The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

Whilst, therefore, we devote our energies chiefly to progress, and fix our attention upon the present and future of war, it cannot fail to interest those who are actively engaged in the duties of their profession, if we occasionally take a glance backward and see what recent discoveries have done towards elucidating its origin and early history.

It might, perhaps, assist a right understanding of the principles on which the weapons and implements of savages deserve to be studied, if I were to notice some of those great questions respecting the origin of our species, and man’s place in nature, which the investigations of science have been the means of raising in our day. I need hardly say that the rude implements, which I am about to describe, are of little practical interest in themselves, as models for instruction or imitation. We have no need of bows and arrows in the existing state of war, and if we did require them, the appliances of modern times would enable us to construct them in far greater perfection than could be acquired by any lessons from savages. These weapons are valuable only, in the absence of other evidence, from the light they throw on prehistoric times, and on those great questions to which I have alluded, and from their enabling us to trace out the origin of many of those customs which have been handed down to us by past generations.

As, however, the discussion of these interesting subjects would lead me into matters that are hardly suited to the Lecture-room of this Institution, I must pass over the consideration of them with a few brief remarks.

In so doing, I may appear to postulate some opinions upon points that are still the subject of animated controversy in the scientific world. But it would require a far broader field of investigation than is here afforded me, in order to treat these inquiries successfully, and to adduce all the evidence that would be necessary to support the hypotheses put forward; and I am anxious to devote no greater space to these preliminary remarks than is necessary to point out some of the main features of interest that are involved in the particular study which forms the subject of my lecture.

We are apt to speak of the creation of the universe as a thing of the past, and to suppose that the world, with all the varied life upon it, previous to man’s appearance, having been created for his especial happiness and supremacy, was afterwards left to his control and government. But this view of the subject belongs to an age in which the laws of nature in their all-sufficiency and completeness were but little studied and appreciated. Modern science finds no evidence of any such abandonment of the universe to man’s jurisdiction. The more comprehensively the subject is viewed, the more restricted appear to be those limits over which the free will of mankind is permitted to range, and the more evident it becomes, that in his social advancement, his laws, arts, and wars, he moves on under the influence and development of those same laws which have been in force from the very first dawn of creation. The lower the archaeologist searches in the crust of the earth for the relics of human art, the more faint become the traces of that broad gulf, which in our times appears to separate man from the brute creation. In all the numerous and varied offsprings of the human intellect, in the arts, and even in speech, the more we investigate and trace them back, the more clearly they appear to point to a condition of the human race in which they had no existence whatever. The great law of nature, ‘natura non facit saltum,’ was not broken by the introduction of man upon the earth. He appears to have been produced in the fullness of time, as the work of creation required a more perfect tool, and to have ameliorated his condition, only as the work to be performed became more complicated and varied, just as in the hands of man, the rougher tool is employed for felling, and the finer tool for finishing and polishing.

By this view we come to look upon even the most barbarous state of man’s existence, as a condition, not so much of degradation, as of arrested or retarded progress, and to see that, notwithstanding many halts and relapses, and a very varied rate of movement in the different races, the march of the human intellect has been always onward.

As, in the lower creation, we find no individuals that are capable of self-improvement, though some appear, by their imitative faculties, to contain within them the germs of an improving element, so the aboriginal man, closely resembling the brutes, may have passed through many generations before he began to show even the first symptoms of mental cultivation, or the rudiments of the simplest arts; and even then his progress may have been, at first, so slow, that it is not without an effort of imagination that the civilized races of our day can realize, by means of the implements which he has left us, the minute gradations which appear to mark the stages of his advancement. This appears to be the view taken by Sir Charles Lyell in his Antiquity of Man, when, in comparing the flint implements found in the higher and lower-level gravels of the valley of the Somme, he arrives at the conclusion ‘that the state of the arts in those early times remained stationary for almost indefinite periods’. ‘We see,’ he says, ‘in our own time, that the rate of progress in the arts and sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as knowledge increases, and so, when we carry back our retrospect into the past, we must be prepared to find the signs of retardation augmenting in a like geometrical ratio; so that the progress of a thousand years at a remote period, may correspond to that of a century in modern times, and in ages still more remote man would more and more resemble the brutes in that attribute which causes one generation exactly to imitate, in all its ways, the generation which preceded it’ (4th ed. 1873, p. 421).

In order to understand the relationship which the savage tribes of our own time bear to the races of antiquity, it is necessary to keep in view that, neither in historic nor prehistoric times is there any evidence that civilization has been equally or universally distributed; on the contrary, it appears always to have been partial, and confined to particular races, whose function it has been, by means of war and conquest, to spread the arts amongst surrounding nations, or to exterminate those whose low state of mental culture rendered them incapable of receiving it.