PROGRESS
It is a far cry and long and weary road from the ape descending from the
trees and the ape-man shuffling over the ground, keeping close to his
arboreal refuge, to the lake-dweller and builder of stone monuments.
There was very little in the appearance or structure of the ape-man to
encourage great hopes for the future. The sleek, graceful, wiry,
well-armed cats were far more attractive, promising, and thrilling
actors on the world's stage. Why did not they progress, win the future,
and insure that all the future meetings of art and learning should be
held on the back fence? They certainly did not progress--that is a
stubborn fact.
They had largely or completely exhausted the possibilities of their
special line of development; as cats they were perfect and could
dominate the portion of the world in which as cats they were solely
interested. This was an impassable bar to progress. Why should they
change? They were so thoroughly conformed to the environment of their
time and conditions that any marked change would have been a
disadvantage. But when conditions did change, and the fashion of the
world which had produced them passed away, they became out of fashion,
"back numbers," incapable of meeting new emergencies and crises--like
men, parties, and governments in all ages of human history. They
suffered from over-adaptation and the resulting limitations.
Man did not make this mistake. Isolated tribes and even races might
settle down in contentment, become completely adapted to easy conditions
of life, and stagnate or degenerate. But a saving remnant was always
marching out into new physical or social surroundings, exposed to new
needs, fears, and opportunities, and readapting itself to meet and
profit by them. Man was not, and could not be, precocious. He was always
a bundle of possibilities and great expectations, which he has even now
only begun to realize.
Overpopulation, or other pressure in his primeval home, resulted in
great racial migrations, sending him all over the world to seek his
fortune. He became one of the very few physically cosmopolitan animals,
living everywhere from the equator to the Arctic zone. He became
toughened and hardened and adaptable, able to live under the most trying
circumstances. Everywhere he had to be a close observer, watchful and
wary. He was weak and defenseless, and his life depended upon his quick
recognition of "nature's signs of displeasure," upon the full exercise
of his few small wits. He learned to be faithful in a few things. We
need not repeat or review this weary chapter of his history.
"There were years that no one talked of. There were times
of horrid doubt.
There was faith and hope and whacking and despair."
Man was experimenting with all kinds of climates and conditions. It was
in the hard and cold northern regions that he developed farthest, though
less rapidly at first. We have already glanced at the educational
results of language, of family life in the rock-shelter around the fire,
of the fashioning and use of tools, of his love of ornaments and
display, of his dawning and clearing self-consciousness, of the
beginnings of ownership. We have noticed his burial rites and their
suggestions. All these may have been rude and crude, but they contained
the germs of vast possibilities, though painfully slow of development.
His "castles in Spain" were his richest possessions, though he probably
never knew or suspected them. One hundred thousand years of human life
in Europe produced nothing higher than Neanderthal man.
Suddenly, at the beginning of Upper Paleolithic time Cro-Magnon man
appeared. His splendid physique and large brain, his production and
appreciation of art, and many other qualities, have led some one to
speak of him as the "prehistoric Greek." In our enthusiasm we may easily
overestimate his powers; but, as we study him and his work, we feel that
here was a great race, and that now some great human possibilities are
to be fully attained and made permanent. Apparently he had come from the
plateau region of western Asia. Near his birthplace there must have been
other peoples capable of great things. We remember that Susa was
probably founded not much later than the beginning of the Magdalenian
epoch in Europe. But the Cro-Magnon folk decreased in numbers, in
stature, apparently also in ability and vitality. During the period of
transition to Neolithic time Europe was occupied only by a sparse
population of fishermen along the rivers, while barbarous hunting tribes
were working their way northward toward the Baltic. The shell-heaps of
Denmark are the monuments of the attainments of this epoch.
A higher civilization had already entered the Mediterranean basin. It
was building houses, villages, possibly forerunners of the Greek
city-states. Especially in Greece they were sufficiently separated to
allow independence of development and great variety, and yet near enough
to one another to prevent the ill effects of complete isolation. Here
there was rapid interchange and improvement of physical and mental
attainments, mental stimulation and rivalry, change and progress.
Implements, weapons, pottery; new discoveries, inventions, ideas, arts,
and habits of life and thought spread slowly and gradually from these
centres of progressing culture far to the northward. This was
undoubtedly one important source of stimuli. But we must not
overestimate its influence.[172]
It spread through France into England and Denmark. As time went on this
northward current increased and strengthened until, during the Bronze
period, the Baltic region, especially Denmark, became almost a second
Mediterranean centre of culture and art; just as at a far later time
Flemish cities became the Venices of the north. But the north was never
a beggarly dependent and imitator of the south. It selected and accepted
only what it would, almost always modified and frequently improved what
it had selected.
[Illustration: ANCIENT FISHERMEN
From the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Muséum d'Histoire
Naturelle, Paris.]
The larger part of central and northern Europe lay outside of this
great current and was reached by it only slightly and very indirectly.
These regions or provinces were largely working out their own
civilization and culture.
What then was the real source of Neolithic progress?[173] It is not to
be sought in great wars and revolutions. Genuine wars are carried on by
nations with a national government, and as yet there were no nations,
and even tribal government--outside of religion, the great bond of tribal
unity at this stage--was probably weak, loose, and inefficient. There
were no such strong towns or city-states as sprang up later in Greece.
There were here no nomadic hordes to be driven by drought from their
withering pastures to migrate _en masse_ and force their way into less
thirsty and starving regions. There was, as yet, no great overpopulation
of mountainous areas compelling raids or forays into piedmont zones. The
nearest approach to this condition is the slow, evidently peaceful
penetration of parts of France by broad-heads from its eastern uplands
filtering in and mixing with the long-headed older population, and
betraying their arrival mainly by a change in form of head and rise of
cephalic index.
There was little wealth to tempt invasion. There were no cities or
large towns to plunder. There were wide stretches of land thinly or not
at all populated and open to any newcomer. All that we know of Neolithic
religion, far more dominant in tribal life and action than the very
feebly developed political or social organization, the cult of the
goddess, and the accompanying mother-right, suggest peace. The great
invasions of the Bronze and Iron periods introduced or stimulated the
cult of war gods and patriarchal family life and kinship. But these were
still in the future. The picture of Europe at this time as a great arena
of roving savages, thirsting for blood and always at war, seems to be a
caricature.
The people of the banded pottery were evidently peaceful. They left no
weapons except mattocks and hammers. No one, I believe, has ever accused
the broad-heads of blood-thirst. The graves of northern hunters with
corded pottery are all about Grosgartach. The little village was
deserted and decayed. It showed no signs of having been burned. The
lake-dwellings were open to attack at all times, especially after the
ice had formed during the winter. Robenhausen during its long history
burned several times; hardly as often as most of our New England
villages. Here a single brand or fire-tipped arrow in a thatched roof
would have destroyed the whole settlement.
Only in northern Europe, in the country of the corded pottery, do we
find great attention paid to the making of fine weapons like the flint
daggers and axes. Here we have chiefly herdsmen and hunters. Here there
were probably village incompatibilities--Donnybrook fairs,
cattle-lifting, and forays. But these should hardly be dignified with
the name of wars. We find then some North German peoples at the very end
of the Neolithic period pushing southward, often by peaceable
infiltration, sometimes perhaps by violent incursions, when the
resistance was great.[174]
Says Wundt:[175] "So long as he is not obliged to protect himself
against peoples that crowd in upon him, primitive man is familiar with
the weapon only as an implement of the chase. The old picture of a war
of all with all, as Thomas Hobbes once sketched the natural state of
man, is the very reverse of what obtained. The natural condition is one
of peace, unless this is disturbed by external circumstances, one of the
most important of which is contact with a higher culture."
We remember, also, the fewness of fortified villages in northern Europe
until toward the end of the Neolithic period, and then mainly along
great routes of migration; and around mines and workshops. They seem to
fail altogether in Scandinavia at this time. Even the wars, battles, or
quarrels which occurred probably hindered progress far more than they
aided it. Haeckel in his younger days was fierce in his denunciations of
the stupidity of war.
Political or economic revolutions could hardly occur when there was
probably little organized government and even less wealth and class
difference.
Conditions in France may have been somewhat different. Here the great
stone monuments suggest a denser population under a more advanced
organization, religious or political, or both, reminding us of
conditions in the Mediterranean region, with whose culture it was
closely connected. Here fortifications seem to have been quite
numerous.[176] But our knowledge is too slight to allow even a
conjecture.
[Illustration: EARLY AGRICULTURE
From the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Muséum d'Histoire
Naturelle, Paris.]
In the southeastern part of Europe we find the people of the banded
pottery who practised an advanced form of agriculture. Here apparently
the men as well as the women worked in the fields. We find their stone
mattocks and ploughshares. Hoe-culture was giving place to ploughing.
Here men were receiving a very different education and training from the
hunters, fishermen, and herdsmen of the north, though there also a
gradual increase of tillage was doubtless taking place. They were
tilling the ground laboriously, monotonously, doing what was wearisome
and disagreeable for a reward sometimes large, sometimes scanty. The
peasant farmer learns forethought, thrift, economy, industry, and a host
of homely virtues, far less known to hunter or herdsman. He is no more a
collector taking what he finds: he has gone into partnership with
nature. He is studying her ways, moods, and whims. He amasses a steadily
increasing store of most valuable lore concerning climate, weather,
soil, plants, animals, and things. He is rooted in a little patch of
ground. His outlook is narrow and he is slow to change. But he learns
his lessons thoroughly. He may enter the school unwillingly but he stays
in it.
He has a permanent home even if it is hardly more than a hut, which is
the centre of his life and thought. It is a hard, healthy life, and
population increases rapidly under such conditions. He probably has a
large family of children, and they educate and socialize him and one
another. He is trained and moulded by "home surroundings." Is not this
the history of the frontiersman or homesteader everywhere at all times?
The home and family attachments and instincts are deeply rooted because
very ancient and entirely natural.
He lives in a village or neighborhood, which is hardly more than a great
patriarchal family, closely united by intermarriage, and by the pressure
of common work to satisfy common needs, common ownership of the soil,
mutual aid in hard times. The religious rites and ceremonies, the feasts
and mysteries, the prayers or magic, are all community affairs. Many of
the divinities are local. These religious bonds are all the firmer and
more compelling because, in the lack of any developed and permanent
political organization, religion is the great tribal bond. We easily
forget the civilizing, refining, and improving unremitting pressure and
power of these simple, uninteresting peasant influences. He is learning
to get on with the members of the family and neighborhood. He is
experimenting upon his neighbors: his experiments and experiences may
often be very trying to himself and them; the results may sometimes be
discouraging. But he is not only practising the essentials and
fundamentals of morality, very incomplete and without code; but a sort
of preparatory course in government. It may easily be self-government in
these small villages. The town-meeting originated here or somewhat
farther north.
We have already seen that his religion had grown out of the experiences
of his daily life. May we not claim that science and a sort of
philosophy may have sprung from the same source? He knew nothing of
cause and effect in the material world. But he was seeking diligently
the invisible bond of relations of things and events. The relation,
according to his views, was mainly of a spiritual character through the
agency of dæmons. His ritual, call it magic if you will, was the
expression of his conviction that results in the material world might be
modified by his lending a helping hand to all the beneficent spirits. He
indulged freely in hypotheses, but these were the outgrowth of millennia
of experience and life, a very healthy form of pragmatism. He who has
never laughed at a modern scientific theory, useful and fruitful in its
time but now outgrown and replaced by a somewhat better one, may cast
the first stone at his "benighted" Neolithic ancestor.
We might even venture to suspect that in his own crude way he was a
philosopher. He must have had something like a philosophy of life, even
if it was hardly more than a dumb instinct.
Says Miss Harrison: "Dike" (usually translated justice), "in common
Greek parlance is the way of life, normal habit. Dike is the way of the
world, the way things happen, and Themis is that specialized way for
human beings which is sanctioned by the collective conscience, by herd
instinct. A lonely beast in the valley, a fish in the sea, has his Dike,
but it is not till man congregates together that he has his Themis.
Greeks and Indians alike seem to have discovered that the divine way was
also the truth and the life. This notion of the way, which was also the
truth and the life, seems to have existed before the separation of
Indian from Iranian. Closely allied to Dike and to Vedic Rta is the
Chinese Tao, only it seems less moralized and more magical. Deep-rooted
in man's heart is the pathetic conviction that moral goodness and
material prosperity go together, that if man keep the Rta, he can
magically affect for good nature's ordered going."[177]
Thus primitive man, long before the dawn of anything like civilization,
was seeking, finding, clearing, and treading out the "way" to an
ordered, right, and healthy individual and social life--not through, but
to, codes of morals and systems of philosophy. His thought was more or
less chaotic, perhaps; it was crudely, often indecently, expressed in
ugly form or action; but it was always acted upon, kept close to life.
We might possibly call him an "Ur-pragmatist," if you will pardon the
barbarism. He had neither the language nor the "conveniences for
thinking" and other things, to write out a cool, logical abstract system
in long words. In this we have outrun him until we have left him out of
sight. His philosophy was not a guidebook or map, but a rough and often
miry trail.
We have tried to express briefly the results of a glance at the
agriculturists of southeastern Europe. Before the close of the Neolithic
period they were in fairly close communication with Ægean culture and
owed considerable or much progress to stimuli from this source. In the
great essentials of human training and development something quite
similar might be said of the lake-dwellers and the broad-heads of
eastern France. North Germany had a different culture and probably
somewhat different religious cults and general views and conceptions.
France and England, too, represented a quite distinct province whose
peoples were always under Mediterranean influence. Denmark was already
a meeting-place for a variety of cultures, thoughts, and influences.
Peoples were gradually closing in from all directions on the central
provinces of northern Europe, and here apparently they met. We find here
a mixture of head-forms, of culture; mixture or modifications of styles
of ceramic ornament, of burial customs--all suggesting a mingling of
peoples of a variety of cultures. Here at or toward the end of the
Neolithic period was the "melting-pot" for the fusion of these peoples
and their cultures. There was conflict of customs and ideas, of _ways_
of life. There was probably much incompatibility, many broken heads. The
pacific people of the banded pottery seem largely to have withdrawn, or
been driven out, before the infiltration or invasions of northern folk.
It was hardly a comfortable place for conservative pacificists. There
were doubtless battles in many regions--perhaps now and here we might
speak of wars. In some places there may have been extermination of the
fighting men. But in most parts there was large fusion, and out of this
mixture of cultures, ideas, thoughts, and habits of life came the
culture of the beginning of the Bronze Age.
The great characteristic of Neolithic culture seems to be a rude, often
barbarous, sometimes ugly but generally healthy, always hardy and
vigorous growth--it grew "like a weed"--the manifestation of an intense
vitality. Because it was healthy it was essentially and generally fairly
sane, matter-of-fact, whole, and balanced. The Neoliths were certainly
no "reversed cripples," in whom one or two of the less essential powers
had outgrown and dwarfed the man. It was an adaptable stock giving rise
to many marked and vigorous varieties, from whose intercrossing
something great and good could hardly fail to arise.
Green refuses to write a "trumpet-and-drum history of England." "Happy
the people--here we cannot say nation--that has no annals." Here is surely
a certain amount of truth which we may be in danger of forgetting. In
plants, and often in men, a long period of silent unnoticeable growth
usually precedes the brief season of flowers and fruit. Is this the rule
in racial, or internal, development?
Is it true, as some historians tell us, that a dormant period of
national history best repays investigation, and that dormant peoples
will bear watching? Is the dormant nation often storing up nutriment,
strength, vitality, just as the plant is doing in its ugly underground
roots and stem? Are fallow periods necessary to its fertility and
apparently dormant times essential to its life and growth? Must periods
of energetic action and effort be followed by times of exhaustion and
rest, as in the history of the strong athlete rejoicing to run a race?
Is China awakening from just such a dormant period? What of India, still
the home of philosophy? Because a nation, after bearing a marvellous
harvest of culture, thought, art, or religion, seems barren and
exhausted, does this discourage or arouse the hope that it will some day
produce an equal or greater fruitage?
How about "darkest Africa"? Here surely we have a case of degeneration
beyond all hope of recovery, not to mention a great future. But is this
quite as certain as some of us seem to think? Is not much of our
so-called Occidental progress really an orgy of wasted energy, neurotic
excitement, half-camouflaged decadence, which will end in degeneration?
We do not know yet. May there some day be a family rather than league of
nations to which every one will contribute according to its special
ability? If this be granted, will Huxley's statement concerning the
individual be applicable to races and peoples: "Its aim will be not so
much the survival of the fittest as the fitting of as many as possible
to survive"? These are sphinx questions demanding an answer from
statesmen. Unfortunately most of our statesmen are only waiting to be
gathered to their fathers in the graveyard of dead politicians. We will
turn homeward after our excursion, gladly leaving our little bundle of
facts and questions at the door of the philosopher of history.
But one question confronts us directly. Is our whole estimate and
valuation of Neolithic life, work, and progress extreme and practically
worthless? Were they, in spite of all our arguments, a mob of crude,
worthless barbarians, undeserving of any gratitude or sympathy, much
less of respect? Do we really owe anything to them?
One historic event of great importance had its growth and rise during
the Neolithic period out of Neolithic life, conditions, and culture.
This was the Aryan culture of Persia and India, of Greece and Rome, and
of our northern ancestors. No one seems to deny its importance and
value. We must glance at its origin and growth, and see if it supports
at all the tentative and often conjectural conclusions at which we have
arrived. This will be the object of our work and study in the next and
closing chapter.