inoffensive, very easy of
approach; and yet no one, even while praising them, has ever dreamed of
setting them above the surly Norwegians, or even at the side of the
ferocious Malays, who are clad in flaming robes made by themselves, who
sail the seas in ships they have cleverly built with their own hands,
and are the terror, and at the same time the most intelligent agents, of
the carrying trade to the Eastern ports of the Indian Ocean. So eminent
a thinker as von Humboldt could not fail to see this; by the side,
therefore, of civilization, and just one grade above it, he places
_culture_. “By culture,” he says, “a people which is already humanized
in its social relations attains to art and science.”
According to this hierarchy, we find the second age of the world[39]
filled with affectionate and sympathetic beings, poets, artists, and
scholars. These, however, in their own nature, stand outside the grosser
forms of work; they are as aloof from the hardships of war as they are
from tilling the soil or practising the ordinary trades.
The leisure-time allowed for the exercise of the pure intellect is very
small, even in times of the greatest happiness and stability; and there
is an incessant struggle going on with Nature and the laws of the
universe to gain even the bare means of subsistence. This being so, we
can easily see that our Berlin philosopher is less concerned with
describing realities than with taking certain abstractions which seem to
him great and beautiful (as indeed they are), endowing them with life,
and making them act and move in a sphere as ideal as they are
themselves. Any doubts that might remain on this point are soon
dispelled when we come to the culminating-point of the system, which
consists of a third grade, higher than the others. Here stands the
“completely formed man,” in whose nature is “something at once higher
and more personal, a way of looking at the universe by which all the
impressions gathered from the intellectual and moral forces at work
around him are welded harmoniously together and taken up into his
character and sensibility.”
In this rather elaborate series the first stage is thus the “civilized
man,” that is, the softened or humanized man; the next is the “cultured
man,” the poet, artist, and scholar, and the last is the highest point
of development of which our species is capable, the “completely formed
man,”—of whom (if I understand the doctrine aright) we can gain an exact
idea from what we are told of Goethe and his “Olympian calm.” The
principle at the base of this theory is merely the vast difference which
von Humboldt sees between the general level of a people’s civilization
and the stage of perfection reached by a few great individuals. This
difference is so great that civilizations quite foreign to our own—that
of the Brahmans, for instance—have been able, so far as we know, to
produce men far superior in some ways to those that are most admired
among ourselves.
I quite agree with von Humboldt on this point. It is quite true that our
European society gives us neither the most sublime thinkers, nor the
greatest poets, nor even the cleverest artists. I venture to think,
however, in spite of the great scholar’s opinion, that, in order to
define and criticize civilization generally, we must, if only for a
moment, be careful to shake off our prejudices with regard to the
details of some particular type. We must not cast our net so widely as
to include the man in von Humboldt’s first stage, whom I refuse to call
civilized merely because he happens to be mild in character. On the
other hand we must not be so narrow as to reject every one but the
philosopher of the third stage. This would limit too strictly the scope
of all human endeavour after progress, and present its results as merely
isolated and individual.
Von Humboldt’s system does honour to the width and subtlety of a noble
mind, and may be compared, in its essentially abstract nature, with the
frail worlds, imagined by the Hindu philosophers, which are born from
the brain of a sleeping god, rise into the æther like the
rainbow-coloured bubbles blown by a child, and then break and give place
to others according to the dreams that lightly hover round the Divine
slumber.
The nature of my investigations keeps me on a lower and more prosaic
level; I wish to arrive at results that are a little more within the
range of practical experience. The restricted angle of my vision forbids
me to consider, as Guizot does, the measure of prosperity enjoyed by
human societies, or to contemplate, with von Humboldt, the high peaks on
which a few great minds sit in solitary splendour; my inquiries concern
merely the amount of power, material as well as moral, that has been
developed among the mass of a people. It has made me uneasy, I confess,
to see two of the most famous men of the century losing themselves in
by-ways; and if I am to trust myself to follow a different road from
theirs, I must survey my ground, and go back as far as possible for my
premises, in order to reach my goal without stumbling. I must ask the
reader to follow me with patience and attention through the winding
paths in which I have to walk, and I will try to illuminate, as far as I
can, the inherent obscurity of my subject.
There is no tribe so degraded that we cannot discover in it the instinct
to satisfy both its material and its moral needs. The first and most
obvious difference between races lies in the various ways in which the
two sides of this instinct are balanced. Among the most primitive
peoples they are never of equal intensity. In some, the sense of the
physical need is uppermost, in others, the tendency to contemplation.
Thus the brutish hordes of the yellow race seem to be dominated by the
needs of the body, though they are not quite without gleams of a
spiritual world. On the other hand to most of the negro tribes that have
reached the same stage of development, action is less than thought, and
the imagination gives a higher value to the things unseen than those
that can be handled. From the point of view of civilization, I do not
regard this as a reason for placing the negroes on a higher level; for
the experience of centuries shows that they are no more capable of being
civilized than the others. Ages have passed without their doing anything
to improve their condition; they are all equally powerless to mingle act
and idea in sufficient strength to burst their prison walls and emerge
from their degradation. But even in the lowest stages of human progress
I always find this twofold stream of instinct, in which now one, now the
other current predominates; and I will try to trace its path as I go up
the scale of civilization.
Above the Samoyedes, as above some of the Polynesian negroes, come the
tribes that are not quite content with a hut made of branches or with
force as the only social relation, but desire something better. These
tribes are raised one step above absolute barbarism. If they belong to
those races to whom action is more than thought, we shall see them
improving their tools, their arms, and their ornaments, setting up a
government in which the warriors are more important than the priests,
developing ideas of exchange, and already showing a fair aptitude for
commerce. Their wars will still be cruel, but will tend more and more to
become mere pillaging expeditions; in fact, material comfort and
physical enjoyment will be the main aim of the people. I find this
picture realized in many of the Mongolian tribes; also, in a higher
form, among the Quichuas and Aymaras of Peru. The opposite condition,
involving a greater detachment from mere bodily needs, will be found
among the Dahomeys of West Africa, and the Kaffirs.
I now continue the journey upwards, and leave the groups in which the
social system is not strong enough to impose itself over a large
population, even after a fusion of blood. I pass to those in which the
racial elements are so strong that they grip fast everything that comes
within their reach, and draw it into themselves; they found over immense
tracts of territory a supreme dominion resting on a basis of ideas and
actions that are more or less perfectly co-ordinated. For the first time
we have reached what can be called a _civilization_. The same internal
differences that I brought out in the first two stages appear in the
third; they are in fact far more marked than before, as it is only in
this third stage that their effects are of any real importance. From the
moment when an assemblage of men, which began as a mere tribe, has so
widened the horizon of its social relations as to merit the name of a
_people_, we see one of the two currents of instinct, the material and
the intellectual, flowing with greater force than before, according as
the separate groups, now fused together, were originally borne along by
one or the other. Thus, different results will follow, and different
qualities of a nation will come to the surface, according as the power
of thought or that of action is dominant. We may use here the Hindu
symbolism, and represent what I call the “intellectual current” by
Prakriti, the female principle, and the “material current” by Purusha,
the male principle. There is, of course, no blame or praise attaching to
either of these phrases; they merely imply that the one principle is
fertilized by the other.[40]
Further, we can see, at some periods of a people’s existence, a strong
oscillation between the two principles, one of which alternately
prevails over the other. These changes depend on the mingling of blood
that inevitably takes place at various times. Their consequences are
very important, and sensibly alter the character of the civilization by
impairing its stability.
I can thus divide peoples into two classes, as they come predominantly
under the action of one or other of these currents; though the division
is, of course, in no way absolute. At the head of the “male” category I
put the Chinese; the Hindus being the prototype of the opposite class.
After the Chinese come most of the peoples of ancient Italy, the Romans
of the Early Republic, and the Germanic tribes. In the opposite camp are
ranged the nations of Egypt and Assyria. They take their place behind
the men of Hindustan.
When we follow the nations down the ages, we find that the civilization
of nearly all of them has been modified by their oscillation between the
two principles. The peoples of Northern China were at first almost
entirely materialistic. By a gradual fusion with tribes of different
blood, especially those in the Yunnan, their outlook became less purely
utilitarian. The reason why this development has been arrested, or at
least has been very slow, for centuries past, is because the “male”
constituents of the population are far greater in quantity than the
slight “female” element in its blood.
In Northern Europe the materialistic strain, contributed by the best of
the Germanic tribes, has been continually strengthened by the influx of
Celts and Slavs. But as the white peoples drifted more and more towards
the south, the male influences gradually lost their force and were
absorbed by an excess of female elements, which finally triumphed. We
must allow some exceptions to this, for example in Piedmont and Northern
Spain.
Passing now to the other division, we see that the Hindus have in a high
degree the feeling of the supernatural, that they are more given to
meditation than to action. As their earliest conquests brought them
mainly into contact with races organized along the same lines as
themselves, the male principle could not be sufficiently developed among
them. In such an environment their civilization was not able to advance
on the material side as it had on the intellectual. We may contrast the
ancient Romans, who were naturally materialistic, and only ceased to be
so after a complete fusion with Greeks, Africans, and Orientals had
changed their original nature and given them a totally new temperament.
The internal development of the Greeks resembled that of the Hindus.
I conclude from such facts as these that every human activity, moral or
intellectual, has its original source in one or other of these two
currents, “male” or “female”; and only the races which have one of these
elements in abundance (without, of course, being quite destitute of the
other) can reach, in their social life, a satisfactory stage of culture,
and so attain to civilization.