have a history; language or any other production of nature admits
only of growth.’ But unless it can be shown that words are entities
having the power of generating and producing other words, which arts,
tools, or weapons, do not possess, the word growth can only be applied
figuratively to language as it is to the arts, and in that case growth
and history are synonymous terms. But this is absurd. Words, as I said
before, are the outward signs of ideas in the mind, and this is also
the case with tools or weapons. Words are ideas expressed by sounds,
whilst tools are ideas expressed by hands; and unless it can be shown
that there are distinct processes in the mind for language and for the
arts they must be classed together.
But it is said, ‘language has the property of progressing gradually
and irresistibly, and the changes in it are completely beyond the
control of the free will of man.’ This, however, can only be accepted
relatively. We know that in certain phases of savage life the use of
particular words may be tabooed in the same manner that the use of
particular implements or weapons may be tabooed; but it would be quite
as hopeless for any individual to attempt to change the entire course
of the constructive arts as to change the form of a language; the
action of the individual man is limited in both cases to the production
of particular words or particular implements, which take their place
like bricks in a building.
Man is not the designer in the sense of an architect, but he is the
constructor in the sense of a brickmaker or a bricklayer.
But the difficulty of tracing fleeting words to their sources operates
to a great extent in effacing the action of the individual in language.
Words become public property before they are incorporated in a
language. It would be difficult to establish a system of patents for
new words. Here again we see that the line drawn between language and
the arts is a subjective delusion, not an objective reality. It is not
true that words do not originate with individual men, but merely that
we do not perceive it.
Modifications of words, like modifications in the forms of the
arts, result from the succession of ideas or other causes affecting
particular minds. They obtain acceptance through natural selection by
the survival of the fittest.
The chance which a new word or a new implement has of surviving depends
on the number of words or implements to be superseded, on their
relative importance to the art or the language, and the persistency
with which these superseded words or implements are retained. The truth
of this is seen in the fact that vocabularies change far more rapidly
than grammatical forms; because the same grammatical terminations are
employed with a large number of different words, and they are therefore
a more constant necessity of speech.
Hence early and barbaric languages may be connected by their
grammatical forms long after their vocabularies have entirely changed.
The same truth is seen in the fact admitted by philologists, that in
small communities new words and modifications of words gain more ready
acceptance than in large communities; because the struggle of the new
words for existence is less in small than in large communities, and the
dialects therefore change more rapidly. And the same causes influence
the transformations which take place in the arts. Objects in common
use change more slowly than those which are but little employed; the
difference is merely one of degree and not of kind.
In dealing with the arts, each separate contrivance occupies a larger
share of our attention, to the exclusion of any comprehensive survey
of them as a whole. The arts present themselves to our mental vision
on a larger scale, and we view them analytically; we are as it were in
the brickmaker’s yard seeing each brick turned out of hand, whereas in
dealing with language we see only the finished building; the details
are lost. We view language synthetically. The arts may be said to
present themselves to us as a sea beach in detached fragments; language
in the form of a compact sandstone. The empiric or the utilitarian may
deny that there is any resemblance between them; but the geologist
knows that the mode of deposition has been the same in both cases, and
he classes the whole as rocks.
Then again there are facilities for collecting and arranging the data
for the study of language which do not exist in the case of the arts.
Whilst words take seconds to record, hours and days may be spent in
the accurate delineation of form. Words cost nothing, may be packed
in folios, transmitted by post, and stored on the shelves of every
private library. Ten thousand classified words may be carried in
the coat pocket without inconvenience, whilst a tenth part of that
number of material objects require a museum to contain them, and are
accessible only to a few: this is the reason why the arts have never
been subjected to those classifications which form the groundwork of a
science.
But when we say that words and implements are both tools employed
for the expression of thought, it is important to bear in view one
difference between them, which has a practical bearing on the relative
value of the two studies as a means of tracing the evolution of culture
in prehistoric times and amongst savages. The word is the tool of the
ear, the implement the tool of the eye; and for this reason language is
the science of historic times, whilst the arts constitute the subject
of science to be studied in relation to prehistoric times.
Every new tool or weapon formed by the hand of man retains the same
form as long as it continues to exist; it may be handed from man to
man, from tribe to tribe, from father to son, from one generation
to another; or, buried in the soil, it may under special conditions
continue for untold ages without change of form, until in our time it
may be discovered and employed as evidence of the condition of the arts
at the time it was fabricated. Very different, however, is the history
of words. Each word coined by the exercise of the inventive faculty of
man to express an idea is liable to change as it passes from mouth to
ear. Its continued identity is dependent solely on memory, and it is
subject to phonetic and acoustic changes from which the forms of the
arts are exempt.
When by the invention of writing each word receives its equivalent in
forms that are appreciable to the sense of sight, it gains stability,
which places it on a footing of equality with the arts, and enables us
to trace with certainty the changes it has undergone; and therefore
in historic times language is the surest test of social contact that
we can have. But in prehistoric times, before it had acquired this
permanence through the invention of writing, the forms of language
were, to use Mr. Sayce’s expression, in a constant state of flux.
The truth of this is seen in the immense number of dialects and
languages employed by savages at the present time. Thus amongst the
one hundred islands occupied by the Melanesian race, the Bishop of
Wellington tells us, and his statement is confirmed by the late
lamented Bishop Patteson, that there are no less than two hundred
languages, differing so much that the tribes can have but very little
interchange of thought; and similar accounts are given of rapid changes
of language in Cambodia, Siberia, Central Africa, North, Central, and
South America.
The greater stability of the material arts as compared with the
fluctuations in the language of a people in a state of primaeval
savagery, is well shown by a consideration of the weapons of the
Australians, and the names by which they are known in the several parts
of that continent. These people, from the simplicity of their arts,
afford us the only living examples of what we may presume to have been
the characteristics of a primitive people. Their weapons are the same
throughout the continent; the shield, the throwing-stick, the spear,
the boomerang, and their other weapons differ only in being thicker,
broader, flatter, or longer, in different localities; but whether
seen on the east or the west coast, each of these classes of weapons
is easily recognized by its form and uses. On the other hand, amongst
the innumerable languages and dialects spoken by these people, it
would appear that almost every tribe has a different name for the same
weapon. The narrow parrying-shield, which consists of a piece of wood
with a place for the hand in the centre, in South Australia goes by
the name of ‘heileman’, in other parts it is known under the name of
‘mulabakka’, in Victoria it is ‘turnmung’, and on the west coast we
have ‘murukanye’ and ‘tamarang’ for the same implement very slightly
modified in size and form. Referring to the comparative table of
Australian languages compiled by the Rev. George Taplin, in the first
number of the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_ (i, 1872, pp.
84-8), we find the throwing-stick, which on the Murray River is known
by the name of ‘yova’, on the Lower Darling is ‘yarrum’, in New South
Wales it is ‘wommurrur’, in Victoria ‘karrick’, on Lake Alexandrina
‘taralye’, amongst the Adelaide tribes of South Australia it is
‘midla’, in other parts of South Australia it is called ‘ngeweangko’,
and in King George’s Sound ‘miro’.
From these considerations we arrive at the conclusion that in the
earliest stages of culture the arts are far more stable than language:
whilst the arts are subject only, or chiefly, to those changes which
result from growth, language, in addition to those which result from
growth, is also affected by changes arising from phonetic decay.
The importance therefore of studying the grammar, so to speak, of the
arts becomes apparent, as it is by this means alone that we can trace
out the origin and evolution of culture in the earliest times.
The task before us is to follow by means of them the succession of
ideas by which the mind of man has developed, from the simple to the
complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous; to work out
step by step, by the use of such symbols as the arts afford, that
law of contiguity by which the mind has passed from simple cohesion
of states of consciousness to the association of ideas, and so on to
broader generalizations.
This development has to be considered under the two heads of culture
and constitution, that is to say, that we have to consider not only the
succession of ideas in the mind resulting from experience, but also the
development by inheritance of the internal organism of the mind itself,
or, to use the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, ‘In the progress of life
at large, as in the progress of the individual, the adjustment of
inner tendencies to outer persistencies must begin with the simple and
advance to the complex, seeing that, both within and without, complex
relations, being made up of simple ones, cannot be established before
simple ones have been established’ (_Princ. of Psych._, i^3, p. 426).
We find no difficulty in assenting to the general proposition that
culture has been a work of progress. Our difficulty lies in realizing
the slow stages of its early development, owing to the complexities
both of our mental constitution and of the contemporaneous culture
from which experience is drawn, or, again to use Mr. Spencer’s more
expressive words, of our ‘inner tendencies’, and ‘outer persistencies’;
we are apt to regard as intuitive, if not congenital, many simple
ideas which in early culture can only have been worked out through the
exercise of experience and reason during a long course of ages.
We see this error of our own minds constantly displayed in the
education of children. The ideas in a child’s mind, like those of
mankind at large, are necessarily built up in sequence. The instructor
makes use of some word, the meaning of which is clearly understood
by him, but which does not fall into the sequence of the child’s
reasoning; the conception associated with it in the child’s mind must,
however, necessarily conform to such sequence. Hence a confusion of
ideas, which is often attributed to the stupidity of the child, but
which is in reality due to the inexperience of the instructor; as,
for instance, in the case exemplified by Pip, in Dickens’ _Great
Expectations_, who, having imbibed the precept that he was to ‘walk in
the same all the days of his life’, was led by his sequence of ideas to
infer therefrom that he was invariably to walk to school by the same
path, and on no account go round by the pastrycook’s.
And so in studying savages and early races whose mental development
corresponds in some degree to that of children, we have to guard
against this automorphism, as Mr. Spencer terms it; that is to say, the
tendency to estimate the capacity of others by our own, which appears
almost completely to incapacitate some people from dealing with the
subject.
The question of the free will of man enters largely into this study. I
shall not be expected to say much upon a subject which has so lately
occupied the attention of the public, having been discussed by some of
our ablest scientists; but I cannot avoid quoting, in reference to this
point, a passage from Dr. Carpenter’s _Mental Physiology_, who in this
controversy is certainly entitled to be regarded as the champion of
free will; and therefore by quoting him we run no risk of overstating
the case against free will. ‘Our mental activity,’ he says (p. 25), is
‘entirely spontaneous or automatic, being determined by our congenital
nervous organism.... It may be stated as a fundamental principle that
the will can never originate any form of mental activity....’ But
it has the power, he continues, of selecting any one out of several
objects that present themselves either simultaneously or successively
before the mental vision, and of so limiting and intensifying the
impression which that particular object makes upon the consciousness,
that all others shall be for the time non-existent to it.
The truth of this, in so far as regards the limitation of the will,
cannot fail to force itself upon the student of culture. It is,
I venture to think, by classifying and arranging in evolutionary
order the actual facts of the manifestations of mind, as seen in the
development of the arts, institutions, and languages of mankind, no
less than by comparative anatomy, and far more than by metaphysical
speculation, that we shall arrive at a solution of the question,
to what extent the mental Ego has been, to use Professor Huxley’s
expression, a conscious spectator of what has passed.
I propose, therefore, with your permission, to give a few examples,
by means of diagrams, of material evolution derived from the earliest
phases of culture. In language and in all ideas communicated by word
of mouth there is a hiatus between the limits of our knowledge and the
origin of culture which can never be bridged over, but we may hold in
our hand the first tool ever created by the hand of man.
It has been said that the use of speech is the distinctive quality of
man. But how can we know that? We are literally surrounded by brute
language. We can imitate their calls, and we find that animals will
respond to our imitations of them. But who has ever seen any of the
lower animals construct a tool and use it.
The conception of man, not as a tool-_using_ but as a tool-_making_
animal, is clear, defined, and unassailable; probably if we could
trace language to its sources, we should be able to draw the same line
between natural sounds employed as a medium of communication, and the
created word. Thus the arts which we can study may perhaps be taken to
illustrate the origin of language, which we cannot study in this phase.
The ape employs both sticks and stones as missiles and as hammers to
crack the shells of nuts. But we have no evidence that he ever selects
special forms for special uses. The arts therefore afford us a clearly
defined starting-point for the commencement of culture.
To go in search of a particular form of stick or stone in order to
apply it to a particular use would require greater effort of the will
in fixing attention continuously on the matter in hand than is found to
exist amongst the lower animals except in cases of instinct, which term
I understand to mean an inherited congenital nervous organism which
adapts the mind to the ready reception of experience of a particular
kind. But this instinct does not exist in the case in question; there
is no tool-making instinct: our tool has to be evolved through reason
and experience, without the aid of any special organism for the purpose.
The process we have to assume therefore is that, in using stones as
hammers, they would occasionally split. In using certain stratified
rocks this would occur frequently, and so force itself on the attention
of the creature. The creature going on hammering, it would force itself
on his notice that the sharp fractured end was doing better work than
before. It would be perceived that there were hard things and soft
things, that the hard things split the stone, and the soft things were
cut by it; and so there would grow up in the mind an association of
ideas between striking hard things and splitting, and striking soft
things and cutting, and also a sequence by which it would be perceived
that the fracture of the stone was a necessary preliminary to the
other; and in the course of many generations, during which the internal
organism of the mind grew in harmony with this experience, the creature
would be led to perform the motions which had been found effectual in
splitting the stone before applying it to the purposes for which it was
to be used.
Thus we arrive at a state of the arts in which we may suppose man to
be able to construct a tool by means of a single blow. By constantly
striking in the same direction, flakes would be produced; and by still
further repeating the same motions, it would at last be found that by
means of many blows a stone could be chipped to an edge or a point so
as to form a very efficient tool.
But this continued chipping of the stone in order to produce a tool,
implies a considerable mental advance upon the effort of mind necessary
to construct a tool with one blow.
It implies continued attention directed by the will to the
accomplishment of an object already conceived in the mind, and its
subsequent application to another object which must also have been
conceived in the mind before the tool was begun.
Now we know from all experience, and from all evolution which we can
trace with certainty, that progress moves on in an accelerating ratio,
and that the earlier processes take longer than the later ones.
[Illustration: PLATE XII.
_Diagram 1._]
But the implements of the drift, which are the earliest relics of human
workmanship as yet recognized, are most of them multi-flaked tools,
such as the implements figured on Plate XII, Nos. 1-10, requiring a
considerable time to construct, and the use of innumerable blows in
order to trim to a point at one end.
It appears therefore evident that in the natural course of events
the drift period must have been preceded by an earlier period of
considerable extent characterized by the use of single-flaked tools.
And we may therefore consider it probable that should any evidences of
man be hereafter discovered in miocene beds, they will be associated
with such large rude flakes as those now exhibited, which require a
feebler effort of attention and of reason to construct.
If we examine the forms of the flint implements of the drift, we
find that out of many intermediate shapes we may recognize three in
particular, which have been minutely described by Mr. Evans in his
valuable work on the stone implements of Britain[9]: (1) a side-tool,
consisting of a flint chipped to an edge on one side and having the
natural rounded outside of the flint left on the other side, where it
appears to have been held in the hand; (2) a tongue-shaped implement
chipped to a point at one end, and having the rounded surface for the
hand at the big end; and (3) an oval or almond-shaped tool, which is
often chipped to an edge all round.
We have no evidence to show which of these kind of tools was the
earliest; but that they were employed for different uses there can be
little reason to doubt. But have we any evidence to throw light on the
way in which these several forms originated in the minds of men in the
very low condition of mental development which we may suppose to have
existed at the time?
About eight years ago, whilst examining the ancient British camps on
the South Downs, I chanced to discover in the camp of Cissbury, near
Worthing, a large flint factory of the neolithic age. There were some
sixty or more pits from which flints had been obtained from the chalk,
and these pits were full of the débris of the flint-workers. The
factory was of the neolithic age, the most characteristic tool of which
is the flint celt, a form which differs but slightly from the oval
or almond-shaped palaeolithic form, but the cutting edge of which is
more decidedly at the broad end. The débris, some six hundred or more
specimens of which were collected, consisted chiefly of these celts in
various stages of manufacture.
If any one will attempt to make a flint celt, as I have done sometimes
(and Mr. Evans, from whom I learnt that art, has done frequently), he
will find that it is difficult to command the fracture of the flint
with certainty; every now and then a large piece will come off, or a
flaw will be discovered which spoils the symmetry of the tool, and it
has to be thrown away. In arranging and classifying the remains of this
flint factory, I found that all the palaeolithic forms were represented
by one or other of these unfinished celts, so much so as to make it
doubtful whether some of them may not actually have been used like them.
A celt finished at the thin end, and abandoned before the cutting edge
was completed, represented a tongue-shaped palaeolithic implement; a
celt finished only on one side represented a palaeolithic side-tool;
and a celt rudely chipped out, and abandoned before receiving its
finishing strokes, represented almost exactly an oval palaeolithic
tool, only differing from it in being somewhat rougher, and showing
evidence of unfinish.
Taking a lesson then from this flint-worker’s shop of the later
neolithic age, we see how the earlier palaeolithic forms originated.
They were not designed outright, as the nineteenth-century man would
have designed them for special uses, but arose from a selection of
varieties produced accidentally in the process of manufacture. The
forms were also suggested by those of the nodules out of which they
were made. We see, by examining the outside surfaces that were left on
some of them, how a long thin nodule produced a long thin celt, a broad
thick nodule a broad thick celt, and so forth. Indeed, so completely
does the fabricator appear to have been controlled by the necessities
of his art, that in tracing these successive forms one is almost
tempted to ask whether the principle of causation lay mostly in the
flint or in the flint-worker, so fully do they bear out the statement
of Dr. Carpenter and the other physiologists, that nothing originates
in the free will of man.
[Illustration: PLATE I.]
[Illustration: PLATE II.]
On these two diagrams (Plates I and II) I have shown how, from the same
form of palaeolithic implement already described, the more complex
forms of the spear and axe-blade of the subsequent periods were
developed. The point developed into a spear, and the broad end into an
axe-blade. You will see by reference to Plate I that the oval tool of
the drift suggested the smaller leaf-shaped spear-head of the early
neolithic age. This, by a gradual straightening of the sides, became
the lozenge-shaped form, which latter developed into the barbed form,
and this last into the triangular form, which consists of barbs without
a tang.