History everywhere has come out of the night, out of the deep gloom of the unrecorded. But it has not leaped forth like lightning out of the darkness. It has dawned, night being succeeded by the amorphous shadows of legend and tradition, and these in turn by the attested events of true history. Almost every civilised people can trace back its genealogy to a time when it was represented on the earth by one or more tribes of savage or half-savage ancestors. The Anglo-Saxons go back to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, three semi-savage tribes who came to England from the borderlands of the Baltic fourteen or fifteen centuries ago. The French are the descendants of the Gauls, who formed the scattered population of warring and superstitious tribes referred to by Julius Caesar in the opening lines of his ‘Commentaries.’ The blue-eyed Germans came from the Cimbri, the Goths, and the Vandals, those bold, wild hordes who charged out of the north to battle with the power of Rome. And all of the Aryan races—English, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Russian, Roman, Greek, and Persian—trace their ancestry back, by means of common languages and legends, to a time when they were wandering tribes of nomads tenting somewhere on the plains of transcaspian Asia.
6. The evolution of mind in the animal world in general is suggested by the fact that mind in man has evolved. The rich, luminous intellect of civilised man, with its art, science, law, literature, government, and morality, has been evolved from the rude, raw, demon-haunted mind of the savage. Evidence of this evolution is furnished by the recorded facts of human history, by the antiquarian collections of our museums, and by a study of existing savages.
In all our museums there are collections of the relics of prehistoric peoples. These collections consist of objects upon which men in distant ages of the world have wrought—their weapons, ornaments, utensils, implements, and playthings—which have been saved from the teeth of Time by their durability. The character of the minds which operated on these objects, which produced and used them, may be inferred from the character of the objects, just as the life and surroundings of an ancient animal or plant may be inferred from its fossil. These relics are of stone, bone, bronze, and iron. They are found in almost every region of the earth—all over Europe and its islands, in western and central Asia, in China and Japan, in Malay, Australia, and New Zealand, in the islands of the Pacific, and throughout the length and breadth of America. They antedate human history by thousands of years. They are the ruins of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age of mankind. In all of these remains there is evidence of a slow but gradual improvement as we approach the present. There are places on the earth where the evolution of human implements, from the rudest chipped stones to the comparatively finished products of historic peoples, is epitomised in the deposits of a few feet in depth. One of these occurs at Chelles, a suburb of Paris, and was made the subject of a paper by Professor Packard in the Popular Science Monthly for May, 1902. Here three distinct layers, containing human remains entirely different in character from each other, appear within a depth of 30 feet from the surface. The lowest bed, a layer of pebbles and sand, and probably preglacial in origin, contains the famous Chellean ‘axes,’ rude almond-shaped implements of chipped flint, and used by these ancient inhabitants by being held in the hand. In this bed are also found the bones of the straight-tusked elephant, cave-bear, big-nosed rhinoceros, and other species now extinct. The next bed is the interglacial, and contains implements entirely different from the one below it, among which are skin-scrapers and lance-points. The animal remains of this bed are also different from those found in the bed below, and include animals like the musk-ox and the reindeer, which were probably driven to this southern clime from more northern regions by the excessive cold of the time. The third bed, which lies just below the surface soils, contains polished stone axes and other remains of human industry cotemporaneous with the Swiss lake-dwellers. From the swamps and loams are sometimes dug up the remains of Gallo-Roman civilisations—Gallic coins, serpentine axes, and bronzes of the time of the Antonines.
No one can fully realise the vast advance that has been made by the human mind until he has looked upon a savage—has seen the savage in his native haunts attacking the problems of his daily life, and has tasted of his philosophy and disposition. The savage is the ancestor of all higher men. When we look upon the savage, we look upon the infancy of the human world. All of the laws, languages, sciences, governments, religions, and philosophies of civilised man, or nearly all of them at any rate, are the exfoliated laws, languages, sciences, governments, religions, and philosophies of savages. It is impossible to understand the laws of civilised societies without a knowledge of the laws of savage societies. The same thing is true of government, religion, and philosophy—and of human nature itself. Human nature as exhibited by civilised men and women—I mean men and women with a veneering of civility, not really civilised folks, for there are none of them on the earth—is a perpetual enigma unless it is illumined by retrospection, by a comparative study of human nature, by a study of human nature as seen in more and more primitive men and women. The mind of the savage, as compared with that of civilised man, is exceedingly primitive. The picture drawn by Gilbraith of the North American Sioux is a typical picture of savage life and character. Gilbraith lived among these tribes for several years, and was thoroughly acquainted with them. He says:
‘They are bigoted, barbarous, and exceedingly superstitious. They regard most of the vices as virtues. Theft, arson, rape, and murder are regarded by them as the means of distinction. The young Indian is taught from childhood to regard killing as the highest of virtues. In their dances and at their feasts, the warriors recite their deeds of theft, pillage, and slaughter as precious things; and the highest, indeed the only, ambition of the young brave is to secure “the feather,” which is but the record of his having murdered, or participated in the murder of, some human being—whether man, woman, or child, it is immaterial’.[2]
‘Conscience,’ says Burton, ‘does not exist in East Africa, and “repentance” simply expresses regret for missed opportunities for crime. Robbery makes an honorable man; and murder, the more atrocious the crime the better, makes the hero’.‘Conscience,’ says Burton, ‘does not exist in East Africa, and “repentance” simply expresses regret for missed opportunities for crime. Robbery makes an honorable man; and murder, the more atrocious the crime the better, makes the hero’.[3]
Many things appear natural and self-evident to the savage which seem to us actually revolting. When the Fuegians are hard pressed by want, they kill their old women for food rather than their dogs, saying: ‘Old women no use; dogs kill otters.’ ‘What I’ said a negro to Burton, ‘am I to starve while my sister has children whom she can sell?’
Lubbock, in his great work on ‘The Origin of Civilisation,’ cites hundreds of instances of savage rudeness and simplicity which seem almost incredible to one accustomed all his life to types of human character such as are found in Europe and America. For instance, ‘when the natives of the Lower Murray first saw pack-oxen, some of them were frightened and took them for demons with spears on their heads, while others thought they were the wives of the settlers, because they carried the baggage.’ Speaking of the wild men in the interior of Borneo, this writer says: ‘They live absolutely in a state of nature, neither cultivating the ground nor living in huts. They eat neither rice nor salt, and do not associate with each other, but rove about the woods like wild beasts. The sexes meet in the jungle. When the children are old enough to shift for themselves, they usually separate, neither one afterwards thinking of the other. At night they sleep under some large tree whose branches hang low. They fasten the children to the branches in a kind of swing, and build a fire around the tree to protect them from snakes and wild beasts. The poor creatures are looked on and treated by the other Dyaks as wild beasts.’ Lubbock sums up his conclusions on the morality of savages in the following pathetic acknowledgment: ‘I do not remember a single instance in which a savage is recorded as having shown any symptoms of remorse; and almost the only case I can call to mind in which a man belonging to one of the lower races has accounted for an act by saying explicitly that it was right, was when Mr. Hunt asked a young Figian why he had killed his mother’.[4a]
A few pages further on, the same author adds, regarding the deplorable state of morality among savages: ‘That there should be races of men so deficient in moral feeling was altogether opposed to the preconceived ideas with which I commenced the study of savage life, and I have arrived at the conviction by slow degrees, and even with reluctance. I have, however, been forced to this conclusion, not only by the direct statements of travellers, but also by the general tenor of their remarks, and especially by the remarkable absence of repentance and remorse among the lowest races of men.’ Among ourselves the words used to distinguish right and wrong are metaphors. Right originally meant ‘straight,’ and wrong meant ‘twisted.’ Language existed, therefore, before morality; for if moral ideas had preceded language, there would have been original words to stand for them. Religion, according to Lubbock, has no moral aspect or influence except among the more advanced races of men. ‘The deities of savages are evil, not good; they may be forced into compliance with the wishes of man; they generally delight in bloody, and often require human, sacrifices; they are mortal, not immortal; they are to be approached by dances rather than by prayers; and often approve what we call vice rather than what we esteem as virtue. In fact, the so-called religion of the lower races of mankind bears somewhat the same relation to religion in its higher forms as astrology does to astronomy or alchemy to chemistry’.[4b]
Savages have few general ideas of any kind, as is evidenced by the almost total absence among them of words denoting general ideas. Many savage races cannot comprehend numbers greater than five or six, and are unable to make the simplest mathematical computations without using the fingers. The languages of savages are extremely rude, words being freely pieced out with pantomime. Savages talk with difficulty in the dark, because of their great reliance on gesture in conversation. The rich vocabularies of the languages of Europe and America have grown up step by step with the evolution of European and American mind. Every language is an evolution. The languages of many primitive peoples lack the verb to be entirely, and all nouns are proper nouns. Words are often little more than grunts or clucks, and are without the euphony and articulation found in the languages of the civilised. Darwin says that the language of the Fuegians sounds like a man clearing his throat. Not only every language, but every word, both in its form and meaning, is in process of evolution. Spirit, for instance, originally meant ‘blowing,’ understanding meant ‘getting beneath,’ and development the physical act of ‘unfolding.’ Words are continually drifting from their original meanings under the stress of incessant use, as ships drag their anchors in a gale. Those words that are exposed to common use undergo the most rapid changes, while words sheltered from the rush of human affairs, like harboured ships, hold to their moorings forever. Let, for instance, once meant ‘hinder’; now it means ‘allow.’ Bisect, on the other hand, a word of rare and technical use, has remained unaltered in significance for twenty centuries.