The new Nemesis is really that which I have just put far from me--namely,
that 'modern savages represent everywhere the Eocene stratum of
religion.' They _probably_ represent an _early_ stage in religion, just
as, teste. Mr. Max Muller, they represent an early stage in language 'In
savage languages we see what we can no longer expect to see even in the
most ancient Sanskrit or Hebrew. We watch the childhood of language,
with all its childish pranks.' {120c}
Now, if the tongues spoken by modern savages represent the 'childhood'
and 'childish pranks' of language, why should the beliefs of modern
savages not represent the childhood and childish pranks of religion? I
am not here averring that they do so, nor even that Mr. Max Muller is
right in _his_ remark on language. The Australian blacks have been men
as long as the Prussian nobility. Their language has had time to outgrow
'childish pranks,' but apparently it has not made use of its
opportunities, according to our critic. Does he know why?
One need not reply to the charge that anthropologists, if they are meant,
regard modern savages 'as just evolved from the earth, or the sky,' or
from monkeys (i. 197). 'Savages have a far-stretching unknown history
behind them.' 'The past of savages, I say, must have been a long past.'
{121} So, once more, the Nemesis of De Brosses fails to touch me--and,
of course, to touch more learned anthropologists.
There is yet another Nemesis--the postulate that Aryans and Semites, or
rather their ancestors, must have passed through the savage state. Dr.
Tylor writes:--'So far as history is to be our criterion, progression is
primary and degradation secondary. _Culture must be gained before it can
be lost_.' Now a person who has not gained what Dr. Tylor calls
'culture' (_not_ in Mr. Arnold's sense) is a man without tools,
instruments, or clothes. He is certainly, so far, like a savage; is very
much lower in 'culture' than any race with which we are acquainted. As a
matter of hypothesis, anyone may say that man was born 'with everything
handsome about him.' He has then to account for the savage elements in
Greek myth and rite.
For Us or Against Us?
We now hear that the worst and last penalty paid for De Brosses'
audacious comparison of savage with civilised superstitions is the
postulate that Aryan and Semitic peoples have passed through a stage of
savagery. 'However different the languages, customs and myths, the
colour and the skulls of these modern savages might be from those of
Aryan and Semitic people, the latter must once have passed through the
same stage, must once have been what the negroes of the West Coast of
Africa are to-day. This postulate has not been, and, according to its
very nature, cannot be proved. But the mischief done by acting on such
postulates is still going on, and in several cases it has come to
this--that what in historical religions, such as our own, is known to be
the most modern, the very last outcome, namely, the worship of relics or
a belief in amulets, has been represented as the first necessary step in
the evolution of all religions' (i. 197).
I really do not know who says that the prehistoric ancestors of Aryans
and Semites were once in the same stage as the 'negroes of the West Coast
of Africa are to-day.' These honest fellows are well acquainted with
coined money, with the use of firearms, and other resources of
civilisation, and have been in touch with missionaries, Miss Kingsley,
traders, and tourists. The ancestors of the Aryans and Semites enjoyed
no such advantages. Mr. Max Muller does not tell us who says that they
did. But that the ancestors of all mankind passed through a stage in
which they had to develop for themselves tools, languages, clothes, and
institutions, is assuredly the belief of anthropologists. A race without
tools, language, clothes, pottery, and social institutions, or with these
in the shape of undeveloped speech, stone knives, and 'possum or other
skins, is what we call a race of savages. Such we believe the ancestors
of mankind to have been--at any rate after the Fall.
Now when Mr. Max Muller began to write his book, he accepted this
postulate of anthropology (i. 15). When he reached i. 197 he abandoned
and denounced this postulate.