Who first applied fire to the metal, and thus made it plastic as the clay and sharper than the stone? who first discovered fire itself? No one knows; nor is the question worth asking. But there is one thing well worth noticing: it is the answer given to the question, and that in the rudest of times and amongst many various nations. Some god bestowed it. This tendency to look for a supernatural giver is very soon and very widely developed. And what is more, the idea of a giver has called forth amongst rude selfish people struggling for existence, the desire to manifest their gratitude by some act of worship which should also be some act of self-denial. On a certain day of the year all lights shall be extinguished, and one man amongst them (endowed for the very purpose with imaginary sanctity) shall rekindle the flame, thus acknowledging by this symbol its reception from the divine Giver. The ancient Peruvians drew their fire on this solemn occasion at once from the sun; they collected its rays into a focus by a concave mirror of polished metal, and thus ignited some dried cotton, or bark, or fungus. Nothing could be more expressive and appropriate than such a symbolic act. It is a pity that the historian has to record that other symbolic acts (if such they are to be considered) were of a cruel and hideous description. The savage is not accustomed only to thank God; he has, he thinks, to propitiate His favour; and as he has nothing to give, he destroys in honour of the universal Bestower. The worship of the American Indian is tainted more than any other we read of with the rite of human sacrifice.
Various methods for obtaining fire have been invented, but the earliest seems to have been by the friction of two dry pieces of wood. It was a progressive step, we presume, when the bark of a certain tree or a dried fungus was used for tinder. However produced, it was to the savage, in the first instance, itself a tool, the immediate instrument he employed to cut down the tree which would have resisted a long while his flint hatchet. We thought that all known people had made discovery of fire and converted it to their own purposes; but the inhabitants of the Ladrones, when discovered by the Spaniards, are said to have shrunk from fire as from a thing they simply feared: “they called it a devil, a god that bit fiercely when it was touched, and lived on wood, which they saw it devour.”
Mr Wilson entitles the chapter which treats on this subject ‘The Promethean Instinct: Fire.’ The next chapter is headed ‘The Maritime Instinct: the Canoe.’ Then we have ‘The Technological Instinct,’ and so on. Why this ostentatious use of the term Instinct? Did men hunt after fire even before they had seen it, as an animal might be supposed to hunt after food even before it had eaten? Do men build canoes as birds their nests or beavers their dams? What is the leading idea of Mr Wilson when he thus liberally applies to us the term Instinct? We have desires and we have intelligence suggesting means to an end. Is it the desire that is instinctive, or the apprehension of the means whereby the desire can be gratified? Men have a desire to pass from one side of the river to the other; perhaps the animal they were in chase of has swam the stream; they have observed that wood will float, that a large piece of wood will float with a man on it; they procure such piece of wood, and paddle themselves across. The knowledge which the man displays in all this follows from his previous perceptions. Perception, memory, judgment, are all exercised in a quite normal manner, and the desire to float across the stream has arisen from the peculiar circumstances in which the man was placed. What element of mystery is there in this transaction which calls for the name of Instinct? For the word Instinct is applied to certain actions of animals because the ordinary laws of psychology are, or seem, inadequate to explain them—because a certain mystery hangs over the event which we mark by the name Instinct. When we see animals acting, without the teaching of experience, in the same sort of way in which we act after that teaching of experience, we, perplexed to explain this anomaly, pronounce the action instinctive. The bee and the bird build in this inexplicable manner. Probably a more minute investigation may enable us to resolve whatever we call Instinct into some delicacy of the senses, or some rapidity of the judgment, peculiar to the animal. Meanwhile the term is serviceable as marking a class of unexplained phenomena. But how is it applicable to man in his capacity of boat-builder? The sort of canoe he will build, the materials he will use, the tools he will work with, are all determined for him by existing circumstances, and the actual amount of his knowledge. Or is it the vague desire to put to sea, prompting some manner of boat-building, that Mr Wilson calls our “maritime instinct?” Are we driven to sea like ducks to a pond? The peasantry of an inland country are not conscious of any such instinct, and would be very unfortunate if they possessed it.
We have no wish to expel the terms instinct and instinctive from our popular diction, even when applied to human actions. There are cases when men act with a suddenness and decision which remind us of the animal in his promptest moods, and we naturally apply to these the term instinctive; and sometimes we apply the term to a tendency or desire which we cannot at the time trace to our senses, or to the usual operations of the mind. But when an author formally—in the very titles of his chapters—supplies us with “Promethean and maritime instincts,” we may be excused if we ask for some precise definition of the term.
“Speech is one of the instincts of man, but it is by the voluntary exercise of his intellectual faculties, as we conceive, that he is enabled to develop it into language.” This sounds oracular, but, like most oracles, it is very obscure. What does Mr Wilson mean by speech as contrasted with language? Is speech the mere giving of names to things, and language the formation of a grammar? But grammar is only a naming of a more complex kind, a naming of things and events in their more complicated relations. And what speech was ever formed that had not some grammar, that was not also a language? If by speech, in contrast to language, is meant the mere utterance of articulate sounds which have no meaning attached to them, then what proof have we that men ever passed through a stage of unmeaning gibberish? or could anything so purposeless be dignified with the name of an instinct? The desire to speak, or to communicate our thoughts or our wants, is sometimes spoken of as an instinct. But the need man has of co-operation, and the ability he has to co-operate, and those general sympathies and affections which render him a social being, are sufficient to explain this desire. Such a desire may be contemplated as existing apart and prior to the possession of language, but there can be no reason for applying the term instinct to it, unless we apply that term to all our desires. So strong and inevitable is this desire to express our thoughts, that we have not the least doubt that, if the human larynx had not been fitted for speech, man would have invented a language of signs. His hands and feet would have talked, if his tongue and palate did not. His larynx being mute and all other faculties remaining the same, he would have talked with his fingers and written as the Chinese write, whose characters are signs for things, not for words.
The maritime or boat-building instinct has, at all events, been very much under the control of circumstances. Sometimes the tree was felled and hollowed, sometimes the bark was stretched over wicker-work, or skins of beasts were employed, or planks were made into a raft. The Egyptian bound some of his water-jugs together and made a raft of them. Some tribes have limited themselves to the paddle or the oar; some have spread the sail, and spread it very boldly. The Malay hoists his large sail over a couple of planks of wood sewed together with bark, and balances this fragile craft by means of two long spars fastened athwart and projecting to windward. In such a vessel as this he will scud fearlessly through tempestuous seas from one island to another. We may boast, and very justly, of our steam-engines, our electric telegraphs, and of other triumphant employments of the powers of nature; but even to this day there is not a more pleasing or thrilling spectacle, or a more glorious instance of the powers of nature turned to the service of man, than when some solitary boatman sits, at the helm with sail outspread, borne by the wind along the surface of the sea. The water floats him, the wind speeds him; he is for the moment master of the two great elements. Verily the savage has his joy, his hour of pride and exultation.
It is curious that the natives of North America limited themselves to the oar or the paddle. The Peruvians appear to have been the only people of this continent who, at the time of its discovery by Columbus, employed the sail. This is a striking instance of the very general fact, almost amounting to a law, that when a people have attained to a certain proficiency in the arts, sufficient to render life tolerable, there ensues a long pause in the career of progress. It requires the stimulus of an urgent want to set at work the inventive faculties of the savage; and when his invention has secured to him an agreeable existence, or what he considers such, there intervenes the force of habit and the attachment to familiar customs. Fortunately the differences of climate, or other external circumstances, require or suggest different inventions, even in this early stage of society, and thus one barbarian may be able to teach another. A people who had brought the canoe propelled by oars to perfection, would probably rest contented with it; they could not have invented the sail themselves; they might receive it from another people with whom it had been, from the commencement, their favourite mode of traversing the sea. Our “technological instincts,” as Mr Wilson calls them, go to sleep in the savage when he is no longer pinched by hunger or cold, or other pressing inconvenience. They awake again in the civilised man, with whom invention itself has become an agreeable effort or an intellectual triumph. Some sort of culinary vessels are wanted, and if these have been once shaped out of clay, the same kind of pottery will content a people for ages. If nature has thrown them the calabash, a ready-made vessel, their instinct of pottery will not be developed at all; they will content themselves with the calabash.
Mr Wilson brings together in a very pictorial manner the two extremes of this human art of boat-building:—
“On the banks of the Scottish Clyde the modern voyager from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers, with ribs of steel, and planks, not of oak, but of iron, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and pleasure to us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the forehammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel appliances of iron shipbuilding, tell of the modern era of steam; but meanwhile, underneath these very shipbuilders’ yards, lie the memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back up the stream of human industry far into prehistoric times. The earliest recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt designation of St Enoch’s Croft. This primitive canoe, hewn out of a single oak, rested in a horizontal position on its keel; and within it, near the prow, there lay a curiously suggestive memorial of the mechanical arts of the remote era to which the ancient ship of the Clyde must be assigned. This was a beautifully finished stone axe or celt, doubtless one of the simple implements of the allophylian Caledonian to whom the canoe belonged, if not, indeed, the tool with which it had been fashioned into shape.”
From the hollowed trunk of a tree, hewn with a stone axe by this “allophylian,” as Mr Wilson delights in calling him, to the iron steam-vessel that would have carried him and all his tribe across the Atlantic, the advance is great indeed. And a very curious sentiment must arise in the man who has seen this canoe dug up from under the busy streets of Glasgow, and then afterwards in another continent, on some lake or river not yet quite appropriated by the white man, has watched some prowling Indian paddling about in a canoe not much unlike it. The past and the present seem to live together before him: it is not the ends of the earth only that are brought together for him; he appears to embrace the first and the last of the generations of mankind.