The first need of the individual organism, self-maintenance, is met in a much more perfect manner in the modern state than it was formerly. The savage is satisfied with the raw products of nature—with hunting, fishing, and the gathering of roots and fruits. Agriculture and pasturage come later. Many stages of barbarism and lower civilization must be passed before the conditions of feeding, housing, and clothing provide a secure and comfortable existence for man, and permit the addition of æsthetic and intellectual interests to the indispensable search for food.
The feeding and condition of the social body as a whole have been improved by modern civilization, just as in the case of the individual. The progress of chemistry and agriculture has enabled us to produce food in larger quantities. The ease and rapidity of transfer allow it to be distributed over the whole earth. Scientific medicine and hygiene have discovered many means of diminishing the dangers of disease and preventing its occurrence. By means of public baths, gymnasiums, popular restaurants, public gardens, etc., greater care is taken of the health of the community. The arrangement of modern houses and their heating and lighting have been immensely improved. Modern social politics strives more and more to extend these benefits of civilization to the lower classes. Philanthropic societies are busy supplying the material and spiritual wants of various classes of sufferers. It is true there is still a broad margin for the improvement of the national well-being. But, on the whole, it cannot be denied that the provision of food in the modern state is an immense advance upon that of the Middle Ages and of the barbaric period.
The great value of modern civilization and its vast progress beyond the condition of the savage is seen in no branch of physiology so conspicuously as in the wonderful process of reproduction and the maintenance of the species. In most savages and barbarians the satisfaction of their powerful sexual impulse is at the same low stage as in the ape and other mammals. The woman is merely an object of lust to the man, or even a slave without rights, bought and exchanged like all other property. Improvement is slow and gradual in the value of this property, until it reaches a high guarantee of permanency in the formal marriage. The family life proves a source of higher and finer enjoyment for both parties. The position of woman advances with civilization; her rights obtain further recognition, and in addition to sensual love the psychic relation of man and wife begins to develop. The common concern for the proper care and education of the children, which we find to an extent even in the case of many animals, leads to the further development of family life and the founding of the school. With the advent of a higher stage of civilization begins the refinement of sexual love, which finds its highest satisfaction, not in the momentary gratification of the sex-impulse, but in the spiritual relation of the sexes and their constant and intimate intercourse. The beautiful then unites with the good and the true to form a harmonious trinity. Hence love has been for thousands of years the chief source of the æsthetic uplifting of man in every respect; the arts—poetry, music, painting, and sculpture—have drawn inexhaustively from this source. However, for the individual civilized human being this higher love is of value, not only because it satisfies the natural and irresistible sex-impulse in its noblest form, but also because the mutual influence of the sexes, their complementary qualities and their common enjoyment of the highest ideal good, has a great effect upon individual character. A good and happy marriage—which is not very common to-day—ought to be regarded, both psychologically and physiologically, as one of the most important ends of life by every individual of the higher nations.
As a pure marriage is the best form of family life and the most solid foundation of the state, its high social value is at once evident. The attraction and mutual devotion of the sexes fulfils in the highest degree the ethical golden rule—the balance of egoism and altruism. As Fritz Schultze very truly says in his Comparative Psychology
We must not seek the causes of this altruism in the transcendental region of the supernatural, or in any metaphysical abstraction, but must go back to the very real and natural qualities of the organic being—and then there can be no question that the organic sex-impulse, at once physical and psychical is the first and enduring source of all love, however spiritual, and of all real ethical and sympathetic feelings and the morality founded thereon. There are two primitive instincts in all organisms: that of self-maintenance and that of the maintenance of the species. The one is the strong impulse of egoism, the other the spring of altruism: from the one come all unfriendly and from the other all friendly feelings. Every being seeks first to nourish and protect itself in virtue of its instinct of self-maintenance. But soon the magic of the instinct for the maintenance of the species works in it; it feels the sex-impulse, and thinks it is only satisfying its egoistic lust in yielding to it. In this it is wrong; it is not really serving itself, but the whole, the species, the genus. The ardor of love burns in it; and however sensual this love is at first, the new feeling is undeniably a feeling of belonging to another and of mutual consideration, looking not only to itself, but to another; not only to its own good, but to that of another, and finding its own good only in that of the other. And though this feeling at first only unites the two parents, it enlarges when children enter into life, and is extended to them in the form of parental love. Thus, out of the sex-impulse of the maintenance of the species, with its strong physical and psychic roots, is developed the love of spouses, of parents, of children, and of neighbor. Disinterested egoism goes even to the extent of sacrificing its own life for its young; in this organic and natural family love, and in the sense of the family that comes of it, we find the roots of all sympathetic and really ethical altruistic feelings; from this it widens out to larger spheres. Hence, the family is rightly held to be the chief source of all real moral feeling and life, not only in the human, but also in the animal world.
The further ennoblement of family life in the advance of civilization will give fresh proofs of the truth of this appreciation.
We now turn to consider the advantages that modern civilization offers in the way of movement in contrast to the simple methods of locomotion of the savage. We may point out first that the earliest men, like their ancestors, the anthropoid apes, lived in trees, and only gradually began to run on the ground. Some of the higher savages began to use the horse for riding and to tame it. Many inhabitants of the coast or islands began at an early period to make boats. Later the barbaric tribes invented the wagon, and much later again streets were paved and vehicles improved by civilized races. But the nineteenth century brought the invaluable means of rapid and convenient travelling by means of steamboats and railways. The whole problem of transit was revolutionized, and in the last few decades further vast changes have been made owing to the advance of electricity. Modern ideas of time and space are quite different from those of our parents sixty years ago, or our grandparents ninety years ago. In our expresses we cover in an hour a stretch of country that the mail-coach took five times and the foot-passenger ten times as long to cover. As the experiments with the Berlin electric railway have lately shown, we can now travel two hundred kilometres in an hour. The journey from Europe to India now takes three weeks, whereas the earlier sailing-vessel took as many months. The immense saving of time that we make is equivalent to a lengthening of our own life. This applies also to the more rapid transit provided by balloons, automobiles, bicycles, etc. It is easy to estimate the value of these improvements; but it is only fully appreciated by those who have lived long in an uncivilized country without roads or among savages whose legs are their only means of locomotion.
This progress in the means of transit is not less valuable socially than personally. If we conceive the state as a unified organism of the higher order, the development of its means of transit corresponds in many ways to that of the circulation of the blood in the vertebrate frame. The easy, rapid, and convenient transport of the means of life from the centre to the most distant parts of the land, and the corresponding development of the net-work of railways and steamboat routes, are to a certain extent direct tests of the degree of civilization. To this we must add the creation of a large number of offices which provide steady employment and means of subsistence for many thousands.
To compare the complex sensations of civilized man with the much simpler ones of the savage we must consider first the functions of the outer organs of sense and then the internal sense-processes in the cortex of the brain. Fritz Schultze has pointed out in his Psychology of the Savage, in regard to both sets of organs, that the savage is a man of sense-life, the civilized human being a man of mind-life. When we remember that our higher psychic functions (sensation, will, presentation, and thought) are anatomically connected with the phronema (the thought-organ in the cortex), and the inner sense-perception with the central sensorium (in the sense-centres of the cortex), we shall expect to find the latter more developed in the savage and the former in civilized man. The external sense-action is more intense in quantity, but weaker in quality, in the savage than in civilized man; this is especially true of the finer and more complex sense-functions which we call æsthetic sensations and regard as the source of art and poetry. Most strongly developed of all in the savage is the power of perceiving distant objects (sight, hearing, smell), as they warn him of the dangers about him. It is just the reverse with the subjective and proximate feelings that are excited by the immediate touch of objects and are the special instruments of sensual enjoyment—taste, sex-sense, touch, and feeling of temperature. But in both kinds of sense-action the civilized man is far ahead of the savage in respect of the finer shades of feeling and æsthetic education. Moreover, modern civilization has provided man with various means of vastly increasing and improving the natural power of his senses. We need only mention the fields of knowledge that have been opened to us by the microscope and telescope, the refined chemical methods of modern cooking, etc. The finer æsthetic enjoyment which our advanced art affords—plastic art for the eye, music for the ear, perfumery for the nose, cuisine for the tongue—is generally unintelligible to the savage, although he can see much farther, and hear and smell much more acutely, than civilized man. And in the senses of near objects (taste, touch, temperature) the senses of the savages are more coarse, and incapable of the fine gradations of civilized man.
This more refined sense-life and the accompanying æsthetic enjoyment have no less social than personal value. We have, in the first place, the incalculable treasure of modern art and science, their promotion by the state, and their embodiment in the training of the young. In the future the higher races are likely to give more attention to this, training the senses of children as well as their intelligence from the earliest years, leading them to a closer observation of nature and reproduction of its forms by drawing and painting. The art-sense must also be fostered by the exhibition of models and by æsthetic exercises, a larger place must be given to artistic education along with the acquisition of real knowledge, and an appreciation of the beauties of nature must be created by means of walks and travels. Then the children of civilized races will have the inexhaustible sources of the finest and noblest pleasures in life opened to them in good time.