The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

The truth of this is seen in the immense number of dialects and languages employed by savages at the present time. Thus amongst the one hundred islands occupied by the Melanesian race, the Bishop of Wellington tells us, and his statement is confirmed by the late lamented Bishop Patteson, that there are no less than two hundred languages, differing so much that the tribes can have but very little interchange of thought; and similar accounts are given of rapid changes of language in Cambodia, Siberia, Central Africa, North, Central, and South America.

The greater stability of the material arts as compared with the fluctuations in the language of a people in a state of primaeval savagery, is well shown by a consideration of the weapons of the Australians, and the names by which they are known in the several parts of that continent. These people, from the simplicity of their arts, afford us the only living examples of what we may presume to have been the characteristics of a primitive people. Their weapons are the same throughout the continent; the shield, the throwing-stick, the spear, the boomerang, and their other weapons differ only in being thicker, broader, flatter, or longer, in different localities; but whether seen on the east or the west coast, each of these classes of weapons is easily recognized by its form and uses. On the other hand, amongst the innumerable languages and dialects spoken by these people, it would appear that almost every tribe has a different name for the same weapon. The narrow parrying-shield, which consists of a piece of wood with a place for the hand in the centre, in South Australia goes by the name of ‘heileman’, in other parts it is known under the name of ‘mulabakka’, in Victoria it is ‘turnmung’, and on the west coast we have ‘murukanye’ and ‘tamarang’ for the same implement very slightly modified in size and form. Referring to the comparative table of Australian languages compiled by the Rev. George Taplin, in the first number of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (i, 1872, pp. 84-8), we find the throwing-stick, which on the Murray River is known by the name of ‘yova’, on the Lower Darling is ‘yarrum’, in New South Wales it is ‘wommurrur’, in Victoria ‘karrick’, on Lake Alexandrina ‘taralye’, amongst the Adelaide tribes of South Australia it is ‘midla’, in other parts of South Australia it is called ‘ngeweangko’, and in King George’s Sound ‘miro’.

From these considerations we arrive at the conclusion that in the earliest stages of culture the arts are far more stable than language: whilst the arts are subject only, or chiefly, to those changes which result from growth, language, in addition to those which result from growth, is also affected by changes arising from phonetic decay.

The importance therefore of studying the grammar, so to speak, of the arts becomes apparent, as it is by this means alone that we can trace out the origin and evolution of culture in the earliest times.

The task before us is to follow by means of them the succession of ideas by which the mind of man has developed, from the simple to the complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous; to work out step by step, by the use of such symbols as the arts afford, that law of contiguity by which the mind has passed from simple cohesion of states of consciousness to the association of ideas, and so on to broader generalizations.

This development has to be considered under the two heads of culture and constitution, that is to say, that we have to consider not only the succession of ideas in the mind resulting from experience, but also the development by inheritance of the internal organism of the mind itself, or, to use the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, ‘In the progress of life at large, as in the progress of the individual, the adjustment of inner tendencies to outer persistencies must begin with the simple and advance to the complex, seeing that, both within and without, complex relations, being made up of simple ones, cannot be established before simple ones have been established’ (Princ. of Psych., i³, p. 426).

We find no difficulty in assenting to the general proposition that culture has been a work of progress. Our difficulty lies in realizing the slow stages of its early development, owing to the complexities both of our mental constitution and of the contemporaneous culture from which experience is drawn, or, again to use Mr. Spencer’s more expressive words, of our ‘inner tendencies’, and ‘outer persistencies’; we are apt to regard as intuitive, if not congenital, many simple ideas which in early culture can only have been worked out through the exercise of experience and reason during a long course of ages.

We see this error of our own minds constantly displayed in the education of children. The ideas in a child’s mind, like those of mankind at large, are necessarily built up in sequence. The instructor makes use of some word, the meaning of which is clearly understood by him, but which does not fall into the sequence of the child’s reasoning; the conception associated with it in the child’s mind must, however, necessarily conform to such sequence. Hence a confusion of ideas, which is often attributed to the stupidity of the child, but which is in reality due to the inexperience of the instructor; as, for instance, in the case exemplified by Pip, in Dickens’ Great Expectations, who, having imbibed the precept that he was to ‘walk in the same all the days of his life’, was led by his sequence of ideas to infer therefrom that he was invariably to walk to school by the same path, and on no account go round by the pastrycook’s.

And so in studying savages and early races whose mental development corresponds in some degree to that of children, we have to guard against this automorphism, as Mr. Spencer terms it; that is to say, the tendency to estimate the capacity of others by our own, which appears almost completely to incapacitate some people from dealing with the subject.

The question of the free will of man enters largely into this study. I shall not be expected to say much upon a subject which has so lately occupied the attention of the public, having been discussed by some of our ablest scientists; but I cannot avoid quoting, in reference to this point, a passage from Dr. Carpenter’s Mental Physiology, who in this controversy is certainly entitled to be regarded as the champion of free will; and therefore by quoting him we run no risk of overstating the case against free will. ‘Our mental activity,’ he says (p. 25), is ‘entirely spontaneous or automatic, being determined by our congenital nervous organism.... It may be stated as a fundamental principle that the will can never originate any form of mental activity....’ But it has the power, he continues, of selecting any one out of several objects that present themselves either simultaneously or successively before the mental vision, and of so limiting and intensifying the impression which that particular object makes upon the consciousness, that all others shall be for the time non-existent to it.