CHAPTER III.
Can civilization grow out of barbarism? Dislike of progress,
especially if mental. Rediscovery of ancient knowledge.
Advance and retrogression. China and Japan—influence of
strangers. Decadence of nations—followed by a rise. The
Shemitic and Negro races. Varied religious ideas. The Negro
Fetish and Obi. Jewish, Arab, and Christian communication
with the dead. Australian idea about white men. Ideas of a
soul and futurity amongst the Aryans and Egyptians. Their
priesthood. The Aryans Monotheiste. An Aryan hymn. Max
Müller and Talboys Wheeler. Aryan conceptions compared with
Psalm civ. 1-4. Monotheism of the Egyptians. Shemitic
religions.
At one period of my life I entertained the idea that civilization never had grown, nor ever could grow, out of barbarism. Perhaps I have not yet wholly abandoned it. The considerations which the question involves are all but infinite. It is doubtful whether we can reduce them into shape without writing an extensive treatise. We will, however, attempt to do so, and present the subject to our readers to the best of our ability.
As far as our own personal and historic experience goes, we find that man has no natural propensity to learn beyond that which he has received simply as an animal. With him school is a hateful place, and education is a painful process, even in the midst of the highest civilization we see individuals who cast from them all the luxuries of life, and descend voluntarily to a level scarcely superior to that of the brute creation. But those who take kindly to education, and consent to try and learn everything which the teacher presents to their notice, are bounded by the amount of knowledge possessed by the instructor, who cannot impart to others information in matters of which all are ignorant. It is true that I once read a question propounded by his schoolmaster to one of my sons, which ran—"Enumerate upon paper all the capes, bays, and rivers of England that you don't know by name, and describe the seas which you have never heard of." Without dwelling upon the anecdote farther than to say, that it points out the absurdity of the idea that education of itself advances knowledge, we may pass on to remark, that even in nations, whose intellect is highly cultivated, the propensity to advance in knowledge is singularly small. Throughout the old world an inventor is usually regarded as a visionary, or a lunatic, and flouted by all his contemporaries.* From the time of Aristotle and Hippocrates, scarcely any advance was made in philosophy, and, throughout Europe, the fourteenth century was as barbarous, if not indeed more so, than the first of our era; and to such a dark age there is a strong clerical party in Great Britain which desires us to return.
* A man who had travelled much once said to me,—"I will
tell you the main difference between a Yankee and an
Englishman. If you inform the latter of some new discovery—
or propose the use of some recent invention for his own
benefit—he will tell you either that the thing is old, or
worthless. On the other hand, if you recount to the former
what you have told the latter of, his rejoinder will be, I
can improve upon that." This is true, and we are now
repeatedly adopting from the United States discoveries of
various kinds, which we rejected when offered to us in the
first place.
Yet, notwithstanding the propensity of cultivated nations to remain quiescent, there do appear, from time to time, individuals who, being discontented with things as they are, endeavour to bring about improvements in the arts, the sciences, and the general conditions of life. The recognition of a want, is an incentive to a thoughtful mind to supply the exigency. Whenever an individual endeavours to attain a definite end, he exercises his mind, not only in what he has been already taught, but what he can observe beyond that; he rakes up, if possible, the experience of others, studies their proceedings, and experiments with a definite object, and ponders upon the affinities, nature, and the like, of every substance which he surmises may be of service to him. When, by these means, he has obtained his purpose, he will repeatedly find that he has done no more than rediscover a something which was known thousands of years before his time. Without a doubt, much of the philosophy, science, art, religion, &c., of the present day, is due to a close observation and an attainment to the knowledge possessed by our predecessors. "Is there any thing whereof it may be said, see this is new?—it hath been already of old time, which was before us" (Eccles. i. 10).
If this be true, even though it may only be so to a partial extent, it is clearly more philosophical to believe that some primeval men were created with a considerable amount of knowledge, rather than that all were savage, barely, if at all, superior to monkeys, and that one or more of these, gradually elevated their race, by degrees so slow, as to be imperceptible in less time than many thousand years.
This side of the argument receives corroboration when we study the history of such semi-civilized countries as China, and such barbarous regions as those of Africa and Australia. In none of these parts do we see any general propensity to advance. In the first we see a retrogression; there is now no effort to repair ancient roads which have been worn away by centuries of traffic, to restore the old temples, towers, and landmarks, erected when time was younger, or even to keep up the teachings of Confucius. A similar apathy existed amongst the Japanese—yet no sooner do the civilized nations of Europe show the rulers of China and Japan that it is necessary for them to improve, if they desire to retain their power, than they attempt to learn the arts which have enabled their rivals to overcome them. In both cases, the progress is recognized as due to the interference of a nation, superior for the time being, to that whose education has been faulty. Advance, then, in such countries, is clearly due to foreign influence, rather than to an innate propensity to general, mental, scientific, or practical development.
But, on the other side, it may be alleged that the African has been in existence from time immemorial—that he has been in contact with the civilization of ancient and modern Egypt—with Christianity—with the ancient Tyrians and Carthaginians—with the Arabs—with the Spaniards, Portuguese, and British, and yet the African tribes remain almost as savage now as when they first were known. Similar remarks apply to the inhabitants of the Andaman Isles, of the vast islands of Borneo, Celebez, Papua, New Guinea, and others.