Hephæstus

by E. E. Fournier d'Albe

It has taken mankind ten thousand years to emerge from savagery into barbarism, and from barbarism into civilization. Nor is the process yet completed. The mass of mankind is still grossly ignorant. But the leaven of knowledge is steadily working and pervading the mass, and the rate of progress is constantly rising.

Let us trace this wonderful process of civilization to its origins and probe its essential nature.

Starting somewhere in the tropics as a diminutive “sport” allied to the arboreal ape, man learned to use tools and weapons. This was the first step taken towards the conquest of the animal world, his natural enemies.

We do not know how many ages elapsed before the rough stone hammer evolved into the axe of polished flint. In any case, the rough stone, even if only used for throwing at his enemy or killing his prey, was an essentially new departure in evolution, and sounded the keynote to all that followed down to our own times.

Tools and weapons had been evolved by other animals, but they were always organically connected with their bodies. The tiger’s claws and teeth, the tusks of the elephant and the wild boar, the beak of the eagle were all formidable weapons and useful tools, but they could neither be detached, nor replaced, nor exchanged for other tools more suitable to the occasion. Those “natural” tools and weapons had all been produced by “evolution,” in other words, by a mysterious agency which some call God, some Adaptation, and some the Urge of Life.

Who was that audacious man who first took upon himself the divine privilege of making tools and weapons for himself, instead of waiting for “nature” to provide them for him?

Perhaps he was a puny boy, lame from birth and unable to escape from the boar who was pursuing him. In the extremity of his terror he took up a heavy stone from the ground and flung it at the boar with all his might. The boar, we may well imagine, was dazed and probably terrified by this unusual method of defence, and slunk away from his feeble but resourceful antagonist. The story of that deliverance may, for all we know, have been sung for many generations in the tribe, and who knows but that the boy grew up into a great red-haired man, as great an adept at stone-throwing as the street-urchins in Belfast, and formed the prototype of the God Thor, whose hammer, when thrown, returned to his hand of its own accord.

But the essential step was taken. The lad had no teeth or claws which could match the solid tusks wielded by his mighty antagonist. So he “invented” a new weapon. He did not grow it in his own organism, as the squid grows its ink, to be used on one occasion and then gradually renewed. He took a piece of the outside world and made it temporarily a part of his person, a part which could be detached and resumed at a moment’s notice, a temporary attachment or extension of his body which required no blood-vessels to keep it in repair and which, if broken or injured, would inflict no pain upon himself.

This great innovation may have been aided by some analogies in the animal world. A bird had to collect twigs and leaves in order to build a nest, and had thus to put a portion of the “outside world” to its own uses. Besides, the very process of eating involved the apprehension of outside objects, an apprehension which, in the case of the lowest form of animal life, is to this day accomplished by pouring its jelly-like body round the object to be consumed.

But the next invention, the discovery of the use of fire, was a departure without a parallel to anything in the kingdoms of Nature. It placed mankind by a single act in a position of god-like authority over the living world. It is not surprising that the discovery of fire is surrounded by countless legends. In Greek mythology the first use of fire is attributed to Prometheus, the Fore-Thinker, the man who thinks ahead. He stole it from the heavens, and was punished by Zeus with terrible torment for having dared to endow mankind with a divine privilege.