Bib. Sac., 6:715; 29:282—“Man as a moral being does not tend to rise but to fall, and that with a geometric progress, except he be elevated and sustained by some force from without and above himself. While man once civilized may advance, yet moral ideas are apparently never developed from within.” Had savagery been man's primitive condition, he never could have emerged. See Whately, Origin of Civilization, who maintains that man needed not only a divine Creator, but a divine Instructor. Seelye, Introd. to A Century of Dishonor, 3—“The first missionaries to the Indians in Canada took with them skilled laborers to teach the savages how to till their fields, to provide them with comfortable homes, clothing, and food. But the Indians preferred their wigwams, skins, raw flesh, and filth. Only as Christian influences taught the Indian his inner need, and how this was to be supplied, was he led to wish and work for the improvement of his outward condition and habits. Civilization does not reproduce itself. It must first be kindled, and it can then be kept alive only by a power genuinely Christian.” So Wallace, in Nature, Sept. 7, 1876, vol. 14:408-412.
Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 149-168, shows that evolution does not necessarily involve development as regards particular races. There is degeneration in all the organic orders. As regards man, he may be evolving in some directions, while in others he has degenerated. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 245, speaks of “Prof. Clifford as pointing to the history of human progress and declaring that mankind is a risen and not a fallen race. There is no real contradiction between these two views. God has not let man go because man has rebelled against him. Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The humanity which was created in Christ and which is upheld by his power has ever received reinforcements of its physical and mental life, in spite of its moral and spiritual deterioration. “Some shrimps, by the adjustment of their bodily parts, go onward to the higher structure of the lobsters and crabs; while others, taking up the habit of dwelling in the gills of fishes, sink downward into a state closely resembling that of the worms.” Drummond, Ascent of Man: “When a boy's kite comes down in our garden, we do not hold that it originally came from the clouds. So nations went up, before they came down. There is a national gravitation. The stick age preceded the stone age, but has been lost.” Tennyson: “Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.” Evolution often becomes devolution, if not [pg 529]devilution. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 104—“The Jordan is the fitting symbol of our natural life, rising in a lofty elevation, and from pure springs, but plunging steadily down till it pours itself into that Dead Sea from which there is no outlet.”
(b) Later investigations have rendered it probable that the stone age of some localities was contemporaneous with the bronze and iron ages of others, while certain tribes and nations, instead of making progress from one to the other, were never, so far back as we can trace them, without the knowledge and use of the metals. It is to be observed, moreover, that even without such knowledge and use man is not necessarily a barbarian, though he may be a child.
On the question whether the arts of civilization can be lost, see Arthur Mitchell, Past in the Present, 219: Rude art is often the debasement of a higher, instead of being the earlier; the rudest art in a nation may coëxist with the highest; cave-life may accompany high civilization. Illustrations from modern Scotland, where burial of a cock for epilepsy, and sacrifice of a bull, were until very recently extant. Certain arts have unquestionably been lost, as glass-making and iron-working in Assyria (see Mivart, referred to above). The most ancient men do not appear to have been inferior to the latest, either physically or intellectually. Rawlinson: “The explorers who have dug deep into the Mesopotamian mounds, and have ransacked the tombs of Egypt, have come upon no certain traces of savage man in those regions which a wide-spread tradition makes the cradle of the human race.” The Tyrolese peasants show that a rude people may be moral, and a very simple people may be highly intelligent. See Southall, Recent Origin of Man, 386-449; Schliemann, Troy and her Remains, 274.
Mason, Origins of Invention, 110, 124, 128—“There is no evidence that a stone age ever existed in some regions. In Africa, Canada, and perhaps Michigan, the metal age was as old as the stone age.” An illustration of the mathematical powers of the savage is given by Rev. A. E. Hunt in an account of the native arithmetic of Murray Islands, Torres Straits. “Netat” (one) and “neis” (two) are the only numerals, higher numbers being described by combinations of these, as “neis-netat” for three, “neis-i-neis”for four, etc., or by reference to one of the fingers, elbows or other parts of the body. A total of thirty-one could be counted by the latter method. Beyond this all numbers were “many,” as this was the limit reached in counting before the introduction of English numerals, now in general use in the islands.
Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 171—“It is commonly supposed that the direction of the movement [in the variation of species] is ever upward. The fact is on the contrary that in a large number of cases, perhaps in the aggregate in more than half, the change gives rise to a form which, by all the canons by which we determine relative rank, is to be regarded as regressive or degradational.... Species, genera, families, and orders have all, like the individuals of which they are composed, a period of decay in which the gain won by infinite toil and pains is altogether lost in the old age of the group.” Shaler goes on to say that in the matter of variation successes are to failures as 1 to 100,000, and if man be counted the solitary distinguished success, then the proportion is something like 1 to 100,000,000. No species that passes away is ever reinstated. If man were now to disappear, there is no reason to believe that by any process of change a similar creature would be evolved, however long the animal kingdom continued to exist. The use of these successive chances to produce man is inexplicable except upon the hypothesis of an infinite designing Wisdom.
(c) The barbarous customs to which this view looks for support may better be explained as marks of broken-down civilization than as relics of a primitive and universal savagery. Even if they indicated a former state of barbarism, that state might have been itself preceded by a condition of comparative culture.
Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev. Sept., 1882:194—“There is no cruel treatment of females among animals. If man came from the lower animals, then he cannot have been originally savage; for you find the most of this cruel treatment among savages.”Tylor instances “street Arabs.” He compares street Arabs to a ruined house, but [pg 530]savage tribes to a builder's yard. See Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 129, 133; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 223; McLennan, Studies in Ancient History. Gulick, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:517—“Cannibalism and infanticide are unknown among the anthropoid apes. These must be the results of degradation. Pirates and slavetraders are not men of low and abortive intelligence, but men of education who deliberately throw off all restraint, and who use their powers for the destruction of society.”
Keane, Man, Past and Present, 40, quotes Sir H. H. Johnston, an administrator who has had a wider experience of the natives of Africa than any man living, as saying that “the tendency of the negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde one—return toward the savage and even the brute. If he had been cut off from the immigration of the Arab and the European, the purely Negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing towards a higher type of humanity, might have actually reverted by degrees to a type no longer human.” Ratzel's History of Mankind: “We assign no great antiquity to Polynesian civilization. In New Zealand it is a matter of only some centuries back. In newly occupied territories, the development of the population began upon a higher level and then fell off. The Maoris' decadence resulted in the rapid impoverishment of culture, and the character of the people became more savage and cruel. Captain Cook found objects of art worshiped by the descendants of those who produced them.”
Recent researches have entirely discredited L. H. Morgan's theory of an original brutal promiscuity of the human race. Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 6, note—“The theory of an original promiscuity is rendered extremely doubtful by the habits of many of the higher animals.” E. B. Tylor, in 19th Century, July, 1906—“A sort of family life, lasting for the sake of the young, beyond a single pairing season, exists among the higher manlike apes. The male gorilla keeps watch and ward over his progeny. He is the antetype of the house-father. The matriarchal system is a later device for political reasons, to bind together in peace and alliance tribes that would otherwise be hostile. But it is an artificial system introduced as a substitute for and in opposition to the natural paternal system. When the social pressure is removed, the maternalized husband emancipates himself, and paternalism begins.” Westermarck, History of Human Marriage: “Marriage and the family are thus intimately connected with one another; it is for the benefit of the young that male and female continue to live together. Marriage is therefore rooted in the family, rather than the family in marriage.... There is not a shred of genuine evidence for the notion that promiscuity ever formed a general stage in the social history of mankind. The hypothesis of promiscuity, instead of belonging to the class of hypotheses which are scientifically permissible, has no real foundation, and is essentially unscientific.” Howard, History of Matrimonial Institutions: “Marriage or pairing between one man and one woman, though the union be often transitory and the rule often violated, is the typical form of sexual union from the infancy of the human race.”