EARLY AGRICULTURE
From the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.
In the southeastern part of Europe we find the people of the banded pottery who practised an advanced form of agriculture. Here apparently the men as well as the women worked in the fields. We find their stone mattocks and ploughshares. Hoe-culture was giving place to ploughing. Here men were receiving a very different education and training from the hunters, fishermen, and herdsmen of the north, though there also a gradual increase of tillage was doubtless taking place. They were tilling the ground laboriously, monotonously, doing what was wearisome and disagreeable for a reward sometimes large, sometimes scanty. The peasant farmer learns forethought, thrift, economy, industry, and a host of homely virtues, far less known to hunter or herdsman. He is no more a collector taking what he finds: he has gone into partnership with nature. He is studying her ways, moods, and whims. He amasses a steadily increasing store of most valuable lore concerning climate, weather, soil, plants, animals, and things. He is rooted in a little patch of ground. His outlook is narrow and he is slow to change. But he learns his lessons thoroughly. He may enter the school unwillingly but he stays in it.
He has a permanent home even if it is hardly more than a hut, which is the centre of his life and thought. It is a hard, healthy life, and population increases rapidly under such conditions. He probably has a large family of children, and they educate and socialize him and one another. He is trained and moulded by “home surroundings.” Is not this the history of the frontiersman or homesteader everywhere at all times? The home and family attachments and instincts are deeply rooted because very ancient and entirely natural.
He lives in a village or neighborhood, which is hardly more than a great patriarchal family, closely united by intermarriage, and by the pressure of common work to satisfy common needs, common ownership of the soil, mutual aid in hard times. The religious rites and ceremonies, the feasts and mysteries, the prayers or magic, are all community affairs. Many of the divinities are local. These religious bonds are all the firmer and more compelling because, in the lack of any developed and permanent political organization, religion is the great tribal bond. We easily forget the civilizing, refining, and improving unremitting pressure and power of these simple, uninteresting peasant influences. He is learning to get on with the members of the family and neighborhood. He is experimenting upon his neighbors: his experiments and experiences may often be very trying to himself and them; the results may sometimes be discouraging. But he is not only practising the essentials and fundamentals of morality, very incomplete and without code; but a sort of preparatory course in government. It may easily be self-government in these small villages. The town-meeting originated here or somewhat farther north.
We have already seen that his religion had grown out of the experiences of his daily life. May we not claim that science and a sort of philosophy may have sprung from the same source? He knew nothing of cause and effect in the material world. But he was seeking diligently the invisible bond of relations of things and events. The relation, according to his views, was mainly of a spiritual character through the agency of dæmons. His ritual, call it magic if you will, was the expression of his conviction that results in the material world might be modified by his lending a helping hand to all the beneficent spirits. He indulged freely in hypotheses, but these were the outgrowth of millennia of experience and life, a very healthy form of pragmatism. He who has never laughed at a modern scientific theory, useful and fruitful in its time but now outgrown and replaced by a somewhat better one, may cast the first stone at his “benighted” Neolithic ancestor.
We might even venture to suspect that in his own crude way he was a philosopher. He must have had something like a philosophy of life, even if it was hardly more than a dumb instinct.
Says Miss Harrison: “Dike” (usually translated justice), “in common Greek parlance is the way of life, normal habit. Dike is the way of the world, the way things happen, and Themis is that specialized way for human beings which is sanctioned by the collective conscience, by herd instinct. A lonely beast in the valley, a fish in the sea, has his Dike, but it is not till man congregates together that he has his Themis. Greeks and Indians alike seem to have discovered that the divine way was also the truth and the life. This notion of the way, which was also the truth and the life, seems to have existed before the separation of Indian from Iranian. Closely allied to Dike and to Vedic Rta is the Chinese Tao, only it seems less moralized and more magical. Deep-rooted in man’s heart is the pathetic conviction that moral goodness and material prosperity go together, that if man keep the Rta, he can magically affect for good nature’s ordered going.”[177]
Thus primitive man, long before the dawn of anything like civilization, was seeking, finding, clearing, and treading out the “way” to an ordered, right, and healthy individual and social life—not through, but to, codes of morals and systems of philosophy. His thought was more or less chaotic, perhaps; it was crudely, often indecently, expressed in ugly form or action; but it was always acted upon, kept close to life. We might possibly call him an “Ur-pragmatist,” if you will pardon the barbarism. He had neither the language nor the “conveniences for thinking” and other things, to write out a cool, logical abstract system in long words. In this we have outrun him until we have left him out of sight. His philosophy was not a guidebook or map, but a rough and often miry trail.