This dependence on nature has long served as a criterion in ethnography for dividing peoples into two groups—the “civilised” and the “savage.” The name given by the Germans to “savages,” Naturvölker (peoples in a state of nature), explains sufficiently this way of looking at things. According to their greater or less dependence on nature, peoples were divided into hunters, shepherds or nomads, and tillers of the soil or settlers, without, however, characterising in a very precise way each of these states. Morgan was the first to bring a little definiteness into this nomenclature, and at the same time he has shown the necessity of introducing another criterion into the estimate of states of civilisation. In fact, to establish the three forms of socialisation—savage, barbarous, and civilised—he has accepted as a distinctive mark between the second and the third the existence of handwriting—that is to say, of the material means used by the two forces necessary to the inception and maintenance of progress: innovating initiative, and conservation of what has been acquired.[148] He has not made as much of this classification as, in my opinion, he might have done. In fact, the ethnic groups of the earth only differ among themselves from the social point of view by the degree of culture—its essence being always and everywhere the same: pursuit of more and more easy means of satisfying wants and desires. Now, if the form assumed by this species of activity, in a word, if production, subject to the influence of climate, geographical position, etc., is the basis of all social development, as Grosse has so well shown,[149] the nature and evolution of the needs and desires themselves depend up to a certain point on the “temperament” of the race, which must likewise be taken into consideration. The nature and amount of psychic force in any given society, the evolution of which is effected by its mode of production, may in its turn, having attained a certain degree of development, re-act on the economic state, and modify it. We see nothing like this in the animal communities. Bees and ants arrange their hives and manage the affairs of their community to-day as they did a thousand insect-generations ago. It is very probable that race has something to do with psychic force, but up to the present time the fact has not been scientifically demonstrated. However that may be, in order to form a correct opinion as to the degree of civilisation of any people, we should have to take into consideration not only its material culture, but also its état d’âme, its psychology, to realise the psychical resources which it has at its command. Thus certain peoples (Australians, Bushmen), though at the bottom of the scale as regards material culture, are nevertheless well endowed from the artistic point of view; in the same way the Polynesians of a hundred years ago, who were inferior in knowledge of pottery and metallurgy to the Negroes, were superior to them in general intelligence and the richness of their mythology.
But progress is only possible if, side by side with individual power of initiating change, there exists in the social aggregate what may be called the power of conservation. There may be produced among savage peoples, as Ratzel[150] has so well pointed out, persons of exceptional natural talent, men of genius; but the activity of these will almost always be sterile. Even if they succeed in ameliorating the material condition, in raising the moral or intellectual level of the members of their tribe or of their class, the result of their activity has only an ephemeral existence, their efforts are not continued, and after their death, for want of the conservative power, everything falls back into the primitive condition. The secret of civilisation lies not so much in efforts of isolated individuals as in accumulation of these efforts, in the transmission from one generation to another of the acquired result, of a sum-total of knowledge which enables each generation to go further without beginning everything over again ab ovo. In this way progress is unlimited by the very conditions of its origin, and civilisation is only the sum of all the acquisitions of the human mind at any given period.
The conservative and transmittive power become really established in a society only when the means of communicating thought are sufficiently developed, when language has taken a definite form, and an easy method is devised of fixing it by conventional signs more or less indelible and transmissible to future generations. Thus, to estimate different states of civilisation we must have recourse to linguistic characters, understanding by such everything which concerns the means of communicating ideas in time and space—that is to say, spoken or mimetic language and its graphic representation. But before passing rapidly in review the linguistic characters, I owe the reader a few words of explanation of the terms which I am about to use in designating “states of civilisation.”
In these latter days a classification of these states nearly in accordance with the desiderata which were formulated at the beginning of this chapter has been proposed by Vierkandt.[151] This classification takes material culture into account, but the primordial division which is adopted in it, between peoples in a state of nature (or better, uncivilised) and civilised peoples, is based on the development of certain psychical traits denoting a greater or less development of individuality, of the spirit of free investigation, etc. Savage peoples, without any true civilisation, are divided in this classification into semi-civilised and uncivilised properly so-called, with sub-divisions into nomads and tillers of the soil for the former, and hunters and wanderers for the latter.
Admitting the criterion of the existence or non-existence of writing and the relative value of the two elements of progress mentioned above, I arrive at a classification of “states of civilisation” which recalls somewhat that of Vierkandt, but which differs from it on several points. It may be summarised as follows:—
(1) Savage peoples, progressing exceedingly slowly, without writing, sometimes possessing a pictographic method; living in little groups of some hundreds or thousands of individuals. They are divided into two categories: hunters[152] (examples: Bushmen, Australians, Fuegians) and tillers of the soil (examples: Indians of North America, Melanesians, the majority of Negroes).
(2) Semi-civilised peoples, making an appreciable but slow progress, in which the conservative power predominates, forming authoritative societies or states of several thousands or millions of individuals; having an ideographic or phonetic writing, but a rudimentary literature. They are divided likewise into two categories: tillers of the soil (examples: Chinese, Siamese, Abyssinians, Malays, Ancient Egyptians, and Peruvians) and nomads (examples: Mongols, Arabs).
(3) Civilised peoples, making rapid progress, in which the initiating and innovating power predominates, forming states based on individual liberty, and consisting of several millions of individuals; having a phonetic writing and a developed literature. Their economic state is especially characterised by industrialism and cosmopolitan commercialism (examples: the majority of the peoples of Europe and North America).
Having said this much, we shall begin the study of ethnic characters with those which we may consider the indispensable condition of all associability, that is to say the linguistic characters.