With the utmost interest we look upon the first germs of art among these primitive men. They have left its rude sketches on pieces of ivory and flakes of bone, and carvings, of the animals contemporary with them. In these prehistoric delineations, sometimes not without spirit, we have mammoths, combats of reindeer. One presents us with a man harpooning a fish, another a hunting-scene of naked men armed with the dart. Man is the only animal who has the propensity of depicting external forms, and of availing himself of the use of fire.
Shell-mounds, consisting of bones and shells, some of which may be justly described as of vast extent, and of a date anterior to the Bronze age, and full of stone implements, bear in all their parts indications of the use of fire. These are often adjacent to the existing coasts sometimes, however, they are far inland, in certain instances as far as fifty miles. Their contents and position indicate for them a date posterior to that of the great extinct mammals, but prior to the domesticated. Some of these, it is said, cannot be less than one hundred thousand years old.
The lake-dwellings in Switzerland—huts built on piles or logs, wattled with boughs—were, as may be inferred from the accompanying implements, begun in the Stone age, and continued into that of Bronze. In the latter period the evidences become numerous of the adoption of an agricultural life.
It must not be supposed that the periods into which geologists have found it convenient to divide the progress of man in civilization are abrupt epochs, which hold good simultaneously for the whole human race. Thus the wandering Indians of America are only at the present moment emerging from the Stone age. They are still to be seen in many places armed with arrows, tipped with flakes of flint. It is but as yesterday that some have obtained, from the white man, iron, fire-arms, and the horse.
So far as investigations have gone, they indisputably refer the existence of man to a date remote from us by many hundreds of thousands of years. It must be borne in mind that these investigations are quite recent, and confined to a very limited geographical space. No researches have yet been made in those regions which might reasonably be regarded as the primitive habitat of man.
We are thus carried back immeasurably beyond the six thousand years of Patristic chronology. It is difficult to assign a shorter date for the last glaciation of Europe than a quarter of a million of years, and human existence antedates that. But not only is it this grand fact that confronts us, we have to admit also a primitive animalized state, and a slow, a gradual development. But this forlorn, this savage condition of humanity is in strong contrast to the paradisiacal happiness of the garden of Eden, and, what is far more serious, it is inconsistent with the theory of the Fall.
I have been induced to place the subject of this chapter out of its proper chronological order, for the sake of presenting what I had to say respecting the nature of the world more completely by itself. The discussions that arose as to the age of the earth were long after the conflict as to the criterion of truth—that is, after the Reformation; indeed, they were substantially included in the present century. They have been conducted with so much moderation as to justify the term I have used in the title of this chapter, "Controversy," rather than "Conflict." Geology has not had to encounter the vindictive opposition with which astronomy was assailed, and, though, on her part, she has insisted on a concession of great antiquity for the earth, she has herself pointed out the unreliability of all numerical estimates thus far offered. The attentive reader of this chapter cannot have failed to observe inconsistencies in the numbers quoted. Though wanting the merit of exactness, those numbers, however, justify the claim of vast antiquity, and draw us to the conclusion that the time-scale of the world answers to the space-scale in magnitude.
CHAPTER VIII.
CONFLICT RESPECTING THE CRITERION OF TRUTH.
Ancient philosophy declares that man has no means of
ascertaining the truth.
Differences of belief arise among the early Christians—An
ineffectual attempt is made to remedy them by Councils.—
Miracle and ordeal proof introduced.
The papacy resorts to auricular confession and the
Inquisition.—It perpetrates frightful atrocities for the
suppression of differences of opinion.
Effect of the discovery of the Pandects of Justinian and
development of the canon law on the nature of evidence.—It
becomes more scientific.
The Reformation establishes the rights of individual
reason.—Catholicism asserts that the criterion of truth is
in the Church. It restrains the reading of books by the
Index Expurgatorius, and combats dissent by such means as
the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve.
Examination of the authenticity of the Pentateuch as the
Protestant criterion.—Spurious character of those books.
For Science the criterion of truth is to be found in the
revelations of Nature: for the Protestant, it is in the
Scriptures; for the Catholic, in an infallible Pope.