We know what savages are; how, like wild animals, they depend for food and raiment upon the spontaneous products of nature, migrating with the beasts and birds and fishes, burrowing beneath the ground, hiding in caves, or throwing over themselves a shelter of bark or skins or branches or boards, eating or starving as food is abundant or scarce; nevertheless, all of them have made some advancement from their original naked, helpless condition, and have acquired some aids in the procurement of their poor necessities. Primeval man, the only real point of departure, and hence the only true savage, nowhere exists on the globe to-day. Be the animal man never so low—lower in skill and wisdom than the brute, less active in obtaining food, less ingenious in building his den—the first step out of his houseless, comfortless condition, the first fashioning of a tool, the first attempt to cover nakedness and wall out the wind, if this endeavor spring from intellect and not from instinct, is the first step toward civilization. Hence the modern savage is not the pre-historic or primitive man; nor is it among the barbarous nations of to-day that we must look for the rudest barbarism.
DEFINITION OF THE TERMS.
Often is the question asked, What is civilization? and the answer comes, The act of civilizing; the state of being civilized. What is the act of civilizing? To reclaim from a savage or barbarous state; to educate; to refine. What is a savage or barbarous state? A wild uncultivated state; a state of nature. Thus far the dictionaries. The term civilization, then, popularly implies both the transition from a natural to an artificial state, and the artificial condition attained. The derivation of the word civilization, from civis, citizen, civitas, city, and originally from cœtus, union, seems to indicate that culture which, in feudal times, distinguished the occupants of cities from the ill-mannered boors of the country. The word savage, on the other hand, from silva, a wood, points to man primeval; silvestres homines, men of the forest, not necessarily ferocious or brutal, but children of nature. From these simple beginnings both words have gradually acquired a broader significance, until by one is understood a state of comfort, intelligence, and refinement; and by the other, humanity wild and bestial.
Guizot defines civilization as an "improved condition of man resulting from the establishment of social order in place of the individual independence and lawlessness of the savage or barbarous life;" Buckle as "the triumph of mind over external agents;" Virey as "the development more or less absolute of the moral and intellectual faculties of man united in society;" Burke as the exponent of two principles, "the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion." "Whatever be the characteristics of what we call savage life," says John Stuart Mill, "the contrary of these, or the qualities which society puts on as it throws off these, constitute civilization;" and, remarks Emerson, "a nation that has no clothing, no iron, no alphabet, no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract thought, we call barbarous."
Men talk of civilization and call it liberty, religion, government, morality. Now liberty is no more a sign of civilization than tyranny; for the lowest savages are the least governed of all people. Civilized liberty, it is true, marks a more advanced stage than savage liberty, but between these two extremes of liberty there is a necessary age of tyranny, no less significant of an advance on primitive liberty than is constitutional liberty an advance on tyranny. Nor is religion civilization, except in so far as the form and machinery of sacerdotal rites, and the abandonment of fetichism for monotheism become significant of intenser thought and expansion of intellect. No nation ever practiced grosser immorality, or what we of the present day hold to be immorality, than Greece during the height of her intellectual refinement. Peace is no more civilization than war, virtue than vice, good than evil. All these are the incidents, not the essence, of civilization.
That which we commonly call civilization is not an adjunct nor an acquirement of man; it is neither a creed nor a polity, neither science nor philosophy nor industry; it is rather the measure of progressional force implanted in man, the general fund of the nation's wealth, learning, and refinement, the storehouse of accumulated results, the essence of all best worth preserving from the distillations of good and the distillations of evil. It is a something between men, no less than a something within them; for neither an isolated man nor an association of brutes can by any possibility become civilized.
CIVILIZATION A WORKING PRINCIPLE.
Further than this, civilization is not only the measure of aggregated human experiences, but it is a living working principle. It is a social transition; a moving forward rather than an end attained; a developing vitality rather than a fixed entity; it is the effort or aim at refinement rather than refinement itself; it is labor with a view to improvement and not improvement consummated, although it may be and is the metre of such improvement. And this accords with latter-day teachings. Although in its infancy, and, moreover, unable to explain things unexplainable, the science of evolution thus far has proved that the normal condition of the human race, as well as that of physical nature, is progressional; that the plant in a congenial soil is not more sure to grow than is humanity with favorable surroundings certain to advance. Nay, more, we speak of the progress of civilization as of something that moves on of its own accord; we may, if we will, recognize in this onward movement, the same principle of life manifest in nature and in the individual man.
To things we do not understand we give names, with which by frequent use we become familiar, when we fancy that we know all about the things themselves. At the first glance civilization appears to be a simple matter; to be well clad, well housed, and well fed, to be intelligent and cultured are better than nakedness and ignorance; therefore it is a good thing, a thing that men do well to strive for,—and that is all. But once attempt to go below this placid surface, and investigate the nature of progressional phenomena, and we find ourselves launched upon an eternity of ocean, and in pursuit of the same occult Cause, which has been sought alike by philosophic and barbaric of every age and nation; we find ourselves face to face with a great mystery, to which we stand in the same relation as to other great mysteries, such as the origin of things, the principle of life, the soul-nature. When such questions are answered as What is attraction, heat, electricity; what instinct, intellect, soul? Why are plants forced to grow and molecules to conglomerate and go whirling in huge masses through space?—then we may know why society moves ever onward like a river in channels predetermined. At present, these phenomena we may understand in their action partially, in their essence not at all; we may mark effects, we may recognize the same principle under widely different conditions though we may not be able to discover what that principle is. Science tells us that these things are so; that certain combinations of certain elements are inevitably followed by certain results, but science does not attempt to explain why they are so. Nevertheless, a summary of such few simple thoughts as I have been able to gather upon the subject, may be not wholly valueless.
FORCE AND MATTER.