[25]. Primitive Music, pp. 76, 78.
[26]. The best objection against this analogy in any definite use is made by O. Gruppe, Griechische Culte und Mythen, p. 199. The child and the savage, he points out, have each a small range of perceptions; the ways in which they enlarge this range are diametrically opposed. One does it productively; the other, receptively. See, too, a bit of sarcasm over the complacent scorn for the “childish” savages felt by civilized man, Grosse, Anfänge der Kunst, pp. 51 f.
[27]. Dr. Brown, Adam Smith, Lord Monboddo, and others were leading Englishmen in the movement to use the savage to explain early man. Smith and Monboddo enjoyed this literary vivisection, the former once watching “a negro dance to his own song the war-dance of his own country, with such vehemence of action and expression, that the whole company, gentlemen as well as ladies, got up upon chairs and tables.” See the Essays, Edinburgh, 1795, “Of the Imitative Arts,” Parts II., III., and the fragment “Of the Affinity between Music, Dancing, and Poetry.” The main credit, however, belongs to Turgot. In his “Plan du Prém. Disc. sur l’Hist. Universelle,” Œuvres, II. 216, he uses the savages of America to illustrate the state of primitive man. He is also strong for the milieu. “Si Racine fût né au Canada chez les Hurons...!” he says, II. 264; and his other illustrations are suggestive (in the “Plan du 2. Disc.”). II. 265, he notes the homogeneity of barbaric races.
[28]. Outlines of Sociology, trans. Moore, p. 85.
[29]. The outright degeneration assumed by Le Maistre need not come into the account. Human progress is now conceded to be a resultant of opposing forces of growth and decay. Mr. Talcott Williams has an interesting paper, “Was Primitive Man a Modern Savage?” in the Report of the Smithsonian Inst., 1896, pp. 541 ff. His main point is, that the modern savage has deteriorated under pressure. Primitive man was in a more or less “empty earth,” and was not crowded by his fellows. The god of war is always a junior member of Olympus. So, too, Professor Baldwin (Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 214) argues for a reign of peace, a “sort of organic resting-place,” in the child’s second period, which answers to social coöperation, “the rest which man took after his release from the animal.... The social tide then sets in. The quest of domestic union and reciprocal service comes to comfort him, and his nomadic and agricultural habits are formed.” One is reminded of Scherer’s argument for an epoch of peace in early Germanic culture attested by names which bear that stamp as compared with the later and warlike Gerhards, Gertrudes, and the rest.
[30]. It is hardly necessary to warn against fallacies of illustration. Even Bruchmann goes astray when he says the poem of Goethe is to the primitive song as a cherry tree in bloom is to a cherry stone just planted. To primitive man the primitive song was already a tree in bloom, and his appreciation of it was in line with modern appreciation of Goethe’s poem.
[31]. Or, indeed, any one tribe of human beings. Even in the very beginning of human activity, that activity was, as now, conditioned by the environment, and there were doubtless several types of primitive existence. Evidently, then, there could have been different types of social union even at the outset of social progress.
[32]. Principles of Sociology, 3d (American) ed., I. 93, 96. Dr. Eugen Wolff is equally severe on the abuse, “Vorstudien zur Poetik,” in the Zst. f. Litteraturgesch., VI. 426.
[33]. Anfänge der Kunst, pp. 33 ff. For falling off in civilization among Africans and others, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, I. 46, 48.
[34]. Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., 1820, I. 313 ff.