It has of late years been a favourite notion with many, that the human race was at first in a highly civilized state, and that barbarism was a second condition. This idea probably took its origin in a wish to support certain interpretations of the Mosaic record, and it has never yet been propounded by any writer who seemed to have a due sense of the value of science in this class of investigations. The principal argument for it is, that we see many examples of nations falling away from civilization into barbarism, while in some regions of the earth, the history of which we do not clearly know, there are remains of works of art far superior to any which the present unenlightened inhabitants could have produced. It is to be readily admitted that such decadences are common; but do they necessarily prove that there has been anything like a regular and constant decline into the present state, from a state more generally refined? May not these be only instances of local failures and suppressions of the principle of civilization, where it had begun to take root amongst a people generally barbarous? It is, at least, as legitimate to draw this inference from the facts which are known. But it is also alleged that we know of no such thing as civilization being ever self-originated. It is always seen to be imparted from one people to another. Hence, of course, we must infer that civilization at the first could only have been of supernatural origin. This argument appears to be founded on false premises, for civilization does sometimes rise in a manner clearly independent amongst a horde of people generally barbarous. A striking instance is described in the laborious work of Mr. Catlin on the North-American tribes. Far placed among those which inhabit the vast region of the north-west, and quite beyond the reach of any influence from the whites, he found a small tribe living in a fortified village, where they cultivated the arts of manufacture, realized comforts and luxuries, and had attained to a remarkable refinement of manners, insomuch as to be generally called the polite and friendly Mandans. They were also more than usually elegant in their persons, and of every variety of complexion between that of their compatriots and a pure white. Up to the time of Mr. Catlin’s visit, these people had been able to defend themselves and their possessions against the roving bands which surrounded them on all sides; but, soon after, they were attacked by small-pox, which cut them all off except a small party, whom their enemies rushed in upon and destroyed to a man. What is this but a repetition on a small scale of phenomena with which ancient history familiarizes us—a nation rising in arts and elegances amidst barbarous neighbours, but at length overpowered by the rude majority, leaving only a Tadmor or a Luxor as a monument of itself to beautify the waste? What can we suppose the nation which built Palenque and Copan to have been but only a Mandan tribe, which chanced to have made its way farther along the path of civilization and the arts, before the barbarians broke in upon it? The flame essayed to rise in many parts of the earth; but there were always considerable chances against it, and down it accordingly went, times without number; but there was always a vitality in it, nevertheless, and a tendency to progress, and at length it seems to have attained a strength against which the powers of barbarism can never more prevail. The state of our knowledge of uncivilized nations is very apt to make us fall into error on this subject. They are generally supposed to be all at one point in barbarism, which is far from being the case, for in the midst of every great region of uncivilized men, such as North America, there are nations partially refined. The Jolofs, Mandingoes, and Kafirs, are African examples, where a natural and independent origin for the improvement which exists is as unavoidably to be presumed as in the case of the Mandans.
The most conclusive argument against the original civilization of mankind is to be found in the fact that we do not now see civilization existing anywhere except in certain conditions altogether different from any we can suppose to have existed at the commencement of our race. To have civilization, it is necessary that a people should be numerous and closely placed; that they should be fixed in their habitations, and safe from violent external and internal disturbance; that a considerable number of them should be exempt from the necessity of drudging for immediate subsistence. Feeling themselves at ease about the first necessities of their nature, including self-preservation, and daily subjected to that intellectual excitement which society produces, men begin to manifest what is called civilization; but never in rude and shelterless circumstances, or when widely scattered. Even men who have been civilized, when transferred to a wide wilderness, where each has to work hard and isolatedly for the first requisites of life, soon shew a retrogression to barbarism: witness the plains of Australia, as well as the backwoods of Canada and the prairies of Texas. Fixity of residence and thickening of population are perhaps the prime requisites for civilization, and hence it will be found that all civilizations as yet known have taken place in regions physically limited. That of Egypt arose in a narrow valley hemmed in by deserts on both sides. That of Greece took its rise in a small peninsula bounded on the only land side by mountains. Etruria and Rome were naturally limited regions. Civilizations have taken place at both the eastern and western extremities of the elder continent—China and Japan, on the one hand; Germany, Holland, Britain, France, on the other—while the great unmarked tract between contains nations decidedly less advanced. Why is this, but because the sea, in both cases, has imposed limits to further migration, and caused the population to settle and condense—the conditions most necessary for social improvement. [302] Even the simple case of the Mandans affords an illustration of this principle, for Mr. Catlin expressly, though without the least regard to theory, attributes their improvement to the fact of their being a small tribe, obliged, by fear of their more numerous enemies, to settle in a permanent village, so fortified as to ensure their preservation. “By this means,” says he, “they have advanced farther in the arts of manufacture, and have supplied their lodges more abundantly with the comforts and even luxuries of life than any Indian nation I know of. The consequence of this,” he adds, “is that the tribe have taken many steps ahead of other tribes in manners and refinements.” These conditions can only be regarded as natural laws affecting civilization, and it might not be difficult, taking them into account, to predict of any newly settled country its social destiny. An island like Van Dieman’s land might fairly be expected to go on more rapidly to good manners and sound institutions than a wide region like Australia. The United States might be expected to make no great way in civilization till they be fully peopled to the Pacific; and it might not be unreasonable to expect that, when that even has occurred, the greatest civilizations of that vast territory will be found in the peninsula of California and the narrow stripe of country beyond the Rocky Mountains. This, however, is a digression. To return: it is also necessary for a civilization that at least a portion of the community should be placed above mean and engrossing toils. Man’s mind becomes subdued, like the dyer’s hand, to that it works in. In rude and difficult circumstances we unavoidably become rude, because then only the inferior and harsher faculties of our nature are called into existence. When, on the contrary, there is leisure and abundance, the self-seeking and self-preserving instincts are allowed to rest, the gentler and more generous sentiments are evoked, and man becomes that courteous and chivalric being which he is found to be amongst the upper classes of almost all civilized countries. These, then, may be said to be the chief natural laws concerned in the moral phenomenon of civilization. If I am right in so considering them, it will of course be readily admitted that the earliest families of the human race, although they might be simple and innocent, could not have been in anything like a civilized state, seeing that the conditions necessary for that state could not have then existed. Let us only for a moment consider some of the things requisite for their being civilized,—namely, a set of elegant homes ready furnished for their reception, fields ready cultivated to yield them food without labour, stores of luxurious appliances of all kinds, a complete social enginery for the securing of life and property,—and we shall turn from the whole conceit as one worthy only of the philosophers of Utopia.
Yet, as has been remarked, the earliest families might be simple and innocent, while at the same time unskilled and ignorant, and obliged to live merely upon such substances as they could readily procure. The traditions of all nations refer to such a state as that in which mankind were at first: perhaps it is not so much a tradition as an idea which the human mind naturally inclines to form respecting the fathers of the race; but nothing that we see of mankind absolutely forbids our entertaining this idea, while there are some considerations rather favourable to it. A few families, in a state of nature, living near each other, in a country supplying the means of livelihood abundantly, are generally simple and innocent; their instinctive and perceptive faculties are also apt to be very active, although the higher intellect may be dormant. If we therefore presume India to have been the cradle of our race, they might at first exemplify a sort of golden age; but it could not be of long continuance. The very first movements from the primal seat would be attended with degradation, nor could there be any tendency to true civilization till groups had settled and thickened in particular seats physically limited.
The probability may now be assumed that the human race sprung from one stock, which was at first in a state of simplicity, if not barbarism. As yet we have not seen very distinctly how the various branches of the family, as they parted off, and took up separate ground, became marked by external features so peculiar. Why are the Africans black, and generally marked by coarse features and ungainly forms? Why are the Mongolians generally yellow, the Americans red, the Caucasians white? Why the flat features of the Chinese, the small stature of the Laps, the soft round forms of the English, the lank features of their descendants, the Americans? All of these phenomena appear, in a word, to be explicable on the ground of development. We have already seen that various leading animal forms represent stages in the embryotic progress of the highest—the human being. Our brain goes through the various stages of a fish’s, a reptile’s, and a mammifer’s brain, and finally becomes human. There is more than this, for, after completing the animal transformations, it passes through the characters in which it appears, in the Negro, Malay, American, and Mongolian nations, and finally is Caucasian. The face partakes of these alterations. “One of the earliest points in which ossification commences is the lower jaw. This bone is consequently sooner completed than the other bones of the head, and acquires a predominance, which, as is well known, it never loses in the Negro. During the soft pliant state of the bones of the skull, the oblong form which they naturally assume, approaches nearly the permanent shape of the Americans. At birth, the flattened face, and broad smooth forehead of the infant, the position of the eyes rather towards the side of the head, and the widened space between, represent the Mongolian form; while it is only as the child advances to maturity, that the oval face, the arched forehead, and the marked features of the true Caucasian, become perfectly developed.” [307a] The leading characters, in short, of the various races of mankind, are simply representations of particular stages in the development of the highest or Caucasian type. The Negro exhibits permanently the imperfect brain, projecting lower jaw, and slender bent limbs, of a Caucasian child, some considerable time before the period of its birth. The aboriginal American represents the same child nearer birth. The Mongolian is an arrested infant newly born. And so forth. All this is as respects form; [307b] but whence colour? This might be supposed to have depended on climatal agencies only; but it has been shewn by overpowering evidence to be independent of these. In further considering the matter, we are met by the very remarkable fact that colour is deepest in the least perfectly developed type, next in the Malay, next in the American, next in the Mongolian, the very order in which the degrees of development are ranged. May not colour, then, depend upon development also? We do not, indeed, see that a Caucasian fœtus at the stage which the African represents is anything like black; neither is a Caucasian child yellow, like the Mongolian. There may, nevertheless, be a character of skin at a certain stage of development which is predisposed to a particular colour when it is presented as the envelope of a mature being. Development being arrested at so immature a stage in the case of the Negro, the skin may take on the colour as an unavoidable consequence of its imperfect organization. It is favourable to this view, that Negro infants are not deeply black at first, but only acquire the full colour tint after exposure for some time to the atmosphere. Another consideration in its favour is that there is a likelihood of peculiarities of form and colour, since they are so coincident, depending on one set of phenomena. If it be admitted as true, there can be no difficulty in accounting for all the varieties of mankind. They are simply the result of so many advances and retrogressions in the developing power of the human mothers, these advances and retrogressions being, as we have formerly seen, the immediate effect of external conditions in nutrition, hardship, &c., [309] and also, perhaps, to some extent, of the suitableness and unsuitableness of marriages, for it is found that parents too nearly related tend to produce offspring of the Mongolian type,—that is, persons who in maturity still are a kind of children. According to this view, the greater part of the human race must be considered as having lapsed or declined from the original type. In the Caucasian or Indo-European family alone has the primitive organization been improved upon. The Mongolian, Malay, American, and Negro, comprehending perhaps five-sixths of mankind, are degenerate. Strange that the great plan should admit of failures and aberrations of such portentous magnitude! But pause and reflect; take time into consideration: the past history of mankind may be, to what is to come, but as a day. Look at the progress even now making over the barbaric parts of the earth by the best examples of the Caucasian type, promising not only to fill up the waste places, but to supersede the imperfect nations already existing. Who can tell what progress may be made, even in a single century, towards reversing the proportions of the perfect and imperfect types? and who can tell but that the time during which the mean types have lasted, long as it appears, may yet be thrown entirely into the shade by the time during which the best types will remain predominant?
We have seen that the traces of a common origin in all languages afford a ground of presumption for the unity of the human race. They establish a still stronger probability that mankind had not yet begun to disperse before they were possessed of a means of communicating their ideas by conventional sounds—in short, speech. This is a gift so peculiar to man, and in itself so remarkable, that there is a great inclination to surmise a miraculous origin for it, although there is no proper ground, or even support, for such an idea in Scripture, while it is clearly opposed to everything else that we know with regard to the providential arrangements for the creation of our race. Here, as in many other cases, a little observation of nature might have saved much vain discussion. The real character of language itself has not been thoroughly understood. Language, in its most comprehensive sense, is the communication of ideas by whatever means. Ideas can be communicated by looks, gestures, and signs of various other kinds, as well as by speech. The inferior animals possess some of those means of communicating ideas, and they have likewise a silent and unobservable mode of their own, the nature of which is a complete mystery to us, though we are assured of its reality by its effects. Now, as the inferior animals were all in being before man, there was language upon earth long ere the history of our race commenced. The only additional fact in the history of language, which was produced by our creation, was the rise of a new mode of expression—namely, that by sound-signs produced by the vocal organs. In other words, speech was the only novelty in this respect attending the creation of the human race. No doubt it was an addition of great importance, for, in comparison with it, the other natural modes of communicating ideas sink into insignificance. Still, the main and fundamental phenomenon, language, as the communication of ideas, was no new gift of the Creator to man; and in speech itself, when we judge of it as a natural fact, we see only a result of some of those superior endowments of which so many others have fallen to our lot through the medium of an improved or advanced organization.
The first and most obvious natural endowment concerned in speech is that peculiar organization of the larynx, trachea, and mouth, which enables us to produce the various sounds required in the case. Man started at first with this organization ready for use, a constitution of the atmosphere adapted for the sounds which that organization was calculated to produce, and, lastly, but not leastly, as will afterwards be more particularly shewn, a mental power within, prompting to, and giving directions for, the expression of ideas. Such an arrangement of mutually adapted things was as likely to produce sounds as an Eolian harp placed in a draught is to produce tones. It was unavoidable that human beings so organized, and in such a relation to external nature, should utter sounds, and also come to attach to these conventional meanings, thus forming the elements of spoken language. The great difficulty which has been felt was to account for man going in this respect beyond the inferior animals. There could have been no such difficulty if speculators in this class of subjects had looked into physiology for an account of the superior vocal organization of man, and had they possessed a true science of mind to shew man possessing a faculty for the expression of ideas which is only rudimental in the lower animals. Another difficulty has been in the consideration that, if men were at first utterly untutored and barbarous, they could scarcely be in a condition to form or employ language—an instrument which it requires the fullest powers of thought to analyse and speculate upon. But this difficulty also vanishes upon reflection—for, in the first place, we are not bound to suppose the fathers of our race early attaining to great proficiency in language, and, in the second, language itself seems to be amongst the things least difficult to be acquired, if we can form any judgment from what we see in children, most of whom have, by three years of age, while their information and judgment are still as nothing, mastered and familiarized themselves with a quantity of words, infinitely exceeding in proportion what they acquire in the course of any subsequent similar portion of time.
Discussions as to which parts of speech were first formed, and the processes by which grammatical structure and inflections took their rise, appear in a great measure needless, after the matter has been placed in this light. The mental powers could readily connect particular arbitrary sounds with particular ideas, whether those ideas were nouns, verbs, or interjections. As the words of all languages can be traced back into roots which are monosyllables, we may presume these sounds to have all been monosyllabic accordingly. The clustering of two or more together to express a compound idea, and the formation of inflections by additional syllables expressive of pronouns and such prepositions as of, by, and to, are processes which would or might occur as matters of course, being simple results of a mental power called into action, and partly directed, by external necessities. This power, however, as we find it in very different degrees of endowment in individuals, so would it be in different degrees of endowment in nations, or branches of the human family. Hence we find the formation of words and the process of their composition and grammatical arrangement, in very different stages of development in different races. The Chinese have a language composed of a limited number of monosyllables, which they multiply in use by mere variations of accent, and which they have never yet attained the power of clustering or inflecting; the language of this immense nation—the third part of the human race—may be said to be in the condition of infancy. The aboriginal Americans, so inferior in civilization, have, on the other hand, a language of the most elaborately composite kind, perhaps even exceeding, in this respect, the languages of the most refined European nations. These are but a few out of many facts tending to shew that language is in a great measure independent of civilization, as far as its advance and development are concerned. Do they not also help to prove that cultivated intellect is not necessary for the origination of language?
Facts daily presented to our observation afford equally simple reasons for the almost infinite diversification of language. It is invariably found that, wherever society is at once dense and refined, language tends to be uniform throughout the whole population, and to undergo few changes in the course of time. Wherever, on the contrary, we have a scattered and barbarous people, we have great diversities, and comparatively rapid alterations of language. Insomuch that, while English, French, and German are each spoken with little variation by many millions, there are islands in the Indian archipelago, probably not inhabited by one million, but in which there are hundreds of languages, as diverse as are English, French, and German. It is easy to see how this should be. There are peculiarities in the vocal organization of every person, tending to produce peculiarities of pronunciation; for example, it has been stated that each child in a family of six gave the monosyllable, fly, in a different manner, (eye, fy, ly, &c.) until, when the organs were more advanced, correct example induced the proper pronunciation of this and similar words. Such departures from orthoepy are only to be checked by the power of such example; but this is a power not always present, or not always of sufficient strength. The able and self-devoted Robert Moffat, in his work on South Africa, states, without the least regard to hypothesis, that amongst the people of the towns of that great region, “the purity and harmony of language is kept up by their pitchos or public meetings, by their festivals and ceremonies, as well as by their songs and their constant intercourse. With the isolated villages of the desert it is far otherwise. They have no such meetings; they are compelled to traverse the wilds, often to a great distance from their native village. On such occasions, fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a burden, often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of two or three infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, while others can just master a whole sentence, and those still farther advanced, romping and playing together, the children of nature, through the live-long day, become habituated to a language of their own. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious, and thus, from this infant Babel, proceeds a dialect composed of a host of mongrel words and phrases, joined together without rule, and in the course of a generation the entire character of the language is changed.” [317] I have been told, that in like manner the children of the Manchester factory workers, left for a great part of the day, in large assemblages, under the care of perhaps a single elderly person, and spending the time in amusements, are found to make a great deal of new language. I have seen children in other circumstances amuse themselves by concocting and throwing into the family circulation entirely new words; and I believe I am running little risk of contradiction when I say that there is scarcely a family, even amongst the middle classes of this country, who have not some peculiarities of pronunciation and syntax, which have originated amongst themselves, it is hardly possible to say how. All these things being considered, it is easy to understand how mankind have come at length to possess between three and four thousand languages, all different at least as much as French, German, and English, though, as has been shewn, the traces of a common origin are observable in them all.
What has been said on the question whether mankind were originally barbarous or civilized, will have prepared the reader for understanding how the arts and sciences, and the rudiments of civilization itself, took their rise amongst men. The only source of fallacious views on this subject is the so frequent observation of arts, sciences, and social modes, forms, and ideas, being not indigenous where we see them now flourishing, but known to have been derived elsewhere: thus Rome borrowed from Greece, Greece from Egypt, and Egypt itself, lost in the mists of historic antiquity, is now supposed to have obtained the light of knowledge from some still earlier scene of intellectual culture. This has caused to many a great difficulty in supposing a natural or spontaneous origin for civilization and the attendant arts. But, in the first place, several stages of derivation are no conclusive argument against there having been an originality at some earlier stage. In the second, such observers have not looked far enough, for, if they had, they could have seen various instances of civilizations which it is impossible, with any plausibility, to trace back to a common origin with others; such are those of China and America. They would also have seen civilization springing up, as it were, like oases amongst the arid plains of barbarism, as in the case of the Mandans. A still more attentive study of the subject would have shewn, amongst living men, the very psychological procedure on which the origination of civilization and the arts and sciences depended.
These things, like language, are simply the effects of the spontaneous working of certain mental faculties, each in relation to the things of the external world on which it was intended by creative Providence to be exercised. The monkeys themselves, without instruction from any quarter, learn to use sticks in fighting, and some build houses—an act which cannot in their case be considered as one of instinct, but of intelligence. Such being the case, there is no necessary difficulty in supposing how man, with his superior mental organization, (a brain five times heavier,) was able, in his primitive state, without instruction, to turn many things in nature to his use, and commence, in short, the circle of the domestic arts. He appears, in the most unfavourable circumstances, to be able to provide himself with some sort of dwelling, to make weapons, and to practise some simple kind of cookery. But, granting, it will be said, that he can go thus far, how does he ever proceed farther unprompted, seeing that many nations remain fixed for ever at this point, and seem unable to take one step in advance? It is perfectly true that there is such a fixation in many nations; but, on the other hand, all nations are not alike in mental organization, and another point has been established, that only when some favourable circumstances have settled a people in one place, do arts and social arrangements get leave to flourish. If we were to limit our view to humbly endowed nations, or the common class of minds in those called civilized, we should see absolutely no conceivable power for the origination of new ideas and devices. But let us look at the inventive class of minds which stand out amongst their fellows—the men who, with little prompting or none, conceive new ideas in science, arts, morals—and we can be at no loss to understand how and whence have arisen the elements of that civilization which history traces from country to country throughout the course of centuries. See a Pascal, reproducing the Alexandrian’s problems at fifteen; a Ferguson, making clocks from the suggestions of his own brain, while tending cattle on a Morayshire heath; a boy Lawrence, in an inn on the Bath road, producing, without a master, drawings which the educated could not but admire; or look at Solon and Confucius, devising sage laws, and breathing the accents of all but divine wisdom, for their barbarous fellow-countrymen, three thousand years ago—and the whole mystery is solved at once. Amongst the arrangements of Providence is one for the production of original, inventive, and aspiring minds, which, when circumstances are not decidedly unfavourable, strike out new ideas for the benefit of their fellow-creatures, or put upon them a lasting impress of their own superior sentiments. Nations, improved by these means, become in turn foci for the diffusion of light over the adjacent regions of barbarism—their very passions helping to this end, for nothing can be more clear than that ambitious aggression has led to the civilization of many countries. Such is the process which seems to form the destined means for bringing mankind from the darkness of barbarism to the day of knowledge and mechanical and social improvement. Even the noble art of letters is but, as Dr. Adam Fergusson has remarked, “a natural produce of the human mind, which will rise spontaneously, wherever men are happily placed;” original alike amongst the ancient Egyptians and the dimly monumented Toltecans of Yucatan. “Banish,” says Dr. Gall, “music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, all the arts and sciences, and let your Homers, Raphaels, Michael Angelos, Glucks, and Canovas, be forgotten, yet let men of genius of every description spring up, and poetry, music, painting, architecture, sculpture, and all the arts and sciences will again shine out in all their glory. Twice within the records of history has the human race traversed the great circle of its entire destiny, and twice has the rudeness of barbarism been followed by a higher degree of refinement. It is a great mistake to suppose one people to have proceeded from another on account of their conformity of manners, customs, and arts. The swallow of Paris builds its nest like the swallow of Vienna, but does it thence follow that the former sprung from the latter? With the same causes we have the same effects; with the same organization we have the manifestation of the same powers.”