ANIMISM.
Religious ideas generally appear among low races of Mankind—Negative
statements on this subject frequently misleading and mistaken: many
cases uncertain—Minimum definition of Religion—Doctrine of Spiritual
Beings, here termed Animism—Animism treated as belonging to Natural
Religion—Animism divided into two sections, the philosophy of Souls, and
of other Spirits—Doctrine of Souls, its prevalence and definition among
the lower races—Definition of Apparitional Soul or Ghost-Soul—It is a
theoretical conception of primitive Philosophy, designed to account for
phenomena now classed under Biology, especially Life and Death, Health
and Disease, Sleep and Dreams, Trance and Visions—Relation of Soul in
name and nature to Shadow, Blood, Breath—Division or Plurality of
Souls—Soul cause of Life; its restoration to body when supposed
absent—Exit of Soul in Trances—Dreams and Visions: theory of exit of
dreamer’s or seer’s own soul; theory of visits received by them from
other souls—Ghost-Soul seen in Apparitions—Wraiths and Doubles—Soul has
form of Body; suffers mutilation with it—Voice of Ghost—Soul treated and
defined as of Material Substance; this appears to be the original
doctrine—Transmission of Souls to service in future life by Funeral
Sacrifice of wives, attendants, &c.—Souls of Animals—Their transmission
by Funeral Sacrifice—Souls of Plants—Souls of Objects—Their transmission
by Funeral Sacrifice—Relation of Doctrine of Object-Souls to Epicurean
theory of Ideas—Historical development of Doctrine of Souls, from the
Ethereal Soul of primitive Biology to the Immaterial Soul of modern
Theology 417
CHAPTER I.
THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.
Culture or Civilization—Its phenomena related according to definite
Laws—Method of classification and discussion of the
evidence—Connexion of successive stages of culture by Permanence,
Modification, and Survival—Principal topics examined in the present
work.
Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies
of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general
principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and
action. On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely pervades
civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of
uniform causes: while on the other hand its various grades may be
regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of
previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history
of the future. To the investigation of these two great principles in
several departments of ethnography, with especial consideration of the
civilization of the lower tribes as related to the civilization of the
higher nations, the present volumes are devoted.
Our modern investigators in the sciences of inorganic nature are
foremost to recognize, both within and without their special fields of
work, the unity of nature, the fixity of its laws, the definite sequence
of cause and effect through which every fact depends on what has gone
before it, and acts upon what is to come after it. They grasp firmly the
Pythagorean doctrine of pervading order in the universal Kosmos. They
affirm, with Aristotle, that nature is not full of incoherent episodes,
like a bad tragedy. They agree with Leibnitz in what he calls ‘my axiom,
that nature never acts by leaps (la nature n’agit jamais par saut),’ as
well as in his ‘great principle, commonly little employed, that nothing
happens without sufficient reason.’ Nor again, in studying the structure
and habits of plants and animals, or in investigating the lower
functions even of man, are these leading ideas unacknowledged. But when
we come to talk of the higher processes of human feeling and action, of
thought and language, knowledge and art, a change appears in the
prevalent tone of opinion. The world at large is scarcely prepared to
accept the general study of human life as a branch of natural science,
and to carry out, in a large sense, the poet’s injunction, to ‘Account
for moral as for natural things.’ To many educated minds there seems
something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of
mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature, that our thoughts,
wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern
the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth
of plants and animals.
The main reasons of this state of the popular judgment are not far to
seek. There are many who would willingly accept a science of history if
placed before them with substantial definiteness of principle and
evidence, but who not unreasonably reject the systems offered to them,
as falling too far short of a scientific standard. Through resistance
such as this, real knowledge always sooner or later makes its way, while
the habit of opposition to novelty does such excellent service against
the invasions of speculative dogmatism, that we may sometimes even wish
it were stronger than it is. But other obstacles to the investigation of
laws of human nature arise from considerations of metaphysics and
theology. The popular notion of free human will involves not only
freedom to act in accordance with motive, but also a power of breaking
loose from continuity and acting without cause,—a combination which may
be roughly illustrated by the simile of a balance sometimes acting in
the usual way, but also possessed of the faculty of turning by itself
without or against its weights. This view of an anomalous action of the
will, which it need hardly be said is incompatible with scientific
argument, subsists as an opinion patent or latent in men’s minds, and
strongly affecting their theoretic views of history, though it is not,
as a rule, brought prominently forward in systematic reasoning. Indeed
the definition of human will, as strictly according with motive, is the
only possible scientific basis in such enquiries. Happily, it is not
needful to add here yet another to the list of dissertations on
supernatural intervention and natural causation, on liberty,
predestination, and accountability. We may hasten to escape from the
regions of transcendental philosophy and theology, to start on a more
hopeful journey over more practicable ground. None will deny that, as
each man knows by the evidence of his own consciousness, definite and
natural cause does, to a great extent, determine human action. Then,
keeping aside from considerations of extra-natural interference and
causeless spontaneity, let us take this admitted existence of natural
cause and effect as our standing-ground, and travel on it so far as it
will bear us. It is on this same basis that physical science pursues,
with ever-increasing success, its quest of laws of nature. Nor need this
restriction hamper the scientific study of human life, in which the real
difficulties are the practical ones of enormous complexity of evidence,
and imperfection of methods of observation.
Now it appears that this view of human will and conduct as subject to
definite law, is indeed recognised and acted upon by the very people who
oppose it when stated in the abstract as a general principle, and who
then complain that it annihilates man’s free will, destroys his sense of
personal responsibility, and degrades him to a soulless machine. He who
will say these things will nevertheless pass much of his own life in
studying the motives which lead to human action, seeking to attain his
wishes through them, framing in his mind theories of personal character,
reckoning what are likely to be the effects of new combinations, and
giving to his reasoning the crowning character of true scientific
enquiry, by taking it for granted that in so far as his calculation
turns out wrong, either his evidence must have been false or incomplete,
or his judgment upon it unsound. Such a one will sum up the experience
of years spent in complex relations with society, by declaring his
persuasion that there is a reason for everything in life, and that where
events look unaccountable, the rule is to wait and watch in hope that
the key to the problem may some day be found. This man’s observation may
have been as narrow as his inferences are crude and prejudiced, but
nevertheless he has been an inductive philosopher ‘more than forty years
without knowing it.’ He has practically acknowledged definite laws of
human thought and action, and has simply thrown out of account in his
own studies of life the whole fabric of motiveless will and uncaused
spontaneity. It is assumed here that they should be just so thrown out
of account in wider studies, and that the true philosophy of history
lies in extending and improving the methods of the plain people who form
their judgments upon facts, and check them upon new facts. Whether the
doctrine be wholly or but partly true, it accepts the very condition
under which we search for new knowledge in the lessons of experience,
and in a word the whole course of our rational life is based upon it.
‘One event is always the son of another, and we must never forget the
parentage,’ was a remark made by a Bechuana chief to Casalis the African
missionary. Thus at all times historians, so far as they have aimed at
being more than mere chroniclers, have done their best to show not
merely succession, but connexion, among the events upon their record.
Moreover, they have striven to elicit general principles of human
action, and by these to explain particular events, stating expressly or
taking tacitly for granted the existence of a philosophy of history.
Should any one deny the possibility of thus establishing historical
laws, the answer is ready with which Boswell in such a case turned on
Johnson: ‘Then, sir, you would reduce all history to no better than an
almanack.’ That nevertheless the labours of so many eminent thinkers
should have as yet brought history only to the threshold of science,
need cause no wonder to those who consider the bewildering complexity of
the problems which come before the general historian. The evidence from
which he is to draw his conclusions is at once so multifarious and so
doubtful, that a full and distinct view of its bearing on a particular
question is hardly to be attained, and thus the temptation becomes all
but irresistible to garble it in support of some rough and ready theory
of the course of events. The philosophy of history at large, explaining
the past and predicting the future phenomena of man’s life in the world
by reference to general laws, is in fact a subject with which, in the
present state of knowledge, even genius aided by wide research seems but
hardly able to cope. Yet there are departments of it which, though
difficult enough, seem comparatively accessible. If the field of enquiry
be narrowed from History as a whole to that branch of it which is here
called Culture, the history, not of tribes or nations, but of the
condition of knowledge, religion, art, custom, and the like among them,
the task of investigation proves to lie within far more moderate
compass. We suffer still from the same kind of difficulties which beset
the wider argument, but they are much diminished. The evidence is no
longer so wildly heterogeneous, but may be more simply classified and
compared, while the power of getting rid of extraneous matter, and
treating each issue on its own proper set of facts, makes close
reasoning on the whole more available than in general history. This may
appear from a brief preliminary examination of the problem, how the
phenomena of Culture may be classified and arranged, stage by stage, in
a probable order of evolution.
Surveyed in a broad view, the character and habit of mankind at once
display that similarity and consistency of phenomena which led the
Italian proverb-maker to declare that ‘all the world is one country,’
‘tutto il mondo è paese.’ To general likeness in human nature on the one
hand, and to general likeness in the circumstances of life on the other,
this similarity and consistency may no doubt be traced, and they may be
studied with especial fitness in comparing races near the same grade of
civilization. Little respect need be had in such comparisons for date in
history or for place on the map; the ancient Swiss lake-dweller may be
set beside the mediæval Aztec, and the Ojibwa of North America beside
the Zulu of South Africa. As Dr. Johnson contemptuously said when he had
read about Patagonians and South Sea Islanders in Hawkesworth’s Voyages,
‘one set of savages is like another.’ How true a generalization this
really is, any Ethnological Museum may show. Examine for instance the
edged and pointed instruments in such a collection; the inventory
includes hatchet, adze, chisel, knife, saw, scraper, awl, needle, spear
and arrow-head, and of these most or all belong with only differences of
detail to races the most various. So it is with savage occupations; the
wood-chopping, fishing with net and line, shooting and spearing game,
fire-making, cooking, twisting cord and plaiting baskets, repeat
themselves with wonderful uniformity in the museum shelves which
illustrate the life of the lower races from Kamchatka to Tierra del
Fuego, and from Dahome to Hawaii. Even when it comes to comparing
barbarous hordes with civilized nations, the consideration thrusts
itself upon our minds, how far item after item of the life of the lower
races passes into analogous proceedings of the higher, in forms not too
far changed to be recognized, and sometimes hardly changed at all. Look
at the modern European peasant using his hatchet and his hoe, see his
food boiling or roasting over the log-fire, observe the exact place
which beer holds in his calculation of happiness, hear his tale of the
ghost in the nearest haunted house, and of the farmer’s niece who was
bewitched with knots in her inside till she fell into fits and died. If
we choose out in this way things which have altered little in a long
course of centuries, we may draw a picture where there shall be scarce a
hand’s breadth difference between an English ploughman and a negro of
Central Africa. These pages will be so crowded with evidence of such
correspondence among mankind, that there is no need to dwell upon its
details here, but it may be used at once to override a problem which
would complicate the argument, namely, the question of race. For the
present purpose it appears both possible and desirable to eliminate
considerations of hereditary varieties or races of man, and to treat
mankind as homogeneous in nature, though placed in different grades of
civilization. The details of the enquiry will, I think, prove that
stages of culture may be compared without taking into account how far
tribes who use the same implement, follow the same custom, or believe
the same myth, may differ in their bodily configuration and the colour
of their skin and hair.
A first step in the study of civilization is to dissect it into details,
and to classify these in their proper groups. Thus, in examining
weapons, they are to be classed under spear, club, sling, bow and arrow,
and so forth; among textile arts are to be ranged matting, netting, and
several grades of making and weaving threads; myths are divided under
such headings as myths of sunrise and sunset, eclipse-myths,
earthquake-myths, local myths which account for the names of places by
some fanciful tale, eponymic myths which account for the parentage of a
tribe by turning its name into the name of an imaginary ancestor; under
rites and ceremonies occur such practices as the various kinds of
sacrifice to the ghosts of the dead and to other spiritual beings, the
turning to the east in worship, the purification of ceremonial or moral
uncleanness by means of water or fire. Such are a few miscellaneous
examples from a list of hundreds, and the ethnographer’s business is to
classify such details with a view to making out their distribution in
geography and history, and the relations which exist among them. What
this task is like, may be almost perfectly illustrated by comparing
these details of culture with the species of plants and animals as
studied by the naturalist. To the ethnographer the bow and arrow is a
species, the habit of flattening children’s skulls is a species, the
practice of reckoning numbers by tens is a species. The geographical
distribution of these things, and their transmission from region to
region, have to be studied as the naturalist studies the geography of
his botanical and zoological, species. Just as certain plants and
animals are peculiar to certain districts, so it is with such
instruments as the Australian boomerang, the Polynesian stick-and-groove
for fire-making, the tiny bow and arrow used as a lancet or phleme by
tribes about the Isthmus of Panama, and in like manner with many an art,
myth, or custom, found isolated in a particular field. Just as the
catalogue of all the species of plants and animals of a district
represents its Flora and Fauna, so the list of all the items of the
general life of a people represents that whole which we call its
culture. And just as distant regions so often produce vegetables and
animals which are analogous, though by no means identical, so it is with
the details of the civilization of their inhabitants. How good a working
analogy there really is between the diffusion of plants and animals and
the diffusion of civilization, comes well into view when we notice how
far the same causes have produced both at once. In district after
district, the same causes which have introduced the cultivated plants
and domesticated animals of civilization, have brought in with them a
corresponding art and knowledge. The course of events which carried
horses and wheat to America carried with them the use of the gun and the
iron hatchet, while in return the whole world received not only maize,
potatoes, and turkeys, but the habit of tobacco-smoking and the sailor’s
hammock.
It is a matter worthy of consideration, that the accounts of similar
phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts of the world,
actually supply incidental proof of their own authenticity. Some years
since, a question which brings out this point was put to me by a great
historian—‘How can a statement as to customs, myths, beliefs, &c., of a
savage tribe be treated as evidence where it depends on the testimony of
some traveller or missionary, who may be a superficial observer, more or
less ignorant of the native language, a careless retailer of unsifted
talk, a man prejudiced or even wilfully deceitful?’ This question is,
indeed, one which every ethnographer ought to keep clearly and
constantly before his mind. Of course he is bound to use his best
judgment as to the trustworthiness of all authors he quotes, and if
possible to obtain several accounts to certify each point in each
locality. But it is over and above these measures of precaution that the
test of recurrence comes in. If two independent visitors to different
countries, say a mediæval Mohammedan in Tartary and a modern Englishman
in Dahome, or a Jesuit missionary in Brazil and a Wesleyan in the Fiji
Islands, agree in describing some analogous art or rite or myth among
the people they have visited, it becomes difficult or impossible to set
down such correspondence to accident or wilful fraud. A story by a
bushranger in Australia may, perhaps, be objected to as a mistake or an
invention, but did a Methodist minister in Guinea conspire with him to
cheat the public by telling the same story there? The possibility of
intentional or unintentional mystification is often barred by such a
state of things as that a similar statement is made in two remote lands,
by two witnesses, of whom A lived a century before B, and B appears
never to have heard of A. How distant are the countries, how wide apart
the dates, how different the creeds and characters of the observers, in
the catalogue of facts of civilization, needs no farther showing to any
one who will even glance at the footnotes of the present work. And the
more odd the statement, the less likely that several people in several
places should have made it wrongly. This being so, it seems reasonable
to judge that the statements are in the main truly given, and that their
close and regular coincidence is due to the cropping up of similar facts
in various districts of culture. Now the most important facts of
ethnography are vouched for in this way. Experience leads the student
after a while to expect and find that the phenomena of culture, as
resulting from widely-acting similar causes, should recur again and
again in the world. He even mistrusts isolated statements to which he
knows of no parallel elsewhere, and waits for their genuineness to be
shown by corresponding accounts from the other side of the earth, or the
other end of history. So strong, indeed, is this means of
authentication, that the ethnographer in his library may sometimes
presume to decide, not only whether a particular explorer is a shrewd,
honest observer, but also whether what he reports is conformable to the
general rules of civilization. ‘Non quis, sed quid.’
To turn from the distribution of culture in different countries, to its
diffusion within these countries. The quality of mankind which tends
most to make the systematic study of civilization possible, is that
remarkable tacit consensus or agreement which so far induces whole
populations to unite in the use of the same language, to follow the same
religion and customary law, to settle down to the same general level of
art and knowledge. It is this state of things which makes it so far
possible to ignore exceptional facts and to describe nations by a sort
of general average. It is this state of things which makes it so far
possible to represent immense masses of details by a few typical facts,
while, these once settled, new cases recorded by new observers simply
fall into their places to prove the soundness of the classification.
There is found to be such regularity in the composition of societies of
men, that we can drop individual differences out of sight, and thus can
generalize on the arts and opinions of whole nations, just as, when
looking down upon an army from a hill, we forget the individual soldier,
whom, in fact, we can scarce distinguish in the mass, while we see each
regiment as an organized body, spreading or concentrating, moving in
advance or in retreat. In some branches of the study of social laws it
is now possible to call in the aid of statistics, and to set apart
special actions of large mixed communities of men by means of
taxgatherers’ schedules, or the tables of the insurance office. Among
modern arguments on the laws of human action, none have had a deeper
effect than generalizations such as those of M. Quetelet, on the
regularity, not only of such matters as average stature and the annual
rates of birth and death, but of the recurrence, year after year, of
such obscure and seemingly incalculable products of national life as the
numbers of murders and suicides, and the proportion of the very weapons
of crime. Other striking cases are the annual regularity of persons
killed accidentally in the London streets, and of undirected letters
dropped into post-office letter-boxes. But in examining the culture of
the lower races, far from having at command the measured arithmetical
facts of modern statistics, we may have to judge of the condition of
tribes from the imperfect accounts supplied by travellers or
missionaries, or even to reason upon relics of prehistoric races of
whose very names and languages we are hopelessly ignorant. Now these may
seem at the first glance sadly indefinite and unpromising materials for
scientific enquiry. But in fact they are neither indefinite nor
unpromising, but give evidence that is good and definite so far as it
goes. They are data which, for the distinct way in which they severally
denote the condition of the tribe they belong to, will actually bear
comparison with the statistician’s returns. The fact is that a stone
arrow-head, a carved club, an idol, a grave-mound where slaves and
property have been buried for the use of the dead, an account of a
sorcerer’s rites in making rain, a table of numerals, the conjugation of
a verb, are things which each express the state of a people as to one
particular point of culture, as truly as the tabulated numbers of deaths
by poison, and of chests of tea imported, express in a different way
other partial results of the general life of a whole community.
That a whole nation should have a special dress, special tools and
weapons, special laws of marriage and property, special moral and
religious doctrines, is a remarkable fact, which we notice so little
because we have lived all our lives in the midst of it. It is with such
general qualities of organized bodies of men that ethnography has
especially to deal. Yet, while generalizing on the culture of a tribe or
nation, and setting aside the peculiarities of the individuals composing
it as unimportant to the main result, we must be careful not to forget
what makes up this main result. There are people so intent on the
separate life of individuals that they cannot grasp a notion of the
action of a community as a whole—such an observer, incapable of a wide
view of society, is aptly described in the saying that he ‘cannot see
the forest for the trees.’ But, on the other hand, the philosopher may
be so intent upon his general laws of society as to neglect the
individual actors of whom that society is made up, and of him it may be
said that he cannot see the trees for the forest. We know how arts,
customs, and ideas are shaped among ourselves by the combined actions of
many individuals, of which actions both motive and effect often come
quite distinctly within our view. The history of an invention, an
opinion, a ceremony, is a history of suggestion and modification,
encouragement and opposition, personal gain and party prejudice, and the
individuals concerned act each according to his own motives, as
determined by his character and circumstances. Thus sometimes we watch
individuals acting for their own ends with little thought of their
effect on society at large, and sometimes we have to study movements of
national life as a whole, where the individuals co-operating in them are
utterly beyond our observation. But seeing that collective social action
is the mere resultant of many individual actions, it is clear that these
two methods of enquiry, if rightly followed, must be absolutely
consistent.
In studying both the recurrence of special habits or ideas in several
districts, and their prevalence within each district, there come before
us ever-reiterated proofs of regular causation producing the phenomena
of human life, and of laws of maintenance and diffusion according to
which these phenomena settle into permanent standard conditions of
society, at definite stages of culture. But, while giving full
importance to the evidence bearing on these standard conditions of
society, let us be careful to avoid a pitfall which may entrap the
unwary student. Of course the opinions and habits belonging in common to
masses of mankind are to a great extent the results of sound judgment
and practical wisdom. But to a great extent it is not so. That many
numerous societies of men should have believed in the influence of the
evil eye and the existence of a firmament, should have sacrificed slaves
and goods to the ghosts of the departed, should have handed down
traditions of giants slaying monsters and men turning into beasts—all
this is ground for holding that such ideas were indeed produced in men’s
minds by efficient causes, but it is not ground for holding that the
rites in question are profitable, the beliefs sound, and the history
authentic. This may seem at the first glance a truism, but, in fact, it
is the denial of a fallacy which deeply affects the minds of all but a
small critical minority of mankind. Popularly, what everybody says must
be true, what everybody does must be right—‘Quod ubique, quod semper,
quod ab omnibus creditum est, hoc est vere proprieque Catholicum’—and so
forth. There are various topics, especially in history, law, philosophy,
and theology, where even the educated people we live among can hardly be
brought to see that the cause why men do hold an opinion, or practise a
custom, is by no means necessarily a reason why they ought to do so. Now
collections of ethnographic evidence bringing so prominently into view
the agreement of immense multitudes of men as to certain traditions,
beliefs, and usages, are peculiarly liable to be thus improperly used in
direct defence of these institutions themselves, even old barbaric
nations being polled to maintain their opinions against what are called
modern ideas. As it has more than once happened to myself to find my
collections of traditions and beliefs thus set up to prove their own
objective truth, without proper examination of the grounds on which they
were actually received, I take this occasion of remarking that the same
line of argument will serve equally well to demonstrate, by the strong
and wide consent of nations, that the earth is flat, and nightmare the
visit of a demon.
It being shown that the details of Culture are capable of being
classified in a great number of ethnographic groups of arts, beliefs,
customs, and the rest, the consideration comes next how far the facts
arranged in these groups are produced by evolution from one another. It
need hardly be pointed out that the groups in question, though held
together each by a common character, are by no means accurately defined.
To take up again the natural history illustration, it may be said that
they are species which tend to run widely into varieties. And when it
comes to the question what relations some of these groups bear to
others, it is plain that the student of the habits of mankind has a
great advantage over the student of the species of plants and animals.
Among naturalists it is an open question whether a theory of development
from species to species is a record of transitions which actually took
place, or a mere ideal scheme serviceable in the classification of
species whose origin was really independent. But among ethnographers
there is no such question as to the possibility of species of implements
or habits or beliefs being developed one out of another, for development
in Culture is recognized by our most familiar knowledge. Mechanical
invention supplies apt examples of the kind of development which affects
civilization at large. In the history of fire-arms, the clumsy
wheel-lock, in which a notched steel wheel revolved by means of a spring
against a piece of pyrites till a spark caught the priming, led to the
invention of the more serviceable flint-lock, of which a few still hang
in the kitchens of our farm-houses for the boys to shoot small birds
with at Christmas; the flint-lock in time passed by modification into
the percussion-lock, which is just now changing its old-fashioned
arrangement to be adapted from muzzle-loading to breech-loading. The
mediæval astrolabe passed into the quadrant, now discarded in its turn
by the seaman, who uses the more delicate sextant, and so it is through
the history of one art and instrument after another. Such examples of
progression are known to us as direct history, but so thoroughly is this
notion of development at home in our minds, that by means of it we
reconstruct lost history without scruple, trusting to general knowledge
of the principles of human thought and action as a guide in putting the
facts in their proper order. Whether chronicle speaks or is silent on
the point, no one comparing a long-bow and a cross-bow would doubt that
the cross-bow was a development arising from the simpler instrument. So
among the fire-drills for igniting by friction, it seems clear on the
face of the matter that the drill worked by a cord or bow is a later
improvement on the clumsier primitive instrument twirled between the
hands. That instructive class of specimens which antiquaries sometimes
discover, bronze celts modelled on the heavy type of the stone hatchet,
are scarcely explicable except as first steps in the transition from the
Stone Age to the Bronze Age, to be followed soon by the next stage of
progress, in which it is discovered that the new material is suited to a
handier and less wasteful pattern. And thus, in the other branches of
our history, there will come again and again into view series of facts
which may be consistently arranged as having followed one another in a
particular order of development, but which will hardly bear being turned
round and made to follow in reversed order. Such for instance are the
facts I have here brought forward in a chapter on the Art of Counting,
which tend to prove that as to this point of culture at least, savage
tribes reached their position by learning and not by unlearning, by
elevation from a lower rather than by degradation from a higher state.
Among evidence aiding us to trace the course which the civilization of
the world has actually followed, is that great class of facts to denote
which I have found it convenient to introduce the term ‘survivals.’
These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been
carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from
that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as
proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a
newer has been evolved. Thus, I know an old Somersetshire woman whose
hand-loom dates from the time before the introduction of the ‘flying
shuttle,’ which new-fangled appliance she has never even learnt to use,
and I have seen her throw her shuttle from hand to hand in true classic
fashion; this old woman is not a century behind her times, but she is a
case of survival. Such examples often lead us back to the habits of
hundreds and even thousands of years ago. The ordeal of the Key and
Bible, still in use, is a survival; the Midsummer bonfire is a survival;
the Breton peasants’ All Souls’ supper for the spirits of the dead is a
survival. The simple keeping up of ancient habits is only one part of
the transition from old into new and changing times. The serious
business of ancient society may be seen to sink into the sport of later
generations, and its serious belief to linger on in nursery folk-lore,
while superseded habits of old-world life may be modified into new-world
forms still powerful for good and evil. Sometimes old thoughts and
practices will burst out afresh, to the amazement of a world that
thought them long since dead or dying; here survival passes into
revival, as has lately happened in so remarkable a way in the history of
modern spiritualism, a subject full of instruction from the
ethnographer’s point of view. The study of the principles of survival
has, indeed, no small practical importance, for most of what we call
superstition is included within survival, and in this way lies open to
the attack of its deadliest enemy, a reasonable explanation.
Insignificant, moreover, as multitudes of the facts of survival are in
themselves, their study is so effective for tracing the course of the
historical development through which alone it is possible to understand
their meaning, that it becomes a vital point of ethnographic research to
gain the clearest possible insight into their nature. This importance
must justify the detail here devoted to an examination of survival, on
the evidence of such games, popular sayings, customs, superstitions, and
the like, as may serve well to bring into view the manner of its
operation.
Progress, degradation, survival, revival, modification, are all modes of
the connexion that binds together the complex network of civilization.
It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to
set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far but
the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past ages. Looking
round the rooms we live in, we may try here how far he who only knows
his own time can be capable of rightly comprehending even that. Here is
the ‘honeysuckle’ of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis of Anjou, a cornice
with a Greek border runs round the ceiling, the style of Louis XIV, and
its parent the Renaissance share the looking-glass between them.
Transformed, shifted, or mutilated, such elements of art still carry
their history plainly stamped upon them; and if the history yet farther
behind is less easy to read, we are not to say that because we cannot
clearly discern it there is therefore no history there. It is thus even
with the fashion of the clothes men wear. The ridiculous little tails of
the German postilion’s coat show of themselves how they came to dwindle
to such absurd rudiments; but the English clergyman’s bands no longer so
convey their history to the eye, and look unaccountable enough till one
has seen the intermediate stages through which they came down from the
more serviceable wide collars, such as Milton wears in his portrait, and
which gave their name to the ‘band-box’ they used to be kept in. In
fact, the books of costume, showing how one garment grew or shrank by
gradual stages and passed into another, illustrate with much force and
clearness the nature of the change and growth, revival and decay, which
go on from year to year in more important matters of life. In books,
again, we see each writer not for and by himself, but occupying his
proper place in history; we look through each philosopher,
mathematician, chemist, poet, into the background of his
education,—through Leibnitz into Descartes, through Dalton into
Priestley, through Milton into Homer. The study of language has,
perhaps, done more than any other in removing from our view of human
thought and action the ideas of chance and arbitrary invention, and in
substituting for them a theory of development by the co-operation of
individual men, through processes ever reasonable and intelligible where
the facts are fully known. Rudimentary as the science of culture still
is, the symptoms are becoming very strong that even what seem its most
spontaneous and motiveless phenomena will, nevertheless, be shown to
come within the range of distinct cause and effect as certainly as the
facts of mechanics. What would be popularly thought more indefinite and
uncontrolled than the products of the imagination in myths and fables?
Yet any systematic investigation of mythology, on the basis of a wide
collection of evidence, will show plainly enough in such efforts of
fancy at once a development from stage to stage, and a production of
uniformity of result from uniformity of cause. Here, as elsewhere,
causeless spontaneity is seen to recede farther and farther into shelter
within the dark precincts of ignorance; like chance, that still holds
its place among the vulgar as a real cause of events otherwise
unaccountable, while to educated men it has long consciously meant
nothing but this ignorance itself. It is only when men fail to see the
line of connexion in events, that they are prone to fall upon the
notions of arbitrary impulses, causeless freaks, chance and nonsense and
indefinite unaccountability. If childish games, purposeless customs,
absurd superstitions, are set down as spontaneous because no one can say
exactly how they came to be, the assertion may remind us of the like
effect that the eccentric habits of the wild rice-plant had on the
philosophy of a Red Indian tribe, otherwise disposed to see in the
harmony of nature the effects of one controlling personal will. The
Great Spirit, said these Sioux theologians, made all things except the
wild rice; but the wild rice came by chance.
‘Man,’ said Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘ever connects on from what lies at
hand (der Mensch knüpft immer an Vorhandenes an).’ The notion of the
continuity of civilization contained in this maxim is no barren
philosophic principle, but is at once made practical by the
consideration that they who wish to understand their own lives ought to
know the stages through which their opinions and habits have become what
they are. Auguste Comte scarcely overstated the necessity of this study
of development when he declared at the beginning of his ‘Positive
Philosophy’ that ‘no conception can be understood except through its
history,’ and his phrase will bear extension to culture at large. To
expect to look modern life in the face and comprehend it by mere
inspection, is a philosophy whose weakness can easily be tested. Imagine
any one explaining the trivial saying, ‘a little bird told me,’ without
knowing of the old belief in the language of birds and beasts, to which
Dr. Dasent, in the introduction to the Norse Tales, so reasonably traces
its origin. Attempts to explain by the light of reason things which want
the light of history to show their meaning, may be instanced from
Blackstone’s Commentaries. To Blackstone’s mind, the very right of the
commoner to turn his beast out to graze on the common, finds its origin
and explanation in the feudal system. ‘For, when lords of manors granted
out parcels of land to tenants, for services either done or to be done,
these tenants could not plough or manure the land without beasts; these
beasts could not be sustained without pasture; and pasture could not be
had but in the lord’s wastes, and on the uninclosed fallow grounds of
themselves and the other tenants. The law therefore annexed this right
of common, as inseparably incident, to the grant of the lands; and this
was the original of common appendant,’ &c.[2] Now though there is
nothing irrational in this explanation, it does not agree at all with
the Teutonic land-law which prevailed in England long before the Norman
Conquest, and of which the remains have never wholly disappeared. In the
old village-community even the arable land, lying in the great common
fields which may still be traced in our country, had not yet passed into
separate property, while the pasturage in the fallows and stubbles and
on the waste belonged to the householders in common. Since those days,
the change from communal to individual ownership has mostly transformed
this old-world system, but the right which the peasant enjoys of
pasturing his cattle on the common still remains, not as a concession to
feudal tenants, but as possessed by the commoners before the lord ever
claimed the ownership of the waste. It is always unsafe to detach a
custom from its hold on past events, treating it as an isolated fact to
be simply disposed of by some plausible explanation.
In carrying on the great task of rational ethnography, the investigation
of the causes which have produced the phenomena of culture, and of the
laws to which they are subordinate, it is desirable to work out as
systematically as possible a scheme of evolution of this culture along
its many lines. In the following chapter, on the Development of Culture,
an attempt is made to sketch a theoretical course of civilization among
mankind, such as appears on the whole most accordant with the evidence.
By comparing the various stages of civilization among races known to
history, with the aid of archæological inference from the remains of
prehistoric tribes, it seems possible to judge in a rough way of an
early general condition of man, which from our point of view is to be
regarded as a primitive condition, whatever yet earlier state may in
reality have lain behind it. This hypothetical primitive condition
corresponds in a considerable degree to that of modern savage tribes,
who, in spite of their difference and distance, have in common certain
elements of civilization, which seem remains of an early state of the
human race at large. If this hypothesis be true, then, notwithstanding
the continual interference of degeneration, the main tendency of culture
from primæval up to modern times has been from savagery towards
civilization. On the problem of this relation of savage to civilized
life, almost every one of the thousands of facts discussed in the
succeeding chapters has its direct bearing. Survival in Culture, placing
all along the course of advancing civilization way-marks full of meaning
to those who can decipher their signs, even now sets up in our midst
primæval monuments of barbaric thought and life. Its investigation tells
strongly in favour of the view that the European may find among the
Greenlanders or Maoris many a trait for reconstructing the picture of
his own primitive ancestors. Next comes the problem of the Origin of
Language. Obscure as many parts of this problem still remain, its
clearer positions lie open to the investigation whether speech took its
origin among mankind in the savage state, and the result of the enquiry
is that consistently with all known evidence, this may have been the
case. From the examination of the Art of Counting a far more definite
consequence is shown. It may be confidently asserted, that not only is
this important art found in a rudimentary state among savage tribes, but
that satisfactory evidence proves numeration to have been developed by
rational invention from this low stage up to that in which we ourselves
possess it. The examination of Mythology contained in the first volume,
is for the most part made from a special point of view, on evidence
collected for a special purpose, that of tracing the relation between
the myths of savage tribes and their analogues among more civilized
nations. The issue of such enquiry goes far to prove that the earliest
myth-maker arose and flourished among savage hordes, setting on foot an
art which his more cultured successors would carry on, till its results
came to be fossilized in superstition, mistaken for history, shaped and
draped in poetry, or cast aside as lying folly.
Nowhere, perhaps, are broad views of historical development more needed
than in the study of religion. Notwithstanding all that has been written
to make the world acquainted with the lower theologies, the popular
ideas of their place in history and their relation to the faiths of
higher nations are still of the mediæval type. It is wonderful to
contrast some missionary journals with Max Müller’s Essays, and to set
the unappreciating hatred and ridicule that is lavished by narrow
hostile zeal on Brahmanism, Buddhism, Zoroastrism, besides the catholic
sympathy with which deep and wide knowledge can survey those ancient and
noble phases of man’s religious consciousness; nor, because the
religions of savage tribes may be rude and primitive compared with the
great Asiatic systems, do they lie too low for interest and even for
respect. The question really lies between understanding and
misunderstanding them. Few who will give their minds to master the
general principles of savage religion will ever again think it
ridiculous, or the knowledge of it superfluous to the rest of mankind.
Far from its beliefs and practices being a rubbish-heap of miscellaneous
folly, they are consistent and logical in so high a degree as to begin,
as soon as even roughly classified, to display the principles of their
formation and development; and these principles prove to be essentially
rational, though working in a mental condition of intense and inveterate
ignorance. It is with a sense of attempting an investigation which bears
very closely on the current theology of our own day, that I have set
myself to examine systematically, among the lower races, the development
of Animism; that is to say, the doctrine of souls and other spiritual
beings in general. More than half of the present work is occupied with a
mass of evidence from all regions of the world, displaying the nature
and meaning of this great element of the Philosophy of Religion, and
tracing its transmission, expansion, restriction, modification, along
the course of history into the midst of our own modern thought. Nor are
the questions of small practical moment which have to be raised in a
similar attempt to trace the development of certain prominent Rites and
Ceremonies—customs so full of instruction as to the inmost powers of
religion, whose outward expression and practical result they are.
In these investigations, however, made rather from an ethnographic than
a theological point of view, there has seemed little need of entering
into direct controversial argument, which indeed I have taken pains to
avoid as far as possible. The connexion which runs through religion,
from its rudest forms up to the status of an enlightened Christianity,
may be conveniently treated of with little recourse to dogmatic
theology. The rites of sacrifice and purification may be studied in
their stages of development without entering into questions of their
authority and value, nor does an examination of the successive phases of
the world’s belief in a future life demand a discussion of the arguments
adduced for or against the doctrine itself. The ethnographic results may
then be left as materials for professed theologians, and it will not
perhaps be long before evidence so fraught with meaning shall take its
legitimate place. To fall back once again on the analogy of natural
history, the time may soon come when it will be thought as unreasonable
for a scientific student of theology not to have a competent
acquaintance with the principles of the religions of the lower races, as
for a physiologist to look with the contempt of past centuries on
evidence derived from the lower forms of life, deeming the structure of
mere invertebrate creatures matter unworthy of his philosophic study.
Not merely as a matter of curious research, but as an important
practical guide to the understanding of the present and the shaping of
the future, the investigation into the origin and early development of
civilization must be pushed on zealously. Every possible avenue of
knowledge must be explored, every door tried to see if it is open. No
kind of evidence need be left untouched on the score of remoteness or
complexity, of minuteness or triviality. The tendency of modern enquiry
is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is
everywhere. To despair of what a conscientious collection and study of
facts may lead to, and to declare any problem insoluble because
difficult and far off, is distinctly to be on the wrong side in science;
and he who will choose a hopeless task may set himself to discover the
limits of discovery. One remembers Comte starting in his account of
astronomy with a remark on the necessary limitation of our knowledge of
the stars: we conceive, he tells us, the possibility of determining
their form, distance, size, and movement, whilst we should never by any
method be able to study their chemical composition, their mineralogical
structure, &c. Had the philosopher lived to see the application of
spectrum analysis to this very problem, his proclamation of the
dispiriting doctrine of necessary ignorance would perhaps have been
recanted in favour of a more hopeful view. And it seems to be with the
philosophy of remote human life somewhat as with the study of the nature
of the celestial bodies. The processes to be made out in the early
stages of our mental evolution lie distant from us in time as the stars
lie distant from us in space, but the laws of the universe are not
limited with the direct observation of our senses. There is vast
material to be used in our enquiry; many workers are now busied in
bringing this material into shape, though little may have yet been done
in proportion to what remains to do; and already it seems not too much
to say that the vague outlines of a philosophy of primæval history are
beginning to come within our view.
Footnote 2:
Blackstone, ‘Commentaries on the Laws of England,’ bk. II., ch. 3. The
above example replaces that given in former editions. Another example
may be found in his explanation of the origin of deodand, bk. I., ch.
8, as designed, in the blind days of popery, as an expiation for the
souls of such as were snatched away by sudden death; see below, p.
287. [Note to 3rd ed.]
CHAPTER II.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE.
Stages of culture, industrial, intellectual, political,
moral—Development of culture in great measure corresponds
with transition from savage through barbaric to civilized
life—Progression-theory—Degeneration-theory—Development-theory
includes both, the one as primary, the other as secondary—Historical
and traditional evidence not available as to low stages
of culture—Historical evidence as to principles of
Degeneration—Ethnological evidence as to rise and fall in culture
from comparison of different levels of culture in branches of the
same race—Extent of historically recorded antiquity of
civilization—Prehistoric Archæology extends the antiquity of man in
low stages of civilization—Traces of Stone Age, corroborated by
megalithic structures, lake dwellings, shell-heaps, burial-places,
&c., prove original low culture throughout the world—Stages of
Progressive Development in industrial arts.
In taking up the problem of the development of culture as a branch of
ethnological research, a first proceeding is to obtain a means of
measurement. Seeking something like a definite line along which to
reckon progression and retrogression in civilization, we may apparently
find it best in the classification of real tribes and nations, past and
present. Civilization actually existing among mankind in different
grades, we are enabled to estimate and compare it by positive examples.
The educated world of Europe and America practically settles a standard
by simply placing its own nations at one end of the social series and
savage tribes at the other, arranging the rest of mankind between these
limits according as they correspond more closely to savage or to
cultured life. The principal criteria of classification are the absence
or presence, high or low development, of the industrial arts, especially
metal-working, manufacture of implements and vessels, agriculture,
architecture, &c., the extent of scientific knowledge, the definiteness
of moral principles, the condition of religious belief and ceremony, the
degree of social and political organization, and so forth. Thus, on the
definite basis of compared facts, ethnographers are able to set up at
least a rough scale of civilization. Few would dispute that the
following races are arranged rightly in order of culture:—Australian,
Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, Italian. By treating the development of
civilization on this plain ethnographic basis, many difficulties may be
avoided which have embarrassed its discussion. This may be seen by a
glance at the relation which theoretical principles of civilization bear
to the transitions to be observed as matter of fact between the extremes
of savage and cultured life.
From an ideal point of view, civilization may be looked upon as the
general improvement of mankind by higher organization of the individual
and of society, to the end of promoting at once man’s goodness, power,
and happiness. This theoretical civilization does in no small measure
correspond with actual civilization, as traced by comparing savagery
with barbarism, and barbarism with modern educated life. So far as we
take into account only material and intellectual culture, this is
especially true. Acquaintance with the physical laws of the world, and
the accompanying power of adapting nature to man’s own ends, are, on the
whole, lowest among savages, mean among barbarians, and highest among
modern educated nations. Thus a transition from the savage state to our
own would be, practically, that very progress of art and knowledge which
is one main element in the development of culture.
But even those students who hold most strongly that the general course
of civilization, as measured along the scale of races from savages to
ourselves, is progress towards the benefit of mankind, must admit many
and manifold exceptions. Industrial and intellectual culture by no means
advances uniformly in all its branches, and in fact excellence in
various of its details is often obtained under conditions which keep
back culture as a whole. It is true that these exceptions seldom swamp
the general rule; and the Englishman, admitting that he does not climb
trees like the wild Australian, nor track game like the savage of the
Brazilian forest, nor compete with the ancient Etruscan and the modern
Chinese in delicacy of goldsmith’s work and ivory carving, nor reach the
classic Greek level of oratory and sculpture, may yet claim for himself
a general condition above any of these races. But there actually have to
be taken into account developments of science and art which tend
directly against culture. To have learnt to give poison secretly and
effectually, to have raised a corrupt literature to pestilent
perfection, to have organized a successful scheme to arrest free enquiry
and proscribe free expression, are works of knowledge and skill whose
progress toward their goal has hardly conduced to the general good.
Thus, even in comparing mental and artistic culture among several
peoples, the balance of good and ill is not quite easy to strike.
If not only knowledge and art, but at the same time moral and political
excellence, be taken into consideration, it becomes yet harder to reckon
on an ideal scale the advance or decline from stage to stage of culture.
In fact, a combined intellectual and moral measure of human condition is
an instrument which no student has as yet learnt properly to handle.
Even granting that intellectual, moral, and political life may, on a
broad view, be seen to progress together, it is obvious that they are
far from advancing with equal steps. It may be taken as man’s rule of
duty in the world, that he shall strive to know as well as he can find
out, and to do as well as he knows how. But the parting asunder of these
two great principles, that separation of intelligence from virtue which
accounts for so much of the wrong-doing of mankind, is continually seen
to happen in the great movements of civilization. As one conspicuous
instance of what all history stands to prove, if we study the early ages
of Christianity, we may see men with minds pervaded by the new religion
of duty, holiness, and love, yet at the same time actually falling away
in intellectual life, thus at once vigorously grasping one half of
civilization, and contemptuously casting off the other. Whether in high
ranges or in low of human life, it may be seen that advance of culture
seldom results at once in unmixed good. Courage, honesty, generosity,
are virtues which may suffer, at least for a time, by the development of
a sense of value of life and property. The savage who adopts something
of foreign civilization too often loses his ruder virtues without
gaining an equivalent. The white invader or colonist, though
representing on the whole a higher moral standard than the savage he
improves or destroys, often represents his standard very ill, and at
best can hardly claim to substitute a life stronger, nobler, and purer
at every point than that which he supersedes. The onward movement from
barbarism has dropped behind it more than one quality of barbaric
character which cultured modern men look back on with regret, and will
even strive to regain by futile attempts to stop the course of history,
and to restore the past in the midst of the present. So it is with
social institutions. The slavery recognised by savage and barbarous
races is preferable in kind to that which existed for centuries in late
European colonies. The relation of the sexes among many savage tribes is
more healthy than among the richer classes of the Mohammedan world. As a
supreme authority of government, the savage councils of chiefs and
elders compare favourably with the unbridled despotism under which so
many cultured races have groaned. The Creek Indians, asked concerning
their religion, replied that where agreement was not to be had, it was
best to ‘let every man paddle his canoe his own way:’ and after long
ages of theological strife and persecution, the modern world seems
coming to think these savages not far wrong.
Among accounts of savage life, it is not, indeed, uncommon to find
details of admirable moral and social excellence. To take one prominent
instance, Lieut. Bruijn Kops and Mr. Wallace have described, among the
rude Papuans of the Eastern Archipelago, a habitual truthfulness,
rightfulness, and kindliness which it would be hard to match in the
general moral life of Persia or India, to say nothing of many a
civilized European district.[3] Such tribes may count as the ‘blameless
Ethiopians’ of the modern world, and from them an important lesson may
be learnt. Ethnographers who seek in modern savages types of the
remotely ancient human race at large, are bound by such examples to
consider the rude life of primæval man under favourable conditions to
have been, in its measure, a good and happy life. On the other hand, the
pictures drawn by some travellers of savagery as a kind of paradisiacal
state may be taken too exclusively from the bright side. It is remarked
as to these very Papuans, that Europeans whose intercourse with them has
been hostile become so impressed with the wild-beast-like cunning of
their attacks, as hardly to believe in their having feelings in common
with civilized men. Our Polar explorers may well speak in kindly terms
of the industry, the honesty, the cheerful considerate politeness of the
Esquimaux; but it must be remembered that these rude people are on their
best behaviour with foreigners, and that their character is apt to be
foul and brutal where they have nothing to expect or fear. The Caribs
are described as a cheerful, modest, courteous race, and so honest among
themselves that if they missed anything out of a house they said quite
naturally: ‘There has been a Christian here.’ Yet the malignant ferocity
with which these estimable people tortured their prisoners of war with
knife and fire-brand and red pepper, and then cooked and ate them in
solemn debauch, gave fair reason for the name of Carib (Cannibal) to
become the generic name of man-eaters in European languages.[4] So when
we read descriptions of the hospitality, the gentleness, the bravery,
the deep religious feeling of the North American Indians, we admit their
claims to our sincere admiration; but we must not forget that they were
hospitable literally to a fault, that their gentleness would pass with a
flash of anger into frenzy, that their bravery was stained with cruel
and treacherous malignity, that their religion expressed itself in
absurd belief and useless ceremony. The ideal savage of the 18th century
may be held up as a living reproof to vicious and frivolous London; but
in sober fact, a Londoner who should attempt to lead the atrocious life
which the real savage may lead with impunity and even respect, would be
a criminal only allowed to follow his savage models during his short
intervals out of gaol. Savage moral standards are real enough, but they
are far looser and weaker than ours. We may, I think, apply the
often-repeated comparison of savages to children as fairly to their
moral as to their intellectual condition. The better savage social life
seems in but unstable equilibrium, liable to be easily upset by a touch
of distress, temptation, or violence, and then it becomes the worse
savage life, which we know by so many dismal and hideous examples.
Altogether, it may be admitted that some rude tribes lead a life to be
envied by some barbarous races, and even by the outcasts of higher
nations. But that any known savage tribe would not be improved by
judicious civilization, is a proposition which no moralist would dare to
make; while the general tenour of the evidence goes far to justify the
view that on the whole the civilized man is not only wiser and more
capable than the savage, but also better and happier, and that the
barbarian stands between.
It might, perhaps, seem practicable to compare the whole average of the
civilization of two peoples, or of the same people in different ages, by
reckoning each, item by item, to a sort of sum-total, and striking a
balance between them, much as an appraiser compares the value of two
stocks of merchandise, differ as they may both in quantity and quality.
But the few remarks here made will have shown how loose must be the
working-out of these rough-and-ready estimates of culture. In fact, much
of the labour spent in investigating the progress and decline of
civilization has been mis-spent, in premature attempts to treat that as
a whole which is as yet only susceptible of divided study. The present
comparatively narrow argument on the development of culture at any rate
avoids this greatest perplexity. It takes cognizance principally of
knowledge, art, and custom, and indeed only very partial cognizance
within this field, the vast range of physical, political, social, and
ethical considerations being left all but untouched. Its standard of
reckoning progress and decline is not that of ideal good and evil, but
of movement along a measured line from grade to grade of actual
savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The thesis which I venture to
sustain, within limits, is simply this, that the savage state in some
measure represents an early condition of mankind, out of which the
higher culture has gradually been developed or evolved, by processes
still in regular operation as of old, the result showing that, on the
whole, progress has far prevailed over relapse.
On this proposition, the main tendency of human society during its long
term of existence has been to pass from a savage to a civilized state.
Now all must admit a great part of this assertion to be not only truth,
but truism. Referred to direct history, a great section of it proves to
belong not to the domain of speculation, but to that of positive
knowledge. It is mere matter of chronicle that modern civilization is a
development of mediæval civilization, which again is a development from
civilization of the order represented in Greece, Assyria, or Egypt. Thus
the higher culture being clearly traced back to what may be called the
middle culture, the question which remains is whether this middle
culture may be traced back to the lower culture, that is, to savagery.
To affirm this, is merely to assert that the same kind of development in
culture which has gone on inside our range of knowledge has also gone on
outside it, its course of proceeding being unaffected by our having or
not having reporters present. If any one holds that human thought and
action were worked out in primæval times according to laws essentially
other than those of the modern world, it is for him to prove by valid
evidence this anomalous state of things, otherwise the doctrine of
permanent principle will hold good, as in astronomy or geology. That the
tendency of culture has been similar throughout the existence of human
society, and that we may fairly judge from its known historic course
what its prehistoric course may have been, is a theory clearly entitled
to precedence as a fundamental principle of ethnographic research.
Gibbon in his ‘Roman Empire’ expresses in a few vigorous sentences his
theory of the course of culture, as from savagery upward. Judged by the
knowledge of nearly a century later, his remarks cannot, indeed, pass
unquestioned. Especially he seems to rely with misplaced confidence on
traditions of archaic rudeness, to exaggerate the lowness of savage
life, to underestimate the liability to decay of the ruder arts, and in
his view of the effect of high on low civilization, to dwell too
exclusively on the brighter side. But, on the whole, the great
historian’s judgment seems so substantially that of the unprejudiced
modern student of the progressionist school, that I gladly quote the
passage here at length, and take it as a text to represent the
development theory of culture:—‘The discoveries of ancient and modern
navigators, and the domestic history, or tradition, of the most
enlightened nations, represent the _human savage_ naked both in mind and
body, and destitute of laws, of arts, of ideas, and almost of language.
From this abject condition, perhaps the primitive and universal state of
man, he has gradually arisen to command the animals, to fertilise the
earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress
in the improvement and exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties
has been irregular and various; infinitely slow in the beginning, and
increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity: ages of laborious ascent
have been followed by a moment of rapid downfall; and the several
climates of the globe have felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness.
Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and
diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human
species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may
safely be presumed, that no people, unless the face of nature is
changed, will relapse into their original barbarism. The improvements of
society may be viewed under a threefold aspect. 1. The poet or
philosopher illustrates his age and country by the efforts of a _single_
mind; but these superior powers of reason or fancy are rare and
spontaneous productions; and the genius of Homer, or Cicero, or Newton,
would excite less admiration, if they could be created by the will of a
prince, or the lessons of a preceptor. 2. The benefits of law and
policy, of trade and manufactures, of arts and sciences, are more solid
and permanent; and _many_ individuals may be qualified, by education and
discipline, to promote, in their respective stations, the interest of
the community. But this general order is the effect of skill and labour;
and the complex machinery may be decayed by time, or injured by
violence. 3. Fortunately for mankind, the more useful, or, at least,
more necessary arts, can be performed without superior talents, or
national subordination; without the powers of _one_, or the union of
_many_. Each village, each family, each individual, must always possess
both ability and inclination, to perpetuate the use of fire and of
metals; the propagation and service of domestic animals; the methods of
hunting and fishing; the rudiments of navigation; the imperfect
cultivation of corn, or other nutritive grain; and the simple practice
of the mechanic trades. Private genius and public industry may be
extirpated; but these hardy plants survive the tempest, and strike an
everlasting root into the most unfavourable soil. The splendid days of
Augustus and Trajan were eclipsed by a cloud of ignorance; and the
barbarians subverted the laws and palaces of Rome. But the scythe, the
invention, or emblem of Saturn, still continued annually to mow the
harvests of Italy; and the human feasts of Læstrigons have never been
renewed on the coast of Campania. Since the first discovery of the arts,
war, commerce, and religious zeal, have diffused, among the savages of
the Old and New World, these inestimable gifts: they have been
successively propagated; they can never be lost. We may therefore
acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion, that every age of the world has
increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the
knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.’[5]
This progression-theory of civilization may be contrasted with its
rival, the degeneration-theory, in the dashing invective of Count Joseph
de Maistre, written toward the beginning of the 19th century. ‘Nous
partons toujours,’ he says, ‘de l’hypothèse banale que l’homme s’est
élevé graduellement de la barbarie à la science et à la civilisation.
C’est le rêve favori, c’est l’erreur-mère, et comme dit l’école le
proto-pseudes de notre siècle. Mais si les philosophes de ce malheureux
siècle, avec l’horrible perversité que nous leur avons connue, et qui
s’obstinent encore malgré les avertissements qu’ils ont reçus, avaient
possédé de plus quelques-unes de ces connaissances qui ont dû
nécessairement appartenir aux premiers hommes, &c.’[6] The
degeneration-theory, which this eloquent antagonist of ‘modern ideas’
indeed states in an extreme shape, has received the sanction of men of
great learning and ability. It has practically resolved itself into two
assumptions, first, that the history of culture began with the
appearance on earth of a semi-civilized race of men, and second, that
from this stage culture has proceeded in two ways, backward to produce
savages, and forward to produce civilized men. The idea of the original
condition of man being one of more or less high culture, must have a
certain prominence given to it on account of its considerable hold on
public opinion. As to definite evidence, however, it does not seem to
have any ethnological basis whatever. Indeed, I scarcely think that a
stronger counter-persuasion could be used on an intelligent student
inclined to the ordinary degeneration-theory than to induce him to
examine critically and impartially the arguments of the advocates on his
own side. It must be borne in mind, however, that the grounds on which
this theory has been held have generally been rather theological than
ethnological. The strength of the position it has thus occupied may be
well instanced from the theories adopted by two eminent French writers
of the 18th century, which in a remarkable way piece together a belief
in degeneration and an argument for progression. De Brosses, whose whole
intellectual nature turned to the progression-theory, argued that by
studying what actually now happens ‘we may trace men upward from the
savage state to which the flood and dispersion had reduced them.’[7] And
Goguet, holding that the pre-existing arts perished at the deluge, was
thus left free to work out on the most thorough-going progressionist
principles his theories of the invention of fire, cooking, agriculture,
law, and so forth, among tribes thus reduced to a condition of low
savagery.[8] At the present time it is not unusual for the origin of
civilization to be treated as matter of dogmatic theology. It has
happened to me more than once to be assured from the pulpit that the
theories of ethnologists who consider man to have risen from a low
original condition are delusive fancies, it being revealed truth that
man was originally in a high condition. Now as a matter of Biblical
criticism it must be remembered that a large proportion of modern
theologians are far from accepting such a dogma. But in investigating
the problem of early civilization, the claim to ground scientific
opinion upon a basis of revelation is in itself objectionable. It would
be, I think, inexcusable if students who have seen in Astronomy and
Geology the unhappy results of attempting to base science on religion,
should countenance a similar attempt in Ethnology.
By long experience of the course of human society, the principle of
development in culture has become so ingrained in our philosophy that
ethnologists, of whatever school, hardly doubt but that, whether by
progress or degradation, savagery and civilization are connected as
lower and higher stages of one formation. As such, then, two principal
theories claim to account for their relation. As to the first
hypothesis, which takes savage life as in some sort representing an
early human state whence higher states were, in time, developed, it has
to be noticed that advocates of this progression-theory are apt to look
back toward yet lower original conditions of mankind. It has been truly
remarked that the modern naturalist’s doctrine of progressive
development has encouraged a train of thought singularly accordant with
the Epicurean theory of man’s early existence on earth, in a condition
not far removed from that of the lower animals. On such a view, savage
life itself would be a far advanced condition. If the advance of culture
be regarded as taking place along one general line, then existing
savagery stands directly intermediate between animal and civilized life;
if along different lines, then savagery and civilization may be
considered as at least indirectly connected through their common origin.
The method and evidence here employed are not, however, suitable for the
discussion of this remoter part of the problem of civilization. Nor is
it necessary to enquire how, under this or any other theory, the savage
state first came to be on earth. It is enough that, by some means or
other, it has actually come into existence; and so far as it may serve
as a guide in inferring an early condition of the human race at large,
so far the argument takes the very practicable shape of a discussion
turning rather on actual than imaginary states of society. The second
hypothesis, which regards higher culture as original, and the savage
condition as produced from it by a course of degeneration, at once cuts
the hard knot of the origin of culture. It takes for granted a
supernatural interference, as where Archbishop Whately simply refers to
miraculous revelation that condition above the level of barbarism which
he considers to have been man’s original state.[9] It may be
incidentally remarked, however, that the doctrine of original
civilization bestowed on man by divine intervention, by no means
necessarily involves the view that this original civilization was at a
high level. Its advocates are free to choose their starting-point of
culture above, at, or below the savage condition, as may on the evidence
seem to them most reasonable.
The two theories which thus account for the relation of savage to
cultured life may be contrasted according to their main character, as
the progression-theory and the degradation-theory. Yet of course the
progression-theory recognizes degradation, and the degradation-theory
recognizes progression, as powerful influences in the course of culture.
Under proper limitations the principles of both theories are conformable
to historical knowledge, which shows us, on the one hand, that the state
of the higher nations was reached by progression from a lower state,
and, on the other hand, that culture gained by progression may be lost
by degradation. If in this enquiry we should be obliged to end in the
dark, at any rate we need not begin there. History, taken as our guide
in explaining the different stages of civilization, offers a theory
based on actual experience. This is a development-theory, in which both
advance and relapse have their acknowledged places. But so far as
history is to be our criterion, progression is primary and degradation
secondary; culture must be gained before it can be lost. Moreover, in
striking a balance between the effects of forward and backward movement
in civilization, it must be borne in mind how powerfully the diffusion
of culture acts in preserving the results of progress from the attacks
of degeneration. A progressive movement in culture spreads, and becomes
independent of the fate of its originators. What is produced in some
limited district is diffused over a wider and wider area, where the
process of effectual ‘stamping out’ becomes more and more difficult.
Thus it is even possible for the habits and inventions of races long
extinct to remain as the common property of surviving nations; and the
destructive actions which make such havoc with the civilizations of
particular districts fail to destroy the civilization of the world.
The enquiry as to the relation of savagery to barbarism and
semi-civilization lies almost entirely in præ-historic or extra-historic
regions. This is of course an unfavourable condition, and must be
frankly accepted. Direct history hardly tells anything of the changes of
savage culture, except where in contact with and under the dominant
influence of foreign civilization, a state of things which is little to
our present purpose. Periodical examinations of low races otherwise left
isolated to work out their own destinies, would be interesting evidence
to the student of civilization if they could be made; but unfortunately
they cannot. The lower races, wanting documentary memorials, loose in
preserving tradition, and ever ready to clothe myth in its shape, can
seldom be trusted in their stories of long-past ages. History is oral or
written record which can be satisfactorily traced into contact with the
events it describes; and perhaps no account of the course of culture in
its lower stages can satisfy this stringent criterion. Traditions may be
urged in support either of the progression-theory or of the
degradation-theory. These traditions may be partly true, and must be
partly untrue; but whatever truth or untruth they may contain, there is
such difficulty in separating man’s recollection of what was from his
speculation as to what might have been, that ethnology seems not likely
to gain much by attempts to judge of early stages of civilization on a
traditional basis. The problem is one which has occupied the philosophic
mind even in savage and barbaric life, and has been solved by
speculations asserted as facts, and by traditions which are, in great
measure, mere realized theories. The Chinese can show, with all due
gravity, the records of their ancient dynasties and tell us how in old
times their ancestors dwelt in caves, clothed themselves with leaves,
and ate raw flesh, till, under such and such rulers, they were taught to
build huts, prepare skins for garments, and make fire.[10] Lucretius can
describe to us, in his famous lines, the large-boned, hardy, lawless,
primæval race of man, living the roving life of the wild beasts which
they overcame with stones and heavy clubs, devouring berries and acorns,
ignorant as yet of fire, and agriculture, and the use of skins for
clothing. From this state the Epicurean poet traces up the development
of culture, beginning outside but ending inside the range of human
memory.[11] To the same class belong those legends which, starting from
an ancient savage state, describe its elevation by divine civilizers:
this, which may be called the supernatural progression-theory, is
exemplified in the familiar culture-traditions of Peru and Italy.
But other minds, following a different ideal track from the present to
the past, have seen in a far different shape the early stages of human
life. Those men whose eyes are always turned to look back on the wisdom
of the ancients, those who by a common confusion of thought ascribe to
men of old the wisdom of old men, those who hold fast to some
once-honoured scheme of life which new schemes are superseding before
their eyes, are apt to carry back their thought of present degeneration
into far-gone ages, till they reach a period of primæval glory. The
Parsi looks back to the happy rule of King Yima, when men and cattle
were immortal, when water and trees never dried up and food was
inexhaustible, when there was no cold nor heat, no envy nor old age.[12]
The Buddhist looks back to the age of glorious soaring beings who had no
sin, no sex, no want of food, till the unhappy hour when, tasting a
delicious scum that formed upon the surface of the earth, they fell into
evil, and in time became degraded to eat rice, to bear children, to
build houses, to divide property, and to establish caste. In after ages,
record preserves details of the continuing course of degeneration. It
was King Chetiya who told the first lie, and the citizens who heard of
it, not knowing what a lie was, asked if it were white, black or blue.
Men’s lives grew shorter and shorter, and it was King Maha Sâgara who,
after a brief reign of 252,000 years, made the dismal discovery of the
first grey hair.[13]
Admitting the imperfection of the historical record as regards the
lowest stages of culture, we must bear in mind that it tells both ways.
Niebuhr, attacking the progressionists of the 18th century, remarks that
they have overlooked the fact ‘that no single example can be brought
forward of an actually savage people having independently become
civilized.’[14] Whately appropriated this remark, which indeed forms the
kernel of his well-known Lecture on the Origin of Civilisation: ‘Facts
are stubborn things,’ he says, ‘and that no authenticated instance can
be produced of savages that ever _did_ emerge, unaided, from that state
is no _theory_, but a statement, hitherto never disproved, of a matter
of _fact_.’ He uses this as an argument in support of his general
conclusion, that man could not have risen independently from a savage to
a civilized state, and that savages are degenerate descendants of
civilized men.[15] But he omits to ask the counter-question, whether we
find one recorded instance of a civilized people falling independently
into a savage state? Any such record, direct and well vouched, would be
of high interest to ethnologists, though, of course, it would not
contradict the development-theory, for proving loss is not disproving
previous gain. But where is such a record to be found? The defect of
historical evidence as to the transition between savagery and higher
culture is a two-sided fact, only half taken into Archbishop Whately’s
one-sided argument. Fortunately the defect is by no means fatal. Though
history may not account directly for the existence and explain the
position of savages, it at least gives evidence which bears closely on
the matter. Moreover, we are in various ways enabled to study the lower
course of culture on evidence which cannot have been tampered with to
support a theory. Old traditional lore, however untrustworthy as direct
record of events, contains most faithful incidental descriptions of
manners and customs; archæology displays old structures and buried
relics of the remote past; philology brings out the undesigned history
in language, which generation after generation have handed down without
a thought of its having such significance; the ethnological survey of
the races of the world tells much; the ethnographical comparison of
their condition tells more.
Arrest and decline in civilization are to be recognised as among the
more frequent and powerful operations of national life. That knowledge,
arts, and institutions should decay in certain districts, that peoples
once progressive should lag behind and be passed by advancing
neighbours, that sometimes even societies of men should recede into
rudeness and misery—all these are phenomena with which modern history is
familiar. In judging of the relation of the lower to the higher stages
of civilization, it is essential to gain some idea how far it may have
been affected by such degeneration. What kind of evidence can direct
observation and history give as to the degradation of men from a
civilized condition towards that of savagery? In our great cities, the
so-called ‘dangerous classes’ are sunk in hideous misery and depravity.
If we have to strike a balance between the Papuans of New Caledonia and
the communities of European beggars and thieves, we may sadly
acknowledge that we have in our midst something worse than savagery. But
it is not savagery; it is broken-down civilization. Negatively, the
inmates of a Whitechapel casual ward and of a Hottentot kraal agree in
their want of the knowledge and virtue of the higher culture. But
positively, their mental and moral characteristics are utterly
different. Thus, the savage life is essentially devoted to gaining
subsistence from nature, which is just what the proletarian life is not.
Their relations to civilized life—the one of independence, the other of
dependence—are absolutely opposite. To my mind the popular phrases about
‘city savages’ and ‘street Arabs’ seem like comparing a ruined house to
a builder’s yard. It is more to the purpose to notice how war and
misrule, famine and pestilence, have again and again devastated
countries, reduced their population to miserable remnants, and lowered
their level of civilization, and how the isolated life of wild country
districts seems sometimes tending towards savagery. So far as we know,
however, none of these causes have ever really reproduced a savage
community. For an ancient account of degeneration under adverse
circumstances, Ovid’s mention of the unhappy colony of Tomi on the Black
Sea is a case in point, though perhaps not to be taken too literally.
Among its mixed Greek and barbaric population, harassed and carried off
into slavery by the Sarmatian horsemen, much as the Persians till lately
were by the Turkomans, the poet describes the neglect of the gardener’s
craft, the decay of textile arts, the barbaric clothing of hides.
‘Nec tamen hæc loca sunt ullo pretiosa metallo:
Hostis ab agricola vix sinit illa fodi.
Purpura sæpe tuos fulgens prætexit amictus:
Sed non Sarmatico tingitur illa mari.
Vellera dura ferunt pecudes, et Palladis uti
Arte Tomitanæ non didicere nurus.
Femina pro lana Cerialia munera frangit,
Suppositoque gravem vertice portat aquam.
Non hic pampineis amicitur vitibus ulmus:
Nulla premunt ramos pondere poma suo.
Tristia deformes pariunt absinthia campi,
Terraque de fructu quam sit amara docet.’[16]
Cases of exceptionally low civilization in Europe may perhaps be
sometimes accounted for by degeneration of this kind. But they seem more
often the relics of ancient unchanged barbarism. The evidence from wild
parts of Ireland two or three centuries ago is interesting from this
point of view. Acts of Parliament were passed against the inveterate
habits of fastening ploughs to the horses’ tails, and of burning oats
from the straw to save the trouble of threshing. In the 18th century
Ireland could still be thus described in satire:—
‘The Western isle renowned for bogs,
For tories and for great wolf-dogs,
For drawing hobbies by the tails,
And threshing corn with fiery flails.’[17]
Fynes Moryson’s description of the wild or ‘meere’ Irish about 1600, is
amazing. The very lords of them, he says, dwelt in poor clay houses, or
cabins of boughs covered with turf. In many parts men as well as women
had in very winter time but a linen rag about the loins and a woollen
mantle on their bodies, so that it would turn a man’s stomach to see an
old woman in the morning before breakfast. He notices their habit of
burning oats from the straw, and making cakes thereof. They had no
tables, but set their meat on a bundle of grass. They feasted on fallen
horses, and seethed pieces of beef and pork with the unwashed entrails
of beasts in a hollow tree, lapped in a raw cow’s hide, and so set over
the fire, and they drank milk warmed with a stone first cast into the
fire.[18] Another district remarkable for a barbaric simplicity of life
is the Hebrides. Till of late years, there were to be found there in
actual use earthen vessels, unglazed and made by hand without the
potter’s wheel, which might pass in a museum as indifferent specimens of
savage manufacture. These ‘craggans’ are still made by an old woman at
Barvas for sale as curiosities. Such a modern state of the potter’s art
in the Hebrides fits well with George Buchanan’s statement in the 16th
century that the islanders used to boil meat in the beast’s own paunch
or hide.[19] Early in the 18th century Martin mentions as prevalent
there the ancient way of dressing corn by burning it dexterously from
the ear, which he notices to be a very quick process, thence called
‘graddan’ (Gaelic, _grad_=quick).[20] Thus we see that the habit of
burning out the grain, for which the ‘meere Irish’ were reproached, was
really the keeping up of an old Keltic art, not without its practical
use. So the appearance in modern Keltic districts of other widespread
arts of the lower culture—hide-boiling, like that of the Scythians in
Herodotus, and stone-boiling, like that of the Assinaboins of North
America—seems to fit not so well with degradation from a high as with
survival from a low civilization. The Irish and the Hebrideans had been
for ages under the influence of comparatively high civilization, which
nevertheless may have left unaltered much of the older and ruder habit
of the people.
Instances of civilized men taking to a wild life in outlying districts
of the world, and ceasing to obtain or want the appliances of
civilization, give more distinct evidence of degradation. In connexion
with this state of things takes place the nearest known approach to an
independent degeneration from a civilized to a savage state. This
happens in mixed races, whose standard of civilization may be more or
less below that of the higher race. The mutineers of the Bounty, with
their Polynesian wives, founded a small but not savage community on
Pitcairn’s Island.[21] The mixed Portuguese and native races of the East
Indies and Africa lead a life below the European standard, but not a
savage life.[22] The Gauchos of the South American Pampas, a mixed
European and Indian race of equestrian herdsmen, are described as
sitting about on ox-skulls, making broth in horns with hot cinders
heaped round, living on meat without vegetables, and altogether leading
a foul, brutal, comfortless, degenerate, but not savage life.[23] One
step beyond this brings us to the cases of individual civilized men
being absorbed in savage tribes and adopting the savage life, on which
they exercise little influence for improvement; the children of these
men may come distinctly under the category of savages. These cases of
mixed breeds, however, do not show a low culture actually produced as
the result of degeneration from a high one. Their theory is that, given
a higher and a lower civilization existing among two races, a mixed race
between the two may take to the lower or an intermediate condition.
Degeneration probably operates even more actively in the lower than in
the higher culture. Barbarous nations and savage hordes, with their less
knowledge and scantier appliances, would seem peculiarly exposed to
degrading influences. In Africa, for instance, there seems to have been
in modern centuries a falling off in culture, probably due in a
considerable degree to foreign influence. Mr. J. L. Wilson, contrasting
the 16th and 17th century accounts of powerful negro kingdoms in West
Africa with the present small communities, with little or no tradition
of their forefathers’ more extended political organization, looks
especially to the slave-trade as the deteriorating cause.[24] In
South-East Africa, also, a comparatively high barbaric culture, which we
especially associate with the old descriptions of the kingdom of
Monomotapa, seems to have fallen away, not counting the remarkable ruins
of buildings of hewn stone fitted without mortar which indicate the
intrusion of more civilized foreigners into the gold region![25] In
North America, Father Charlevoix remarks of the Iroquois of the last
century, that in old times they used to build their cabins better than
other nations, and better than they do themselves now; they carved rude
figures in relief on them; but since in various expeditions almost all
their villages have been burnt, they have not taken the trouble to
restore them in their old condition.[26] The degradation of the Cheyenne
Indians is matter of history. Persecuted by their enemies the Sioux, and
dislodged at last even from their fortified village, the heart of the
tribe was broken. Their numbers were thinned, they no longer dared to
establish themselves in a permanent abode, they gave up the cultivation
of the soil, and became a tribe of wandering hunters, with horses for
their only valuable possession, which every year they bartered for a
supply of corn, beans, pumpkins, and European merchandise, and then
returned into the heart of the prairies.[27] When in the Rocky
Mountains, Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle came upon an outlying fragment of
the Shushwap race, without horses or dogs, sheltering themselves under
rude temporary slants of bark or matting, falling year by year into
lower misery, and rapidly dying out; this is another example of the
degeneration which no doubt has lowered or destroyed many a savage
people.[28] There are tribes who are the very outcasts of savage life.
There is reason to look upon the miserable Digger Indians of North
America and the Bushmen of South Africa as the persecuted remnants of
tribes who have seen happier days.[29] The traditions of the lower races
of their ancestors’ better life may sometimes be real recollections of a
not far distant past. The Algonquin Indians look back to old days as to
a golden age when life was better than now, when they had better laws
and leaders, and manners less rude.[30] And indeed, knowing what we do
of their history, we may admit that they have cause to remember in
misery happiness gone by. Well, too, might the rude Kamchadal declare
that the world is growing worse and worse, that men are becoming fewer
and viler, and food scarcer, for the hunter, and the bear, and the
reindeer are hurrying away from here to the happier life in the regions
below.[31] It would be a valuable contribution to the study of
civilization to have the action of decline and fall investigated on a
wider and more exact basis of evidence than has yet been attempted. The
cases here stated are probably but part of a long series which might be
brought forward to prove degeneration in culture to have been, by no
means indeed the primary cause of the existence of barbarism and
savagery in the world, but a secondary action largely and deeply
affecting the general development of civilization. It may perhaps give
no unfair idea to compare degeneration of culture, both in its kind of
operation and in its immense extent, to denudation in the geological
history of the earth.
In judging of the relations between savage and civilized life, something
may be learnt by glancing over the divisions of the human race. For this
end the classification by families of languages may be conveniently
used, if checked by the evidence of bodily characteristics. No doubt
speech by itself is an insufficient guide in tracing national descent,
as witness the extreme cases of Jews in England, and three-parts negro
races in the West Indies, nevertheless speaking English as their
mother-tongue. Still, under ordinary circumstances, connexion of speech
does indicate more or less connexion of ancestral race. As a guide in
tracing the history of civilization, language gives still better
evidence, for common language to a great extent involves common culture.
The race dominant enough to maintain or impose its language, usually
more or less maintains or imposes its civilization also. Thus the common
descent of the languages of Hindus, Greeks, and Teutons is no doubt due
in great measure to common ancestry, but is still more closely bound up
with a common social and intellectual history, with what Professor Max
Müller well calls their ‘spiritual relationship.’ The wonderful
permanence of language often enables us to detect among remotely ancient
and distant tribes the traces of connected civilization. How, on such
grounds, do savage and civilized tribes appear to stand related, within
the various groups of mankind connected historically by the possession
of kindred languages?
The Semitic family, which represents one of the oldest known
civilizations of the world, includes Arabs, Jews, Phœnicians, Syrians,
&c., and has an earlier as well as a later connexion in North Africa.
This family takes in some rude tribes, but none which would be classed
as savages. The Aryan family has existed in Asia and Europe certainly
for many thousand years, and there are well-known and well-marked traces
of its early barbaric condition, which has perhaps survived with least
change among secluded tribes in the valleys of the Hindu Kush and
Himalaya. There seems, again, no known case of any full Aryan tribe
having become savage. The Gypsies and other outcasts are, no doubt,
partly Aryan in blood, but their degraded condition is not savagery. In
India there are tribes Aryan by language, but whose physique is rather
of indigenous type, and whose ancestry is mainly from indigenous stocks
with more or less mixture of the dominant Hindu. Some tribes coming
under this category, as among the Bhils and Kulis of the Bombay
Presidency, speak dialects which are Hindi in vocabulary at least,
whether or not in grammatical structure, and yet the people themselves
are lower in culture than some Hinduized nations who have retained their
original Dravidian speech, the Tamils for instance. But these all appear
to stand at higher stages of civilization than any wild forest tribes of
the peninsula who can be reckoned as nearly savages; all such are
non-Aryan both in blood and speech.[32] In Ceylon, however, we have the
remarkable phenomenon of men leading a savage life while speaking an
Aryan dialect. This is the wild part of the race of Veddas or ‘hunters,’
of whom a remnant still inhabit the forest land. These people are
dark-skinned and flat-nosed, slight of frame, and very small of skull,
and five feet is an average man’s height. They are a shy, harmless,
simple people, living principally by hunting; they lime birds, take fish
by poisoning the water, and are skilful in getting wild honey; they have
bows with iron-pointed arrows, which, with their hunting-dogs, are their
most valuable possessions. They dwell in caves or bark huts, and their
very word for a house is Singhalese for a hollow tree (_rukula_); a
patch of bark was formerly their dress, but now a bit of linen hangs to
their waist-cords; their planting of patches of ground is said to be
recent. They count on their fingers, and produce fire with the simplest
kind of fire-drill twirled by hand. They are most truthful and honest.
Their monogamy and conjugal fidelity contrast strongly with the opposite
habits of the more civilized Singhalese. A remarkable Vedda marriage
custom sanctioned a man’s taking his younger (not elder) sister as his
wife; sister-marriage existing among the Singhalese, but being confined
to the royal family. Mistaken statements have been made as to the Veddas
having no religion, no personal names, no language. Their religion, in
fact, corresponds with the animism of the ruder tribes of India; some of
their names are remarkable as being Hindu, but not in use among the
modern Singhalese; their language is a Singhalese dialect. There is no
doubt attaching to the usual opinion that the Veddas are in the main
descended from the ‘yakkos’ or demons; i.e. from the indigenous tribes
of the island. Legend and language concur to make probable an admixture
of Aryan blood accompanying the adoption of Aryan speech, but the
evidence of bodily characteristics shows the Vedda race to be
principally of indigenous pre-Aryan type.[33]
The Tatar family of Northern Asia and Europe (Turanian, if the word be
used in a restricted sense) displays evidence of quite a different kind.
This wide-lying group of tribes and nations has members nearly or quite
touching the savage level in ancient and even modern times, such as
Ostyaks, Tunguz, Samoyeds, Lapps, while more or less high ranges of
culture are represented by Mongols, Turks, and Hungarians. Here,
however, it is unquestionable that the rude tribes represent the earlier
condition of the Tatar race at large, from which its more mixed and
civilized peoples, mostly by adopting the foreign culture of Buddhist,
Moslem, and Christian nations, and partly by internal development, are
well known to have risen. The ethnology of South-Eastern Asia is
somewhat obscure; but if we may classify under one heading the native
races of Siam, Burma, &c., the wilder tribes may be considered as
representing earlier conditions, for the higher culture of this region
is obviously foreign, especially of Buddhist origin. The Malay race is
also remarkable for the range of civilization represented by tribes
classed as belonging to it. If the wild tribes of the Malayan peninsula
and Borneo be compared with the semi-civilized nations of Java and
Sumatra, it appears that part of the race survives to represent an early
savage state, while part is found in possession of a civilization which
the first glance shows to have been mostly borrowed from Hindu and
Moslem sources. Some forest tribes of the peninsula seem to be
representatives of the Malay race at its lowest level of culture, how
far original and how far degraded it is not easy to say. Among them the
very rude Orang Sabimba, who have no agriculture and no boats, give a
remarkable account of themselves, that they are descendants of
shipwrecked Malays from the Bugis country, but were so harassed by
pirates that they gave up civilization and cultivation, and vowed not to
eat fowls, which betrayed them by their crowing. So they plant nothing,
but eat wild fruit and vegetables, and all animals but the fowl. This,
if at all founded on fact, is an interesting case of degeneration. But
savages usually invent myths to account for peculiar habits, as where,
in the same district, the Biduanda Kallang account for their not
cultivating the ground by the story that their ancestors vowed not to
make plantations. Another rude people of the Malay peninsula are the
Jakuns, a simple, kindly race, among whom some trace their pedigree to a
pair of white monkeys, while others declare that they are descendants of
white men; and indeed there is some ground for supposing these latter to
be really of mixed race, for they use a few Portuguese words, and a
report exists of some refugees having settled up the country.[34] The
Melanesians, Papuans, and Australians represent grades of savagery
spread each over its own vast area in a comparatively homogeneous way.
Lastly, the relations of savagery to higher conditions are remarkable,
but obscure, on the American continents. There are several great
linguistic families whose members were discovered in a savage state
throughout; such are the Esquimaux, Algonquin, and Guarani groups. On
the other hand there were three apparently unconnected districts of
semi-civilization reaching a high barbaric level, viz., in Mexico and
Central America, Bogota, and Peru. Between these higher and lower
conditions were races at the level of the Natchez of Louisiana and the
Apalaches of Florida. Linguistic connexion is not unknown between the
more advanced peoples and the lower races around them.[35] But definite
evidence showing the higher culture to have arisen from the lower, or
the lower to have fallen from the higher, is scarcely forthcoming. Both
operations may in degree have happened.
It is apparent, from such general inspection of this ethnological
problem, that it would repay a far closer study than it has as yet
received. As the evidence stands at present, it appears that when in any
race some branches much excel the rest in culture, this more often
happens by elevation than by subsidence. But this elevation is much more
apt to be produced by foreign than by native action. Civilization is a
plant much oftener propagated than developed. As regards the lower
races, this accords with the results of European intercourse with savage
tribes during the last three or four centuries; so far as these tribes
have survived the process, they have assimilated more or less of
European Culture and risen towards the European level, as in Polynesia,
South Africa, South America. Another important point becomes manifest
from this ethnological survey. The fact, that during so many thousand
years of known existence, neither the Aryan nor the Semitic race appears
to have thrown off any direct savage offshoot, tells, with some force,
against the probability of degradation to the savage level ever
happening from high-level civilization.
With regard to the opinions of older writers on early civilization,
whether progressionists or degenerationists, it must be borne in mind
that the evidence at their disposal fell far short of even the miserably
imperfect data now accessible. Criticizing an 18th century ethnologist
is like criticizing an 18th century geologist. The older writer may have
been far abler than his modern critic, but he had not the same
materials. Especially he wanted the guidance of Prehistoric Archæology,
a department of research only established on a scientific footing within
the last few years. It is essential to gain a clear view of the bearing
of this newer knowledge on the old problem.
Chronology, though regarding as more or less fictitious the immense
dynastic schemes of the Egyptians, Hindus, and Chinese, passing as they
do into mere ciphering-book sums with years for units, nevertheless
admits that existing monuments carry back the traces of comparatively
high civilization to a distance of above five thousand years. By piecing
together Eastern and Western documentary evidence it seems that the
great religious divisions of the Aryan race, to which modern Brahmanism,
Zarathustrism, and Buddhism are due, belong to a period of remotely
ancient history. Even if we cannot hold, with Professor Max Müller, in
the preface to his translation of the ‘Rig Veda,’ that this collection
of Aryan hymns ‘will take and maintain for ever its position as the most
ancient of books in the library of mankind,’ and if we do not admit the
stringency of his reckonings of its date in centuries B.C., yet we must
grant that he shows cause to refer its composition to a very ancient
period, where it then proves that a comparatively high barbaric culture
already existed. The linguistic argument for the remotely ancient common
origin of the Indo-European nations, in a degree as to their bodily
descent, and in a greater degree as to their civilization, tends toward
the same result. So it is again with Egypt. The calculations of Egyptian
dynasties in thousands of years, however disputable in detail, are based
on facts which at any rate authorize the reception of a long chronology.
To go no further than the identification of two or three Egyptian names
mentioned in Biblical and Classical history, we gain a strong impression
of remote antiquity. Such are the names of Shishank; of the Psammitichos
line, whose obelisks are to be seen in Rome; of Tirhakah, King of
Ethiopia, whose nurse’s coffin is in the Florence Museum; of the city of
Rameses, plainly connected with that great Ramesside line which
Egyptologists call the 19th Dynasty. Here, before classic culture had
arisen, the culture of Egypt culminated, and behind this time lies the
somewhat less advanced age of the Pyramid kings, and behind this again
the indefinite lapse of ages which such a civilization required for its
production. Again, though no part of the Old Testament can
satisfactorily prove for itself an antiquity of composition approaching
that of the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, yet all critics
must admit that the older of the historical books give on the one hand
contemporary documents showing considerable culture in the Semitic world
at a date which in comparison with classic history is ancient; while on
the other hand they afford evidence by way of chronicle, carrying back
ages farther the record of a somewhat advanced barbaric civilization.
Now if the development-theory is to account for phenomena such as these,
its chronological demand must be no small one, and the more so when it
is admitted that in the lower ranges of culture progress would be
extremely slow in comparison with that which experience shows among
nations already far advanced. On these conditions of the first
appearance of the middle civilization being thrown back to distant
antiquity, and of slow development being required to perform its heavy
task in ages still more remote, Prehistoric Archæology cheerfully takes
up the problem. And, indeed, far from being dismayed by the vastness of
the period required on the narrowest computation, the prehistoric
archæologist shows even too much disposition to revel in calculations of
thousands of years, as a financier does in reckonings of thousands of
pounds, in a liberal and maybe somewhat reckless way.
Prehistoric Archæology is fully alive to facts which may bear on
degeneration in culture. Such are the colossal human figures of hewn
stone in Easter Island, which may possibly have been shaped by the
ancestors of the existing islanders, whose present resources, however,
are quite unequal to the execution of such gigantic works.[36] A much
more important case is that of the former inhabitants of the Mississippi
Valley. In districts where the native tribes known in modern times rank
as savages, there formerly dwelt a race whom ethnologists call the
Mound-Builders, from the amazing extent of their mounds and enclosures,
of which there is a single group occupying an area of four square miles.
The regularity of the squares and circles and the repetition of
enclosures similar in dimensions, raise interesting questions as to the
methods by which these were planned out. To have constructed such works
the Mound-Builders must have been a numerous population, mainly
subsisting by agriculture, and indeed vestiges of their ancient tillage
are still to be found. They did not however in industrial arts approach
the level of Mexico. For instance, their use of native copper, hammered
into shape for cutting instruments, is similar to that of some of the
savage tribes farther north. On the whole, judging by their earthworks,
fields, pottery, stone implements and other remains, they seem to have
belonged to those high savage or barbaric tribes of the Southern States,
of whom the Creeks and Cherokees, as described by Bartram, may be taken
as typical.[37] If any of the wild roving hunting tribes now found
living near the huge earthworks of the Mound-Builders are the
descendants of this somewhat advanced race, then a very considerable
degradation has taken place. The question is an open one. The
explanation of the traces of tillage may perhaps in this case be like
that of the remains of old cultivation-terraces in Borneo, the work of
Chinese colonists whose descendants have mostly been merged in the mass
of the population and follow the native habits.[38] On the other hand,
the evidence of locality may be misleading as to race. A traveller in
Greenland, coming on the ruined stone buildings at Kakortok, would not
argue justly that the Esquimaux are degenerate descendants of ancestors
capable of such architecture, for in fact these are the remains of a
church and baptistery built by the ancient Scandinavian settlers.[39] On
the whole it is remarkable how little of colourable evidence of
degeneration has been disclosed by archæology. Its negative evidence
tells strongly the other way. As an instance may be quoted Sir John
Lubbock’s argument against the idea that tribes now ignorant of
metallurgy and pottery formerly possessed but have since lost these
arts. ‘We may also assert, on a general proposition, that no weapons or
instruments of metal have ever been found in any country inhabited by
savages wholly ignorant of metallurgy. A still stronger case is afforded
by pottery. Pottery is not easily destroyed; when known at all it is
always abundant, and it possesses two qualities, namely, those of being
easy to break and yet difficult to destroy, which render it very
valuable in an archæological point of view. Moreover, it is in most
cases associated with burials. It is, therefore, a very significant
fact, that no fragment of pottery has ever been found in Australia, New
Zealand, or in the Polynesian Islands.’[40] How different a state of
things the popular degeneration-theory would lead us to expect is
pointedly suggested by Sir Charles Lyell’s sarcastic sentences in his
‘Antiquity of Man.’ Had the original stock of mankind, he argues, been
really endowed with superior intellectual powers and inspired knowledge,
while possessing the same improvable nature as their posterity, how
extreme a point of advancement would they have reached. ‘Instead of the
rudest pottery or flint tools, so irregular in form as to cause the
unpractised eye to doubt whether they afford unmistakable evidence of
design, we should now be finding sculptured forms surpassing in beauty
the masterpieces of Phidias or Praxiteles; lines of buried railways or
electric telegraphs from which the best engineers of our day might gain
invaluable hints; astronomical instruments and microscopes of more
advanced construction than any known in Europe, and other indications of
perfection in the arts and sciences, such as the nineteenth century has
not yet witnessed. Still farther would the triumphs of inventive genius
be found to have been carried, when the later deposits, now assigned to
the ages of bronze and iron, were formed. Vainly should we be straining
our imaginations to guess the possible uses and meaning of such
relics—machines, perhaps, for navigating the air or exploring the depths
of the ocean, or for calculating arithmetical problems beyond the wants
or even the conceptions of living mathematicians.’[41]
The master-key to the investigation of man’s primæval condition is held
by Prehistoric Archæology. This key is the evidence of the Stone Age,
proving that men of remotely ancient ages were in the savage state. Ever
since the long-delayed recognition of M. Boucher de Perthes’ discoveries
(1841 and onward) of the flint implements in the Drift gravels of the
Somme Valley, evidence has been accumulating over a wide European area
to show that the ruder Stone Age, represented by implements of the
Palæolithic or Drift type, prevailed among savage tribes of the
Quaternary period, the contemporaries of the mammoth and the woolly
rhinoceros, in ages for which Geology asserts an antiquity far more
remote than History can avail to substantiate for the human race. Mr.
John Frere had already written in 1797 respecting such flint instruments
discovered at Hoxne in Suffolk. ‘The situation in which these weapons
were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed,
even beyond that of the present world.’[42] The vast lapse of time
through which the history of London has represented the history of human
civilization, is to my mind one of the most suggestive facts disclosed
by archæology. There the antiquary, excavating but a few yards deep, may
descend from the débris representing our modern life, to relics of the
art and science of the Middle Ages, to signs of Norman, Saxon,
Romano-British times, to traces of the higher Stone Age. And on his way
from Temple Bar to the Great Northern Station he passes near the spot
(‘opposite to black Mary’s near Grayes inn lane’) where a Drift
implement of black flint was found with the skeleton of an elephant by
Mr. Conyers, about a century and a half ago, the relics side by side of
the London mammoth and the London savage.[43] In the gravel-beds of
Europe, the laterite of India, and other more superficial localities,
where relics of the Palæolithic Age are found, what principally
testifies to man’s condition is the extreme rudeness of his stone
implements, and the absence of even edge-grinding. The natural inference
that this indicates a low savage state is confirmed in the caves of
Central France. There a race of men, who have left indeed really
artistic portraits of themselves and the reindeer and mammoths they
lived among, seem, as may be judged from the remains of their weapons,
implements, &c., to have led a life somewhat of Esquimaux type, but
lower by the want of domesticated animals. The districts where
implements of the rude primitive Drift type are found are limited in
extent. It is to ages later in time and more advanced in development,
that the Neolithic or Polished Stone Period belonged, when the
manufacture of stone instruments was much improved, and grinding and
polishing were generally introduced. During the long period of
prevalence of this state of things, Man appears to have spread almost
over the whole habitable earth. The examination of district after
district of the world has now all but established a universal rule that
the Stone Age (bone or shell being the occasional substitutes for stone)
underlies the Metal Age everywhere. Even the districts famed in history
as seats of ancient civilization show, like other regions, their traces
of a yet more archaic Stone Age. Asia Minor, Egypt, Palestine, India,
China, furnish evidence from actual specimens, historical mentions, and
survivals, which demonstrate the former prevalence of conditions of
society which have their analogues among modern savage tribes.[44] The
Duke of Argyll, in his ‘Primeval Man,’ while admitting the Drift
implements as having been the ice hatchets and rude knives of low tribes
of men inhabiting Europe toward the end of the Glacial Period, concludes
thence ‘that it would be about as safe to argue from these implements as
to the condition of Man at that time in the countries of his Primeval
Home, as it would be in our own day to argue from the habits and arts of
the Eskimo as to the state of civilization in London or in Paris.’[45]
The progress of Archæology for years past, however, has been continually
cutting away the ground on which such an argument as this can stand,
till now it is all but utterly driven off the field. Where now is the
district of the earth that can be pointed to as the ‘Primeval Home’ of
Man, and that does not show by rude stone implements buried in its soil
the savage condition of its former inhabitants? There is scarcely a
known province of the world of which we cannot say certainly, savages
once dwelt here, and if in such a case an ethnologist asserts that these
savages were the descendants or successors of a civilized nation, the
burden of proof lies on him. Again, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age
belong in great measure to history, but their relation to the Stone Age
proves the soundness of the judgement of Lucretius, when, attaching
experience of the present to memory and inference from the past, he
propounded what is now a tenet of archæology, the succession of the
Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages:
‘Arma antiqua manus ungues dentesque fuerunt,
Et lapides et item silvarum fragmina rami
Posterius ferri vis est ærisque reperta,
Et prior æris erat quam ferri cognitus usus.’[46]
Throughout the various topics of Prehistoric Archæology, the force and
convergence of its testimony upon the development of culture are
overpowering. The relics discovered in gravel-beds, caves, shell-mounds,
terramares, lake-dwellings, earthworks, the results of an exploration of
the superficial soil in many countries, the comparison of geological
evidence, of historical documents, of modern savage life, corroborate
and explain one another. The megalithic structures, menhirs, cromlechs,
dolmens, and the like, only known to England, France, Algeria, as the
work of races of the mysterious past, have been kept up as matters of
modern construction and recognized purpose among the ruder indigenous
tribes of India. The series of ancient lake-settlements which must
represent so many centuries of successive population fringing the shores
of the Swiss lakes, have their surviving representatives among the rude
tribes of the East Indies, Africa, and South America. Outlying savages
are still heaping up shell-mounds like those of far-past Scandinavian
antiquity. The burial mounds still to be seen in civilized countries
have served at once as museums of early culture and as proofs of its
savage or barbaric type. It is enough, without entering farther here
into subjects fully discussed in modern special works, to claim the
general support given to the development-theory of culture by
Prehistoric Archæology. It was with a true appreciation of the bearings
of this science that one of its founders, the venerable Professor Sven
Nilsson, declared in 1843 in the Introduction to his ‘Primitive
Inhabitants of Scandinavia,’ that we are ‘unable properly to understand
the significance of the antiquities of any individual country without at
the same time clearly realizing the idea that they are the fragments of
a progressive series of civilization, and that the human race has always
been, and still is, steadily advancing in civilization.’[47]
Enquiry into the origin and early development of the material arts, as
judged of by comparing the various stages at which they are found
existing, leads to a corresponding result. Not to take this argument up
in its full range, a few typical details may serve to show its general
character. Amongst the various stages of the arts, it is only a minority
which show of themselves by mere inspection whether they are in the line
of progress or of decline. Most such facts may be compared to an
Indian’s canoe, stem and stern alike, so that one cannot tell by looking
at it which way it is set to go. But there are some which, like our own
boats, distinctly point in the direction of their actual course. Such
facts are pointers in the study of civilization, and in every branch of
the enquiry should be sought out. A good example of these pointer-facts
is recorded by Mr. Wallace. In Celebes, where the bamboo houses are apt
to lean with the prevalent west wind, the natives have found out that if
they fix some crooked timbers in the sides of the house, it will not
fall. They choose such accordingly, the crookedest they can find, but
they do not know the rationale of the contrivance, and have not hit on
the idea that straight poles fixed slanting would have the same effect
in making the structure rigid.[48] In fact, they have gone half-way
toward inventing what builders call a ‘strut.’ but have stopped short.
Now the mere sight of such a house would show that the plan is not a
remnant of higher architecture, but a half-made invention. This is a
fact in the line of progress, but not of decline. I have mentioned
elsewhere a number of similar cases; thus the adaptation of a cord to
the fire-drill is obviously an improvement on the simpler instrument
twirled by hand, and the use of the spindle for making thread is an
improvement on the clumsier art of hand-twisting;[49] but to reverse
this position, and suppose the hand-drill to have come into use by
leaving off the use of the cord of the cord-drill, or that people who
knew the use of the spindle left it off and painfully twisted their
thread by hand, is absurd. Again, the appearance of an art in a
particular locality where it is hard to account for it as borrowed from
elsewhere, and especially if it concerns some special native product, is
evidence of its being a native invention. Thus, what people can claim
the invention of the hammock, or the still more admirable discovery of
the extraction of the wholesome cassava from the poisonous manioc, but
the natives of the South American and West Indian districts to which
these things belong? As the isolated possession of an art goes to prove
its invention where it is found, so the absence of an art goes to prove
that it was never present. The onus probandi is on the other side; if
anyone thinks that the East African’s ancestors had the lamp and the
potter’s wheel, and that the North American Indians once possessed the
art of making beer from their maize like the Mexicans, but that these
arts have been lost, at any rate let him show cause for such an opinion.
I need not, perhaps, go so far as a facetious ethnological friend of
mine, who argues that the existence of savage tribes who do not kiss
their women is a proof of primæval barbarism, for, he says, if they had
ever known the practice they could not possibly have forgotten it.
Lastly and principally, as experience shows us that arts of civilized
life are developed through successive stages of improvement, we may
assume that the early development of even savage arts came to pass in a
similar way, and thus, finding various stages of an art among the lower
races, we may arrange these stages in a series probably representing
their actual sequence in history. If any art can be traced back among
savage tribes to a rudimentary state in which its invention does not
seem beyond their intellectual condition, and especially if it may be
produced by imitating nature or following nature’s direct suggestion,
there is fair reason to suppose the very origin of the art to have been
reached.
Professor Nilsson, looking at the remarkable similarity of the hunting
and fishing instruments of the lower races of mankind, considers them to
have been contrived instinctively by a sort of natural necessity. As an
example he takes the bow and arrow.[50] The instance seems an
unfortunate one, in the face of the fact that the supposed
bow-and-arrow-making instinct fails among the natives of Tasmania, to
whom it would have been very useful, nor have the Australians any bow of
their own invention. Even within the Papuan region, the bow so prevalent
in New Guinea is absent, or almost so, from New Caledonia. It seems to
me that Dr. Klemm, in his dissertations on Implements and Weapons, and
Colonel Lane Fox, in his lectures on Primitive Warfare, take a more
instructive line in tracing the early development of arts, not to a
blind instinct, but to a selection, imitation, and gradual adaptation
and improvement of objects and operations which Nature, the instructor
of primæval man, sets before him. Thus Klemm traces the stages by which
progress appears to have been made from the rough stick to the finished
spear or club, from the natural sharp-edged or rounded stone to the
artistically fashioned celt, spear-head, or hammer.[51] Lane Fox traces
connexion through the various types of weapons, pointing out how a form
once arrived at is repeated in various sizes, like the spear-head and
arrow-point; how in rude conditions of the arts the same instrument
serves different purposes, as where the Fuegians use their arrow-heads
also for knives, and Kafirs carve with their assagais, till separate
forms are adopted for special purposes; and how in the history of the
striking, cutting, and piercing instruments used by mankind, a
continuity may be traced, which indicates a gradual progressive
development from the rudest beginnings to the most advanced improvements
of modern skill. To show how far the early development of warlike arts
may have been due to man’s imitative faculty, he points out the
analogies in methods of warfare among animals and men, classifying as
defensive appliances hides, solid plates, jointed plates, scales; as
offensive weapons, the piercing, striking, serrated, poisoned kinds,
&c.; and under the head of stratagems, flight, concealment, leaders,
outposts, war-cries, and so forth.[52]
The manufacture of stone implements is now almost perfectly understood
by archæologists. The processes used by modern savages have been
observed and imitated. Sir John Evans, for instance, by blows with a
pebble, pressure with a piece of stag’s horn, sawing with a flint-flake,
boring with a stick and sand, and grinding on a stone surface, succeeds
in reproducing all but the finest kinds of stone implements.[53] On
thorough knowledge we are now able to refer in great measure the
remarkable similarities of the stone scrapers, flake-knives, hatchets,
spear- and arrow-heads, &c., as found in distant times and regions, to
the similarity of natural models, of materials, and of requirements
which belong to savage life. The history of the Stone Age is clearly
seen to be one of development. Beginning with the natural sharp stone,
the transition to the rudest artificially shaped stone implement is
imperceptibly gradual, and onward from this rude stage much independent
progress in different directions is to be traced, till the manufacture
at last arrives at admirable artistic perfection, by the time that the
introduction of metal is superseding it. So with other implements and
fabrics, of which the stages are known through their whole course of
development from the merest nature to the fullest art. The club is
traced from the rudest natural bludgeon up to the weapon of finished
shape and carving. Pebbles held in the hand to hammer with, and
cutting-instruments of stone shaped or left smooth at one end to be held
in the hand, may be seen in museums, hinting that the important art of
fixing instruments in handles was the result of invention, not of
instinct. The stone hatchet, used as a weapon, passes into the
battle-axe. The spear, a pointed stick or pole, has its point hardened
in the fire, and a further improvement is to fix on a sharp point of
horn, bone, or chipped stone. Stones are flung by hand, and then by the
sling, a contrivance widely but not universally known among savage
tribes. From first to last in the history of war the spear or lance is
grasped as a thrusting weapon. Its use as a missile no doubt began as
early, but it has hardly survived so far in civilization. Thus used, it
is most often thrown by the unaided arm, but a sling for the purpose is
known to various savage tribes. The short cord with an eye used in the
New Hebrides, and called a ‘becket’ by Captain Cook, and a whip-like
instrument noticed in New Zealand, are used for spear-throwing. But the
more usual instrument is a wooden handle, a foot or two long. This
spear-thrower is known across the high northern districts of North
America, among some tribes of South America, and among the Australians.
These latter, it has been asserted, could not have invented it in their
present state of barbarism. But the remarkable feature of the matter is
that the spear-thrower belongs especially to savagery, and not to
civilization. Among the higher nations the nearest approach to it seems
to have been the classic amentum, a thong attached to the middle of the
shaft of the javelin to throw it with. The highest people known to have
used the spear-thrower proper were the nations of Mexico and Central
America. Its existence among them is vouched for by representations in
the mythological pictures, by its Mexican name ‘atlatl,’ and by a
beautifully artistic specimen of the thing itself in the Christy Museum;
but we do not hear of it as in practical use after the Spanish Conquest.
In fact the history of the instrument seems in absolute opposition to
the degradation-theory, representing as it does an invention belonging
to the lower civilization, and scarcely able to survive beyond. Nearly
the same may be said of the blow-tube, which as a serious weapon
scarcely ranges above rude tribes of the East Indies and South America,
though kept up in sport at higher levels. The Australian boomerang has
been claimed as derived from some hypothetical high culture, whereas the
transition-stages through which it is connected with the club are to be
observed in its own country, while no civilized race possesses the
weapon.
The use of spring traps of boughs, of switches to fillip small missiles
with, and of the remarkable darts of the Pelew Islands, bent and made to
fly by their own spring, indicate inventions which may have led to that
of the bow, while the arrow is a miniature form of the javelin. The
practice of poisoning arrows, after the manner of stings and serpents’
fangs, is no civilized device, but a characteristic of lower life, which
is generally discarded even at the barbaric stage. The art of
narcotizing fish, remembered but not approved by high civilization,
belongs to many savage tribes, who might easily discover it in any
forest pool where a suitable plant had fallen in. The art of setting
fences to catch fish at the ebb of the tide, so common among the lower
races, is a simple device for assisting nature quite likely to occur to
the savage, in whom sharp hunger is no mean ally of dull wit. Thus it is
with other arts. Fire-making, cooking, pottery, the textile arts, are to
be traced along lines of gradual improvement.[54] Music begins with the
rattle and the drum, which in one way or another hold their places from
end to end of civilization, while pipes and stringed instruments
represent an advanced musical art which is still developing. So with
architecture and agriculture. Complex, elaborate, and highly-reasoned as
are the upper stages of these arts, it is to be remembered that their
lower stages begin with mere direct imitation of nature, copying the
shelters which nature provides, and the propagation of plants which
nature performs. Without enumerating to the same purpose the remaining
industries of savage life, it may be said generally that their facts
resist rather than require a theory of degradation from higher culture.
They agree with, and often necessitate, the same view of development
which we know by experience to account for the origin and progress of
the arts among ourselves.