[THE SAVAGE.]
BY PROF. F. MAX MÜLLER.
There are people in the world who are very fond of asking what they call point-blank questions. They generally profess to hate all shilly-shallying, and they are at no pains to hide their suspicion that anyone who declines to say yes or no to any question which they choose to ask has either his intellect clouded by metaphysics or has not the courage of his opinions. The idea that it is often more difficult to ask a sensible question than to answer it, and that a question, however pointed it may sound, may for all that be so blunt and vague that no accurate and honest thinker would care or dare to answer it, never enters their mind; while the thought that there are realms of knowledge where indefinite language is more appropriate, and in reality more exact and more truthful than the most definite phraseology, is scouted as mere fencing and intellectual cowardice.
One of those point-blank questions which has been addressed to me by several reviewers of my books is this, “Tell us, do you hold that man began as a savage or not?” To say that man began as a savage, and that the most savage and degraded races now existing present us with the primeval type of man, seems to be the shibboleth of a certain school of thought, a school with which on many points I sympathize, so long as it keeps to an accurate and independent inquiry into facts, and to an outspoken statement of its discoveries, regardless of all consequences, but from which I totally dissent as soon as it tries to make facts subservient to theories. I am told that my own utterances on this subject have been ambiguous. Now even granting this, I could never understand why a certain hesitation in answering so difficult a question should rouse such angry feelings, till it began to dawn on me that those who do not unreservedly admit that man began as a savage are supposed to hold that man was created a perfect and almost angelic being. This would amount to denying the gospel of the day, that man was the offspring of a brute, and hence, I suppose, the Anathema.
Now I may say this, that though I have hesitated to affirm that man began as a savage, whatever that may mean, I have been even more careful not to commit myself to the opinion that man began as an angel, or as a child, or as a perfect rational being. I strongly object to such alternatives as that if man did not begin as a savage he must have begun as a child. It would be dreadful if, because there is no sufficient evidence to enable us to form a decided opinion on any given subject, we were to be driven into a corner by such alternatives, instead of preserving our freedom of judgment until we have the complete evidence before us.
But in our case the evidence is as yet extremely scanty, and, from the nature of the case, will probably always remain so. If we want to prove that man began as a child, what evidence can we produce? If we appealed to history, history is impossible before the invention of language; and what language could the primitive child have spoken, what life could it have lived, without a father and without a mother? If we give up history and appeal to our inner consciousness, our reason, nay, our very imagination, collapses when approaching the problem how such a child could have been born, how such a child could have been nourished, reared, and protected from wild animals and other dangers. We feel we have come to the end of our tether, and are running our head against a very old, but a very solid, wall.
Has Kant then written in vain; and is it still supposed that our senses or our reason can ever reach transcendent truths? Has the lesson to be taught again and again that both our senses and our reason have their limits; that we are indeed tethered, and that it is no proof of intellectual strength or suppleness to try to stand on our own shoulders? We are so made that neither can our senses perceive nor can our reason conceive the real beginning and end of anything, whether in space or in time. And yet we imagine we can form a definite conception of the true beginning of mankind.
Then what remains? There remains the humbler and yet far nobler task of studying the earliest records of man's life on earth: to go back as far as literature, language, and tools will allow us, and for a time to consider that as primitive which, whether as a tool, or as a word, or as a proverb, or as a prayer, is the last we can reach, and seems at the same time so simple, so rational, so intelligible, as to require no further antecedents. That is the true work of the historian, and of the philosopher too; and there is plenty of work left for both of them before they dive into the whirlpool of their inner consciousness to find there the primordial savage.
Instead of allowing ourselves to be driven into a corner by such a question as “Did man begin as a savage or as a child?” we have a perfect right to ask the question, What is meant by these two words, savage and child?