The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

But of the particular molecular changes or other processes which accompany the evolution of ideas in the mind, we know no more than we do of the particular molecular changes and other processes which accompany the evolution of life in nature, or the changes in chemistry.

If then we are to understand the expression ‘the work of God’ as implying the direct action of ultimate causes, it is evident that we are not in a position either to affirm or to deny or to make any statement whatever respecting such ultimate causes, which may operate either as directly or as indirectly in the one case as the other. We know nothing about them, and therefore to invoke ultimate causes as a reason for distinguishing between the sciences is to take up a position which cannot be scientifically maintained.

With equal if not greater truth we may combat the assertion that the science of culture is historical, whilst nature, on the other hand, as dealt with by the physical sciences, is incapable of progress. However valid this objection might have appeared during the empirical and comparative stages of the physical sciences, it cannot be maintained, since the researches of Darwin and others have fairly landed them in their evolutionary phase. The principles of variation and natural selection have established a bond of union between the physical and culture sciences which can never be broken. History is but another term for evolution. There are histories and histories, as any one may determine who has read Green’s Short History of the English People, and compared it with the kind of matter which passed for history in his school days. But our position with regard to culture has always been one which has forced on our comprehension the reality of progress, whilst with respect to the slow progress of external nature, it has been concealed from us, owing to the brief span of human existence and our imperfect records of the past. The distinction, therefore, between the sciences, as historical and non-historical, is but a subjective delusion, and not an objective reality; and herein, I believe, lies the secret of most of those errors that we have to contend with.

But the point in which I venture more particularly to differ from the conclusions of the learned author of the Science of Language is the line which he has drawn between language and the other branches of culture by including language amongst the physical sciences whilst he excludes the rest. ‘If language,’ he says, ‘be the work of man in the same sense in which a statue, a temple, a poem, or a law, are properly called works of man, the science of language would have to be classed as an historic science’; and again he says, ‘It is the object of these lectures to prove that language is not a work of human art in the same sense as painting, or building, or writing, or printing.’

In dealing with this question it is material, as regards the relative claims of language and the arts to be studied as physical sciences, to distinguish between the general and the particular. If it is said that language as a whole is not a work of human design, the same may with equal truth be said of the arts as a whole. A man who constructs a building, a tool, or a weapon, can no more be said to have devised a scheme of arts, than the introducer of a new word can be said to have invented a language; but each particular word bears the impress of human design as clearly as a weapon or a coin. A word may be said to be a tool for the communication of thought, just as a weapon is an implement of war.

But, says Professor Müller, ‘art, science, philosophy, religion, all 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.