Thus did the poet prophesy one of the most fruitful achievements of modern science: the discovery of that series of epochs which has been so carefully studied in our century.
Very striking, also, is the statement of Horace, though his idea is evidently derived from Lucretius. He dwells upon man's first condition on earth as low and bestial, and pictures him lurking in caves, progressing from the use of his fists and nails, first to clubs, then to arms which he had learned to forge, and, finally, to the invention of the names of things, to literature, and to laws.(189)
(189) For the passage in Hesiod, as given, see the Works and Days, lines
109-120, in Banks's translation. As to Horace, see the Satires, i, 3,
99. As to the relation of the poetic account of the Fall in Genesis to
Chaldean myths, see Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, pp. 13, 17. For
a very instructive separation of the Jehovistic and Elohistic parts
of Genesis, with the account of the "Fall" as given in the former, see
Lenormant, La Genese, Paris, 1883, pp. 166-168; also Bacon, Genesis of
Genesis. Of the lines of Lucretius—
"Arma antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt, Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami, Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta, Sed prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus"—-
the translation is that of Good. For a more exact prose translation, see Munro's Lucretius, fourth edition, which is much more careful, at least in the proof-reading, than the first edition. As regards Lucretius's propheitc insight into some of the greatest conclusions of modern science, see Munro's translation and notes, fourth edition, book v, notes ii, p. 335. On the relation of several passages in Horace to the ideas of Lucretius, see Munro as above. For the passage from Luther, see the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, p. 242.
During the mediaeval ages of faith this view was almost entirely obscured, and at the Reformation it seemed likely to remain so. Typical of the simplicity of belief in "the Fall" cherished among the Reformers is Luther's declaration regarding Adam and Eve. He tells us, "they entered into the garden about noon, and having a desire to eat, she took the apple; then came the fall—according to our account at about two o'clock." But in the revival of learning the old eclipsed truth reappeared, and in the first part of the seventeenth century we find that, among the crimes for which Vanini was sentenced at Toulouse to have his tongue torn out and to be burned alive, was his belief that there is a gradation extending upward from the lowest to the highest form of created beings.
Yet, in the same century, the writings of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal were evidently undermining the old idea of "the Fall." Bodin especially, brilliant as were his services to orthodoxy, argued lucidly against the doctrine of general human deterioration.
Early in the eighteenth century Vico presented the philosophy of history as an upward movement of man out of animalism and barbarism. This idea took firm hold upon human thought, and in the following centuries such men as Lessing and Turgot gave new force to it.
The investigations of the last forty years have shown that Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets: what they saw by the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius, has been now thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained and arranged—until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern archaeologists, have brought these prophecies to evident fulfilment, by presenting a scientific classification dividing the age of prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an old stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten copper, a period of bronze, and a period of iron, and arraying vast masses of facts from all parts of the world, fitting thoroughly into each other, strengthening each other, and showing beyond a doubt that, instead of a FALL, there has been a RISE of man, from the earliest indications in the Quaternary, or even, possibly, in the Tertiary period.(190)
(190) For Vanini, see Topinard, Elements of Anthropologie, p. 52. For a
brief and careful summary of the agency of Eccard in Germany, Goguet
in France, Hoare in England, and others in various parts of Europe, as
regards this development of the scientific view during the eighteenth
century, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, chap. i. For the
agency of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal, see Flint, Philosophy
of History, introduction, pp. 28 et seq. For a shorter summary,
see Lubbock, Prehistoric Man. For the statements by the northern
archaeologists, see Nilsson, Worsaae, and the other main works cited in
this article. For a generous statement regarding the great services of
the Danish archaeologists in this field, see Quatrefages, introduction
to Cartailhac, Les Ages Prehistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal.