We have thus seen that, wherever we seem to lay hold of primeval savages who are supposed to represent to us the unchanged image of the primeval man, the evidence of their having been autochthonous in the places where we now find them is very weak, the proofs that they have never changed are altogether wanting; while geographical, physical, and linguistic considerations make it probable, though no more, that they originally came from more favored countries, that they were driven in the struggle for life into inhospitable climates, and that in accommodating themselves to the requirements of their new homes they gradually descended from a higher level of civilisation, indicated by their language and religion, to that low level in which we find them now. Some of them have sunk so low that, like individual members of the noblest families in Europe, they can no longer be reclaimed. Others, however, though shaken by sudden contact with the benefits and the dangers of a higher civilisation, may regain their former health and vigor, and, from having been retrogressive savages, become once more progressive in the great struggle for existence.
But if in the cases just mentioned we feel inclined to recognise the influence of degradation, and if we class such races as the Fuegians, the Eskimos, the Bushmen and Hottentots, the Papuans and brown Polynesians, as retrogressive savages, the question arises where we can hope to find specimens of the progressive savage, or rather of the natural man, who might teach us something of what man may have been before civilisation completely changed him into an artificial being, forgetful of the essential purposes of life, and who feels at home no longer in fields and forests, on rivers or mountains, but only in that enchanted castle of custom and fashion which he has erected for himself out of the unmeaning fragments of former ages?
My answer is that after we have collected the primitive tools and weapons which lie buried beneath the abodes of civilised man, our best chance of learning some of the secrets of primitive civilisation is to study the sacred hymns and the ancient legends of India, the traditions embodied in the Homeric poems, and whatever has been preserved to us of the most ancient literature of the progressive races of the world, the Italic, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic races. This of course applies to the Aryan race only. The Semitic races are represented to us in their progress from a nomadic to a more or less civilised life in the Old Testament, in the earliest ballads of the Arabs, and in passages scattered in the inscriptions of Assyrians, Babylonians, and Phœnicians. China too in its ancient literature allows us an insight into the age of a nascent society, while Egypt discloses to us the most ancient of all civilisations, which can boast of a literature at a time when the very idea of writing was as yet unknown to all other nations.
It is easy to say that all this is modern. In one sense no doubt it is. The Vedic literature, the most ancient of the whole Aryan race, presupposes a succession of intellectual strata which no chronology can measure. The language of the Veda is a work of art which it must have taken generations to build up. But is it reasonable to expect anything less modern in the history of the human race? And is there not a continuity in language and thought which allows us to see even in these literary remains, call them as modern as you like, something of the first dawn of human life. French is a very modern language, but in chien we still hear the Sanskrit ṥvan; in journal we recognise the old Vedic deity Dyaus. In the same way we can go back from what is common to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, to what was the common language of the Aryans before they broke up in different nationalities. In that common Aryan vocabulary, again, we can distinguish between what is radical and primitive and what is formal and secondary. Thus we may go back beyond all so-called historical limits to a stage of primitive thought, represented by a small number of radical concepts, and a still smaller number of formal elements. And is not that enough? Is it not more historical and more trustworthy, at all events, than all à priori speculations? and have we not at least a right to demand this from our à priori friends, that, in running their tunnel from the other end, they should take care that when it emerges into the daylight of history it should meet the tunnel which comparative philology, mythology, and theology have carefully dug out on the opposite side through the solid rock of facts? It will never do for à priori theories to run counter to à posteriori facts. It is a fact, for instance, proved by historical evidence, that fetichism represents a secondary stage in the growth of religion, and that it presupposes an earlier stage, in which the name and the concept of something divine, the predicate of every fetich, was formed. It would be fatal, therefore, to any system of à priori reasoning if it placed fetichism before that phase in the development of human thought which is represented by the first formation of divine concepts. It would be a real hysteron-proteron.
Again, it is a fact, proved by historical evidence, that all the words of the Aryan languages are derived from definite roots, expressive of definite concepts. It would therefore be fatal, again, to any system of à priori reasoning if it attempted to derive words direct from more or less inarticulate cries or imitations of cries, and not from that small number of roots which has been proved to supply all that is really wanted in explanation of all the facts of Aryan speech.
Again, it is a fact, proved by historical evidence, that most of the ancient deities of the Aryan nations have names expressive of the great powers of nature, and it would be an insult to all historical scholarship if our à priori friends were to attempt to prove once more that the worship of Zeus was derived from a general reverence felt for a gentleman of the name of Sky, or the belief in Eos from a sentimental devotion excited by a young lady of the name of Dawn. I believe it will be admitted by all honest anthropologists that the philological identification of one single word, Dyaus in the Veda and Zeus in Homer, has done more for rectifying our ideas of the true course of ancient Aryan civilisation than all the myths and customs of savages put together.
There was a time when the students of Oriental literature were inclined to claim an extravagant antiquity for the books which they had rescued from oblivion. But that tendency has now been changed into the very opposite. There may be traces of it among Chinese, sometimes among Egyptian and Accadian scholars, but wherever we have to deal with a real literature, whether in India, Persia, or Palestine, scholars are far more anxious to point out what is modern than what is ancient, whether in the Veda the Avesta, or the Old Testament. I certainly do not feel guilty of ever having claimed an excessive antiquity for the Rig-Veda. From the very first, though I placed the whole of Vedic literature before Buddhism, say the sixth century B.C. and though, owing to the changes in language, style, and thought which are clearly perceptible in different parts of Vedic literature, owing also to certain astronomical dates, I ventured to place it between 1000 and 1500 B.C., yet I have never concealed my impression that some portions of the Veda may turn out to be of far more recent origin.[23]
But is not that sufficient? Is it not perfectly marvellous that so much that is really old, so much that carries us back more than 3,000 years, should have been preserved to us at all? Why will people ask for what is impossible? Savages they say, do not read and write, and yet they want to have trustworthy information from literary documents composed by those very savages who cannot read and write. Among the Aryan nations, I do not believe in any written books before the sixth century B.C. In China, books may have been older, papyri are older in Egypt, and clay tablets in Babylon. But even when literature began, the very last that ancient people do is to write about themselves, about their manners and customs. What we know of the manners and customs of ancient people, when they were still passing through that phase which we call progressive savagery, comes to us from strangers only. As modern travellers give us full accounts of the life of savages who cannot speak and write for themselves, our only chance of learning something about our own ancestors, before they began to write, would be from ancient travellers who were interested in these promising savages. Now it is a piece of excessive good luck that, with regard to one of the Aryan races, with regard to our own Teutonic ancestors, we possess such a book, written by a stranger who felt deeply interested in German savages, and who has told us what they were, before they could write and tell us themselves what they were. If we want to study the progressive savage, not as he ought to have been, according to à priori philosophy, nor as he might have been, according to what we see among Fuegians of the present day, but as he really was according to the best information that could be collected by the best of historians, we must, read and read again the Germania of Tacitus.
If history means the evidence of contemporary eye-witnesses, I doubt whether history will ever enable us to see further into the natural transition of barbarism into civilisation than in the Germania of Tacitus. To divide civilisation from barbarism by a sharp line is of course impossible. There are remnants of barbarism in the most advanced state of civilisation, and there are sparks of civilisation in the most distant ages of barbarism—at least of that healthy barbarism which is represented to us in the Germania, and of which we find but scanty fragments in the ancient literature of the civilising nations of the world.
Here we may see ourselves as we were not quite two thousand years ago. Here we may see from how small beginnings the highest civilisation may be reached. Here we may study the natural man as he really was, in some respects certainly a savage, but a progressive savage, as we know from his later history, and certainly without one sign of that corruption and decay which is so plainly visible in Hottentots and Papuans.