consecrated ideas than to get a vivid notion of human achievement in
its proper historical perspective. In order to do this let us imagine
the whole gradual and laborious attainments of mankind compressed into
the compass of a single lifetime. Let us assume that a single
generation of men have in fifty years managed to accumulate all that
now passes for civilization. They would have to start, as all
individuals do, absolutely uncivilized, and their task would be to
recapitulate what has occupied the race for, let us guess, at least
five hundred thousand years. Each year in the life of a generation
would therefore correspond to ten thousand years in the progress of
the race.
On this scale it would require forty-nine years to reach a point of
intelligence which would enable our self-taught generation to give up
their ancient and inveterate habits of wandering hunters and settle
down here and there to till the ground, harvest their crops,
domesticate animals, and weave their rough garments. Six months later,
or half through the fiftieth year, some of them, in a particularly
favorable situation, would have invented writing and thus established
a new and wonderful means of spreading and perpetuating civilization.
Three months later another group would have carried literature, art,
and philosophy to a high degree of refinement and set standards for
the succeeding weeks. For two months our generation would have been
living under the blessings of Christianity; the printing press would
be but a fortnight old and they would not have had the steam engine
for quite a week. For two or three days they would have been hastening
about the globe in steamships and railroad trains, and only yesterday
would they have come upon the magical possibilities of electricity.
Within the last few hours they would have learned to sail in the air
and beneath the waters, and have forthwith applied their newest
discoveries to the prosecution of a magnificent war on the scale
befitting their high ideals and new resources. This is not so strange,
for only a week ago they were burning and burying alive those who
differed from the ruling party in regard to salvation, eviscerating in
public those who had new ideas of government, and hanging old women
who were accused of traffic with the devil. All of them had been no
better than vagrant savages a year before. Their fuller knowledge was
altogether too recent to have gone very deep, and they had many
institutions and many leaders dedicated to the perpetuation of outworn
notions which would otherwise have disappeared. Until recently changes
had taken place so slowly and so insensibly that only a very few
persons could be expected to realize that not a few of the beliefs
that were accepted as eternal verities were due to the inevitable
misunderstandings of a savage.
In speaking of the "savage" or "primitive mind", we are, of course,
using a very clumsy expression. We shall employ the term, nevertheless,
to indicate the characteristics of the human mind when there was as yet
no writing, no organized industry or mechanical arts, no money, no
important specialization of function except between the sexes, no
settled life in large communities. The period so described covers all
but about five or six thousand of the half million to a million years
that man has existed on the earth.
There are no chronicles to tell us the story of those long centuries.
Some inferences can be made from the increasing artfulness and variety
of the flint weapons and tools which we find. But the stone weapons
which have come down to us, even in their crudest forms (eoliths), are
very far from representing the earliest achievements of man in the
accumulation of culture. Those dim, remote cycles must have been full
of great, but inconspicuous, originators who laid the foundations of
civilization in discoveries and achievements so long taken for granted
that we do not realize that they ever had to be made at all.
Since man is descended from less highly endowed animals, there must
have been a time when the man-animal was in a state of animal
ignorance. He started with no more than an ape is able to know. He had
to learn everything for himself, as he had no one to teach him the
tricks that apes and children can be taught by sophisticated human
beings. He was necessarily self-taught, and began, as we have seen, in
a state of ignorance beyond anything we can readily conceive. He lived
naked and speechless in the woods, or wandered over the plains without
artificial shelter or any way of cooking his food. He subsisted on raw
fruit, berries, roots, insects, and such animals as he could strike
down or pick up dead. His mind must have corresponded with his brutish
state. He must at the first have learned just as his animal relatives
learn--by fumbling and by forming accidental associations. He had
impulses and such sagacity as he individually derived from experience,
but no heritage of knowledge accumulated by the group and transmitted
by education. This heritage had to be constructed on man's
potentialities.
Of mankind in this extremely primitive condition we have no traces.
There could indeed be no traces. All savages of the present day or of
whom we have any record represent a relatively highly developed
traditional culture, with elaborate languages, myths, and
well-established artificial customs, which it probably took hundreds
of thousands of years to accumulate. Man in "a state of nature" is
only a presupposition, but a presupposition which is forced upon us by
compelling evidence, conjectural and inferential though it is.
On a geological time scale we are still close to savagery, and it is
inevitable that the ideas and customs and sentiments of savagery
should have become so ingrained that they may have actually affected
man's nature by natural selection through the survival of those who
most completely adjusted themselves to the uncritical culture which
prevailed. But in any case it is certain, as many anthropologists have
pointed out, that customs, savage ideas, and primitive sentiments have
continued to form an important part of our own culture down even to
the present day. We are met thus with the necessity of reckoning with
this inveterate element in our present thought and customs. Much of
the data that we have regarding primitive man has been accumulated in
recent times, for the most part as a result of the study of simple
peoples. These differ greatly in their habits and myths, but some
salient common traits emerge which cast light on the spontaneous
workings of the human mind when unaffected by the sophistications of a
highly elaborate civilization.
At the start man had to distinguish himself from the group to which he
belonged and say, "I am I." This is not an idea given by nature.[16]
There are evidences that the earlier religious notions were not based
on individuality, but rather on the "virtue" which objects had--that
is, their potency to do things. Only later did the animistic belief in
the personalities of men, animals, and the forces of nature appear.
When man discovered his own individuality he spontaneously ascribed
the same type of individuality and purpose to animals and plants, to
the wind and the thunder.
This exhibits one of the most noxious tendencies of the mind--namely,
personification. It is one of the most virulent enemies of clear
thinking. We speak of the Spirit of the Reformation or the Spirit of
Revolt or the Spirit of Disorder and Anarchy. The papers tell us that,
"Berlin says", "London says", "Uncle Sam so decides", "John Bull is
disgruntled". Now, whether or no there are such things as spirits,
Berlin and London have no souls, and Uncle Sam is as mythical as the
great god Pan. Sometimes this regression to the savage is harmless,
but when a newspaper states that "Germany is as militaristic as ever",
on the ground that some insolent Prussian lieutenant says that German
armies will occupy Paris within five years, we have an example of
animism which in a society farther removed from savagery than ours
might be deemed a high crime and misdemeanor. Chemists and physicians
have given up talking of spirits, but in discussing social and
economic questions we are still victimized by the primitive animistic
tendencies of the mind.
The dream has had a great influence in the building up of the mind.
Our ideas, especially our religious beliefs, would have had quite
another history had men been dreamless. For it was not merely his
shadow and his reflection in the water that led man to imagine souls
and doubles, but pre-eminently the visions of the night. As his body
lay quiet in sleep he found himself wandering in distant places.
Sometimes he was visited by the dead. So it was clear that the body
had an inhabitant who was not necessarily bound to it, who could
desert it from time to time during life, and who continued to exist
and interest itself in human affairs after death.
Whole civilizations and religions and vast theological speculations
have been dominated by this savage inference. It is true that in very
recent times, since Plato, let us say, other reasons have been urged
for believing in the soul and its immortality, but the idea appears to
have got its firm footing in savage logic. It is a primitive inference,
however it may later have been revised, rationalized, and ennobled.
The taboo--the forbidden thing--of savage life is another thing very
elementary in man's make-up. He had tendencies to fall into habits and
establish inhibitions for reasons that he either did not discover or
easily forgot. These became fixed and sacred to him and any departure
from them filled him with dread. Sometimes the prohibition might have
some reasonable justification, sometimes it might seem wholly absurd
and even a great nuisance, but that made no difference in its binding
force. For example, pork was taboo among the ancient Hebrews--no one
can say why, but none of the modern justifications for abstaining from
that particular kind of meat would have counted in early Jewish times.
It is not improbable that it was the original veneration for the boar
and not an abhorrence of him that led to the prohibition.
The modern "principle" is too often only a new form of the ancient
taboo, rather than an enlightened rule of conduct. The person who
justifies himself by saying that he holds certain beliefs, or acts in
a certain manner "on principle", and yet refuses to examine the basis
and expediency of his principle, introduces into his thinking and
conduct an irrational, mystical element similar to that which
characterized savage prohibitions. Principles unintelligently urged
make a great deal of trouble in the free consideration of social
readjustment, for they are frequently as recalcitrant and obscurantist
as the primitive taboo, and are really scarcely more than an excuse
for refusing to reconsider one's convictions and conduct. The
psychological conditions lying back of both taboo and this sort of
principle are essentially the same.
We find in savage thought a sort of intensified and generalized taboo
in the classification of things as clean and unclean and in the
conceptions of the sacred. These are really expressions of profound
and persistent traits in the uncritical mind and can only be overcome
by carefully cultivated criticism. They are the result of our natural
timidity and the constant dread lest we find ourselves treading on
holy (_i. e._, dangerous) ground.[17] When they are intrenched in the
mind we cannot expect to think freely and fairly, for they effectually
stop argument. If a thing is held to be sacred it is the center of
what may be called a defense complex, and a reasonable consideration
of the merits of the case will not be tolerated. When an issue is
declared to be a "moral" one--for example, the prohibition of strong
drink--an emotional state is implied which makes reasonable compromise
and adjustment impossible; for "moral" is a word on somewhat the same
plane as "sacred", and has much the same qualities and similar effects
on thinking. In dealing with the relations of the sexes the terms
"pure" and "impure" introduce mystic and irrational moods alien to
clear analysis and reasonable readjustments. Those who have studied
the characteristics of savage life are always struck by its deadly
conservatism, its needless restraints on the freedom of the
individual, and its hopeless routine. Man, like plants and animals in
general, tends to go on from generation to generation, living as
nearly as may be the life of his forbears. Changes have to be forced
upon him by hard experience, and he is ever prone to find excuses for
slipping back into older habits, for these are likely to be simpler,
less critical, more spontaneous--more closely akin, in short, to his
animal and primitive promptings. One who prides himself to-day on his
conservatism, on the ground that man is naturally an anarchic and
disorderly creature who is held in check by the far-seeing Tory, is
almost exactly reversing the truth. Mankind is conservative by nature
and readily generates restraints on himself and obstacles to change
which have served to keep him in a state of savagery during almost his
whole existence on the earth, and which still perpetuate all sorts of
primitive barbarism in modern society. The conservative "on principle"
is therefore a most unmistakably primitive person in his attitude. His
only advance beyond the savage mood lies in the specious reasons he is
able to advance for remaining of the same mind. What we vaguely call a
"radical" is a very recent product due to altogether exceptional and
unprecedented circumstances.
NOTES.
[10] It is impossible to discuss here the results which a really
honest study of child psychology promises. The relations of the child
to his parents and elders in general and to the highly artificial
system of censorship and restraints which they impose in their own
interests on his natural impulses must surely have a permanent
influence on the notions he continues to have as an adult in regard to
his "superiors" and the institutions and _mores_ under which he is
called to live. Attempts in later life to gain intellectual freedom
can only be successful if one comes to think of the childish origin of
a great part of his "real" reasons.
[11] Clarence Day in _Our Simian World_ discusses with delightful
humor the effects of our underlying simian temperament on the conduct
of life.
[12] The word "imitation" is commonly used very loosely. The real
question is does an animal, or even man himself, tend to make
movements or sounds made by their fellow-creatures in their presence
It seems to be made out now that even monkeys are not imitative in
that sense and that man himself has no general inclination to do over
what he sees being done. Pray, if you doubt this, note how many things
you see others doing that you have no inclination to imitate! For an
admirable summary see Thorndike, E. L., _The Original Nature of Man_,
1913, pp. 108 ff.
[13] "If the earth were struck by one of Mr. Wells's comets, and if,
in consequence, every human being now alive were to lose all the
knowledge and habits which he had acquired from preceding generations
(though retaining unchanged all his own powers of invention and memory
and habituation) nine tenths of the inhabitants of London or New York
would be dead in a month, and 99 per cent of the remaining tenth would
be dead in six months. They would have no language to express their
thoughts, and no thoughts but vague reverie. They could not read
notices, or drive motors or horses. They would wander about, led by
the inarticulate cries of a few naturally dominant individuals,
drowning themselves, as thirst came on, in hundreds at the riverside
landing places, looting those shops where the smell of decaying food
attracted them, and perhaps at the end stumbling on the expedient of
cannibalism. Even in the country districts men could not invent, in
time to preserve their lives, methods of growing food, or taming
animals, or making fire, or so clothing themselves as to endure a
Northern winter."--GRAHAM WALLAS, _Our Social Heritage_, p. 16. Only
the very lowest of savages might possibly pull through if culture
should disappear.
[14] "A Theory of History", Political Science Quarterly, December,
1920. He attributes history to the adventurers.
[15] Count Korzybski in his _Manhood of Humanity_ is so impressed by
the uniqueness and undreamed possibilities of human civilization and
man's "time-binding" capacity that he declares that it is a gross and
misleading error to regard man as an animal at all. Yet he is forced
sadly to confess that man continues all too often to operate on an
animal or "space-binding" plan of life. His aim and outlook are,
however, essentially the same as those of the present writer. His
method of approach will appeal especially to those who are wont to
deal with affairs in the spirit of the mathematician and engineer. He
is quite right in thinking that man has hitherto had little conception
of his peculiar prerogatives and unlimited opportunities for
betterment.
[16] In the beginning, too, man did not know how children came about,
for it was not easy to connect a common impulsive act with the event
of birth so far removed in time. The tales told to children still are
reminiscences of the mythical explanations which our savage ancestors
advanced to explain the arrival of the infant. Consequently, all
popular theories of the origin of marriage and the family based on the
assumption of conscious paternity are outlawed.
[17] Lucretius warns the reader not to be deterred from considering
the evils wrought by religion by the fear of treading on "the unholy
grounds of reason and in the path of sin".--_De Rer. Nat_. i, 80 ff.
* * * * *
IV
Thereupon one of the Egyptian priests, who was of a very great
age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children, and
there was never an old man who was a Hellene. Solon in return
asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind
you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you
by ancient tradition; nor any science which is hoary with age.
--PLATO'S _Timaeus_, 22 (Jowett's translation).
The truth is that we are far more likely to underrate the originality
of the Greeks than to exaggerate it, and we do not always remember the
very short time they took to lay down the lines scientific inquiry has
followed ever since.--JOHN BURNET.
8. BEGINNING OF CRITICAL THINKING
The Egyptians were the first people, so far as we know, who invented a
highly artificial method of writing, about five thousand years ago,
and began to devise new arts beyond those of their barbarous
predecessors. They developed painting and architecture, navigation,
and various ingenious industries; they worked in glass and enamels and
began the use of copper, and so introduced metal into human affairs.
But in spite of their extraordinary advance in practical,
matter-of-fact knowledge they remained very primitive in their
beliefs. The same may be said of the peoples of Mesopotamia and of the
western Asiatic nations in general--just as in our own day the
practical arts have got a long start compared with the revision of
beliefs in regard to man and the gods. The peculiar opinions of the
Egyptians do not enter directly into our intellectual heritage, but
some of the fundamental religious ideas which developed in western
Asia have, through the veneration for the Hebrew Scriptures, become
part and parcel of our ways of thinking. To the Greeks, however, we
are intellectually under heavy obligation. The literature of the
Greeks, in such fragments as escaped destruction, was destined, along
with the Hebrew Scriptures, to exercise an incalculable influence in
the formation of our modern civilized minds. These two dominating
literary heritages originated about the same time--day before
yesterday--viewed in the perspective of our race's history. Previous
to the Greek civilization books had played no great part in the
development, dissemination, and transmission of culture from
generation to generation. Now they were to become a cardinal force in
advancing and retarding the mind's expansion.
It required about a thousand years for the Greek shepherds from the
pastures of the Danube to assimilate the culture of the highly
civilized regions in which they first appeared as barbarian
destroyers. They accepted the industrial arts of the eastern
Mediterranean, adopted the Phoenician alphabet, and emulated the
Phoenician merchant. By the seventh century before our era they had
towns, colonies, and commerce, with much stimulating running hither
and thither. We get our first traces of new intellectual enterprise in
the Ionian cities, especially Miletus, and in the Italian colonies of
the Greeks. Only later did Athens become the unrivaled center in a
marvelous outflowering of the human intelligence.
It is a delicate task to summarize what we owe to the Greeks. Leaving
aside their supreme achievements in literature and art, we can
consider only very briefly the general scope and nature of their
thinking as it relates most closely to our theme.
The chief strength of the Greeks lay in their freedom from hampering
intellectual tradition. They had no venerated classics, no holy books,
no dead languages to master, no authorities to check their free
speculation. As Lord Bacon reminds us, they had no antiquity of
knowledge and no knowledge of antiquity. A modern classicist would
have been a forlorn outlander in ancient Athens, with no books in a
forgotten tongue, no obsolete inflections to impose upon reluctant
youth. He would have had to use the everyday speech of the
sandal-maker and fuller.
For a long time no technical words were invented to give aloofness and
seeming precision to philosophic and scientific discussion. Aristotle
was the first to use words incomprehensible to the average citizen. It
was in these conditions that the possibilities of human criticism
first showed themselves. The primitive notions of man, of the gods,
and of the workings of natural forces began to be overhauled on an
entirely new scale. Intelligence developed rapidly as exceptionally
bold individuals came to have their suspicions of simple, spontaneous,
and ancient ways of looking at things. Ultimately there came men who
professed to doubt everything.
As Abelard long after put it, "By doubting we come to question, and by
seeking we may come upon the truth." But man is by nature credulous.
He is victimized by first impressions, from which he can only escape
with great difficulty. He resents criticism of accepted and familiar
ideas as he resents any unwelcome disturbance of routine. So criticism
is against nature, for it conflicts with the smooth workings of our
more primitive minds, those of the child and the savage.
It should not be forgotten that the Greek people were no exception in
this matter. Anaxagoras and Aristotle were banished for thinking as
they did; Euripides was an object of abhorrence to the conservative of
his day, and Socrates was actually executed for his godless teachings.
The Greek thinkers furnish the first instance of intellectual freedom,
of the "self-detachment and self-abnegating vigor of criticism" which
is most touchingly illustrated in the honest "know-nothingism" of
Socrates. _They discovered skepticism in the higher and proper
significance of the word, and this was their supreme contribution to
human thought_.
One of the finest examples of early Greek skepticism was the discovery
of Xenophanes that man created the gods in his own image. He looked
about him, observed the current conceptions of the gods, compared
those of different peoples, and reached the conclusion that the way in
which a tribe pictured its gods was not the outcome of any knowledge
of how they really looked and whether they had black eyes or blue, but
was a reflection of the familiarly human. If the lions had gods they
would have the shape of their worshipers.
No more fundamentally shocking revelation was ever made than this, for
it shook the very foundations of religious belief. The home life on
Olympus as described in Homer was too scandalous to escape the
attention of the thoughtful, and no later Christian could have
denounced the demoralizing influence of the current religious beliefs
in hotter indignation than did Plato. To judge from the reflection of
Greek thought which we find in Lucretius and Cicero, none of the
primitive religious beliefs escaped mordant criticism.