After relating the history of man in prehistoric times, our philosopher gives, in the second part of her work, the present picture of the races as their physical characteristics and their social orders differentiate them so profoundly: At the top, the white race, the last flower of the genealogical tree, to which all the great nationalities belong. By the side of it, its two diverging branches, the Turanians (Hungarians, Finns, and Turks) and the Aramæans or Semites (Jews, Arabs, and Syrians). Then come the three—Hyperborean, Mongolian, and Sinitic—branches of the yellow stock, who inhabit eastern and northern Asia. We find also the Malays covering the surface of the two southern peninsulas of Asia and Oceania. They constitute a lateral ramification, which, together with the red or copper-colored race of North America, may have had the same point of departure as the Mongols. Lastly comes the negro race, which has been separated a much longer time from the common stock from which man has diverged.
Further on, Madame Royer discusses the anatomical relations of man and the ape, with the conclusion deduced as resulting from phenomena of observation that the human family is only a term in a series of which the different primates are the other steps. In short, the further we go back in the past of primitive man, the more we meet manifestations of passions as ferocious as base. This is, moreover, easily conceivable. The savage, at war with Nature and his like, and placed in conditions of life common to the animal world, has in the beginning all its bad instincts.
The end of the second part of L'Origine de l'Homme et des Sociétés is devoted to the most complex problem of anthropology—that of the beginning of speech and the origin of language. Man, in the view of the author, first makes his wants and feelings known to other beings by a series of signs. The three primordial faculties—feeling, thinking, and wishing—were the point of departure, the cause and the rule of all languages that man has created in his entire progress. As his mind has shaped a new idea, it has found a new sign to express it; but the process varying with the race, time and the environment have produced the diversity of tongues which we observe. In the beginning a more or less complicated cry suffices to express the thought in its original syncretism. Then, under the influence of reflection continued through ages, from generation to generation, it becomes transformed and decomposed into various elements. Every noun was primarily an adjective-substantive. For example, thunder was designated by imitating it; the horse, by its neighing and the sound of galloping. The relations of place, possession, and those of many other kinds were probably expressed by the look, the attitude, a motion with the hand, etc. Ideas of number were developed slowly. The earliest languages contained only about a hundred words, and these sufficed for centuries for the needs of human thought, confined within the narrow experience of a generation. It results from these facts that in every sense the formation of languages is a consequence of social relations. But here rises a question as important as difficult to answer: When did man begin to speak? From the harmony between the anthropological classifications deduced from philological research and those drawn from the labors of the physiologists it appears evident that the spontaneous and primitive constitution of the first elements of language was, among all known human races, posterior to their geographical and ethnical separation. In other words, local varieties had already been formed, and men had acquired the anatomical differences that distinguish them to-day before they conquered the faculty of speech. However it may be with these hypotheses, we may assent fully to the conclusion of the chapter that man will never deserve the name of the reasoning animal till he shall possess a logical and single language for all the members of the great human association. May this dream be realized by the destruction of the barriers which now divide so many peoples!
In the third part of the work, Madame Royer treats of the development of human society. Everything permits the supposition that from a very remote period the anthropoid primate that served as the root stock of man became omnivorous, with a predominance of carnivorous tastes. These conditions of life therefore invoked an at least rudimentary social instinct—that is, animals lived in troops collected under chiefs, with a tactics for mutual defense. The most ancient documents, in fact, show the human species living in rival or allied tribes. Hunting and fishing were the principal business of these primitive races, which relied for assistance at first on their agility, muscular strength, and arms of stone of a workmanship still in its infancy. Flint was then very roughly cut. But now a great advance was achieved for man, a step toward industry and civilization. This second stage was the discovery of fire, an immediate consequence of the cutting of flints, when sparks would fly out at each blow. Yet a later epoch probably had to be reached for the real employment of fire in cooking food. Previous to that it could serve man only for warming himself, or for protecting himself at night against wild beasts.
Next came the earliest industries—the potter's art, the making of rude clothing, and the construction of habitations; and about this time the instinct of property begins to develop. For a long time there are no other securities than force. On the other hand, the diversities of the faculties, which are very unequally distributed among the various races, and even among the different individuals of each of them, create social inequalities, the chief cause of the crime, wars, and misery with which every page of the history of man is soiled, and from which the original organization of civil society sprang.
At the close of her treatise the eminent anthropologist states the formula of the highest social prosperity: she believes that it resides in an equal liberty for each member of a national collectivity and in the free play of individual initiatives. Man will work in as large a sphere of action as the right of another leaves him, striving to broaden his place at the feast of life. Each one will climb the social ladder in his own way and will fix himself on the step on which his aptitudes will meet the best reward. Each individual will therefore gain a large sum of well-being, and the species will possess a total maximum of enjoyment.
Such, in broad outline, is the substance of this book, which naturalists and philosophers have consulted now for many years. It is not within the province of our sketch to dwell upon any of the bold assertions and hypotheses in it that have been invalidated by later geological discoveries; and, notwithstanding a few errors in detail, almost inevitable in a book of the kind, the Origine de l'Homme is, as a whole, a work as vigorously thought out as clearly and generously written.
Madame Clémence Royer has further occupied herself with special researches on subjects of the same nature. Their results have been published in the highly esteemed review, the Bulletin of the Société d'Anthropologie. The most important of these memoirs relate to the Craniology of the Quaternary Period, the Celts, the Origin of the Different Human Races (1873), and the Domestication of Monkeys (1887). The last work was published at the time of the appearance of a book by M. Victor Meunier,[42] a believer in the possibility of domesticating the simian race. His proposition, received in France as a kind of a joke, taxed the genius of the Parisian caricaturists, because the author had suggested that newborn children be nursed by monkeys, whose milk was most like that of the human mother. Of course it was an easy subject to joke about. Madame Royer showed how little originality there was in this book. We might, she said, undoubtedly succeed in educating monkeys, and they would at the end of many generations be in certain cases superior to the dog and the horse. Unfortunately, the struggle for existence opposed the adoption of the Utopian idea. The place for each human recruit at the social table is now too narrow for any part of it to be left for "our lower brethren."
Anthropological sciences were not the only ones to which the encyclopedic mind of our learned philosopher was attracted. A few years ago she returned to her earlier studies, and collaborated on the Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Économie Politique of Léon Say (1891-'92). The most profound article she wrote for this work was that on the word positivism. According to it, the Positive Philosophy dates, not from Auguste Comte, who is believed to have introduced it, but from Bacon; for its essential features may be found in the Novum Organum and the Scientia nuova. Furthermore, Madame Royer found that Comte "emasculated" the doctrine of the famous chancellor. The principal dogma of the system is the impossibility of knowledge of first causes by our reason. This is an error, says Madame Royer. Two distinct ideas have been confounded in the term first causes: first, the permanent cause of phenomena, their essential "substratum," the discovery of which man may perhaps some day reach; and, second, the supposed primary term of each phenomenal law. But if the world is eternal, this last does not exist, since "the eternity of the substantial involves the eternity of its effects." Yet, while she attacks Comte's errors in the sphere of sociology, she renders full justice to his Course of Positive Philosophy, which was often in advance of its time in respect to the exact sciences. Among other of Madame Royer's publications we may cite Zoroastre, son Epoque et sa Doctrine (Zoroaster, his Epoch and his Doctrine, two volumes, 1875); Les Ages Préhistoriques (The Prehistoric Ages, 1876); La Terre et ses Anciens Habitants (The Earth and its Ancient Inhabitants, 1891), a sort of summary of recent progress in paleontology, and of facts that may be derived from the study of living beings; and Les Variations Séculaires des Saisons (Secular Variation of the Seasons, 1892), a little work in which the author endeavors to confirm by observation a theory that climatic variations are dependent, in the meteorological sense, on planetary movements. She showed, for example, that in the cold winter of 1879-'80 the distribution of the planets around the sun was precisely that which should give the greatest degree of cold for our hemisphere.