No more perfect example of tribal organization exists than that of the tribes of Australasia. In a very large proportion of existing tribes, the tribe is an aggregate of several stocks or distinct bodies of kindred, the persons composing the tribes being included in stocks which are, or are accounted, distinct from each other. Two tribal customs, namely, the prohibition of marriage between persons of the same stock, and the reckoning of kinship through females only, so that children are accounted of the stock of their mother, sustain this organization. Persons of the same stock, too, owe duties to each other, and are to some extent participants in each other’s liabilities. An injury done by a man is an injury done by his stock, which may be avenged upon any member thereof; or an injury done to a man is an injury done by his stock, for which every member of it is bound to seek vengeance. As a consequence of these customs, a husband must be of a different stock from his wife or wives, and therefore must be accounted of a different stock from his children; and if he has wives of different stocks, then their respective children are accounted of different stocks. More than one stock, it will thus be perceived, is represented in every household. And since a man owes duties to his stock—the duties of acknowledged blood-relationship—while to those of his family who are not of his stock, there being nothing but the accident of birth to unite him, it necessarily follows that the family among these tribes has very little cohesion.
Wholly sensuous is the language of the Australian, their abstraction tending only in the way of arithmetic as far as the number five, and that itself being quite an unusual stretch. Polysyllabic as it is in formation, and having the accent on the penultimate, it is not at all inharmonious. Though it comprehends many divergent forms, yet they seem to be all fundamentally connected, constituting a group entirely isolated from any of the linguistic families of the other parts of the world. Within its narrow confines the language is well developed and sensuously copious and expressive.
Like almost all other savages, the native Australians are rapidly disappearing before the spread of civilization. The European settlers crowd them out of all the more fertile and habitable lands, pressing them more and more into the desert of the interior, where they find it exceedingly hard to obtain in their roving, unsettled lives the necessary means of subsistence. Great numbers are thus forced to succumb to deprivations not of their own bringing, and not a few to the diseases and vices brought among them by the new possessors of their domains. The lowest estimate of their number, prior to the settlement of Europeans among them, gives over 150,000, but the natives still surviving scarcely figure one-half of that population. It is only a question of a decade or two when the Australian, like the Tasmanian, who was once his near neighbor, will have vanished from off the face of the country, leaving behind him his implements of war and the chase, his culinary and domestic apparatus, and the rude carvings of his hands in caves and in rocks, as the principal evidences of his earthly existence.
By competent critics the Australian is pronounced to be the most degraded of human beings, and the lowest type of man. In reason, love, generosity, conscience and mere responsibility he is the inferior of many of the lower animals, and in the erection of a house for comfort, shelter and security he is surpassed by creatures even as low in the scale as the worms and insects. It is true, when hunger has to be met, that he has shown some skill in the manufacture of implements necessary to the obtainment of his food, and also in resisting the attacks of his own kind and of the natural enemies by which he is surrounded. There is no doubt that he is well satisfied with his condition in life, and could hardly be induced to exchange it for another. He has doubtless fulfilled the purpose of his being in the world, and unable to cope in the struggle for existence with a superior civilization must succumb to the latter which is better fitted to endure, a sad but impressive lesson which is the teaching of every chapter of the world’s geologic story.
LIVING SOULS.
All things were made by the Word of God. In this Word was life, spirit or energy. Without it was not anything made that was made. Hence, says Elihu, “the Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life;” or, as Moses testifies, “the Lord God formed man, the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives; and man became a Living Soul.”
Now, if it be asked what the Scriptures define a living soul to be, the answer is a living natural, or animal body, whether of beasts, birds, fish or men. The phrase living creature is the exact synonyme of living soul. The words nephesh chayiah are in Hebrew the signs of the ideas expressed by Moses, nephesh signifying creature, life, soul, or breathing frame from the verb breathe, and chayiah, a noun from the verb to live, of life. Nephesh chayiah is the genus which includes all species of living creatures. In the common version of the Scriptures, it is rendered living soul, and, therefore, under this form of expression they speak of all flesh which breathes in air, earth and sea.
From the evidence adduced a man then is merely a body of life in the sense of his being an animal or living creature—nephesh chayiah adam. Therefore, as a natural man, he has no preëminence over the creatures God has made. Moses makes no distinction between him and them, for he calls them all living souls, breathing the breath of lives. His language, literally rendered, says, “and God said, the waters shall produce abundantly sheretz chayiah nephesh the reptile living soul;” and again, “kal nephesh chayiah erameshat every living soul creeping.” In another verse, “let the earth bring forth nephesh chayiah the living soul after its kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind,” and “lekol rumesh ol earetz asher bu nephesh chayiah to everything creeping upon the earth which has in it living breath,” that is, the breath of lives. And lastly, “whatsoever Adam called nephesh chayiah the living soul that was the name thereof.”
Not even are quadrupeds and men living souls, but they are vivified by the same breath and spirit. Neshemet chayim, or the breath of lives, and not the breath of life as the text of the common version has it, is said to be in the inferior creatures as well as in man. Chayim in the Hebrew is in the plural number, and therefore the words neshemet chayim should be rendered as above. Thus, God said, “I bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh wherein is ruach chayim spirit of lives.” And in another place, “they went in to Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, in which is ruach chayim spirit of lives.” And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing, and every man; all in whose nostrils was neshemet ruach chayim, BREATH OF SPIRIT OF LIVES. Now, as has been previously affirmed, it was the neshemet chayim with which God, according to the testimony of Moses, inflated the nostrils of Adam. If, therefore, this were a particle of the divine essence, as it is declared, which became the immortal soul in man, then all other animals have likewise immortal souls, for they all received breath of spirit of lives in common with him. Begotten of the same Invisible Power, and formed from the substance of a common earth mother, man and beasts were animated by the same spirit, and constituted to be living breathing frames, though of different species, and in God they lived, and moved, and had their continued being.
Returning to the philology of our subject, it is to be remarked that by a metonymy, or a figure of speech where the container is put for the thing contained, and conversely, nephesh, breathing frame, is put for neshemet ruach chayim, which, when in motion, causeth the frame to respire. Hence nephesh signifies not only breath and soul, but also life, or those mutually affective, positive and negative principles in all living creatures, whose closed circuits cause motion of and in their frames. By Moses these principles, or qualities of the same thing, are apparently styled the Ruach Elohim, or by Timothy the Spirit of Him “who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen, nor can see,” and which, when the word was spoken, first moved upon the face of the waters, and afterwards disengaged the light, evolved the expanse, gathered the waters together, brought forth the green vegetation, manifested the celestial universe, vitalized the breathing frames of the dry land, the firmament and the seas, and formed man in His own image and likeness. This ruach, or spirit, was the instrumental principle commissioned by the glorious Increate for the elaboration of the natural world, the erection of this earthly house, and its equipment with living souls of every species; and it is this same instrumentally formative power that, together with the neshemeh, or breath, that keeps them from perishing, or returning to the dust. “If God set his heart against man, He will withdraw to himself ruachu veneshemetu, that is, His spirit and His breath; all flesh shall “perish together, and man shall turn again to dust.” “By the neshemet el,” or breath of God, “frost is given.” Speaking of reptiles and beasts, David saith, “thou withdrawest ruachem—their spirit—they die; and to their dust they return. Thou sendest forth ruheck—thy spirit—they are created.”