There is, however, plenty of work still to be done in slowly following up the course of human progress and tracing it back to its earliest stages, as far as literary, monumental, and traditional documents will allow us to do so. There are many intricate windings of that historical river to be explored, many riddles to be solved, many lessons to be learnt. One thing only is quite certain—namely, that the private diary of the first man will never be discovered, least of all at Cape Horn.
I have thus tried to show how untenable is the theory which would boldly identify the modern savage with primitive man, and how cautious we ought to be whenever we take even a few hints here and there from degraded tribes of the present day in order to fill out our imaginary picture of the earliest civilisation of our race. Some lessons, and even important lessons, may be learnt from savages, if only they are studied in a truly scholarlike spirit, as they have been, for instance, by Callaway and Codrington, by Waitz and Tylor. But if the interpretation of an Homeric custom or myth requires care, that of African or Polynesian customs or myths requires ten times greater care, and if a man shrinks from writing on the Veda because he does not know Sanskrit, he should tremble whenever he writes the names of Zulus, unless he has some idea of what Bântu grammar means.
In arguing so far, I have carefully kept to the historical point of view, though I am well aware that the principal traits in the imaginary picture of primitive man are generally taken from a very different source. We are so made that for everything that comes before us we have to postulate a cause and a beginning. We therefore postulate a cause and a beginning for man. The ethnologist is not concerned with the first cause of man, but he cannot resist the craving of his mind to know at least the beginning of man.
Most ethnologists used to hold that, as each individual begins as a child, mankind also began as a child; and they imagined that a careful observation of the modern child would give them some idea of the character of the primeval child. Much ingenuity has been spent on this subject since the days of Voltaire, and many amusing books have been the result, till it was seen at last that the modern baby and the primeval baby have nothing in common but the name, not even a mother or a nurse.
It is chiefly due to Darwin and to the new impulse which he gave to the theory of evolution that this line of argument was abandoned as hopeless. Darwin boldly asked the question whose child the primeval human baby could have been, and he answered it by representing the human baby as the child of non-human parents. Admitting even the possibility of this transitio in aliud genus, which the most honest of Darwin's followers strenuously deny, what should we gain by this for our purpose—namely, for knowing the primitive state of man, the earliest glimmerings of the human intellect? Our difficulties would remain exactly the same, only pushed back a little further.
Disappointing as it may sound, the fact must be faced, nevertheless, that our reasoning faculties, wonderful as they are, break down completely before all problems concerning the origin of things. We may imagine, we may believe, anything we like about the first man; we can know absolutely nothing. If we trace him back to a primeval cell, the primeval cell that could become a man is more mysterious by far than the man that was evolved from a cell. If we trace him back to a primeval pro-anthropos, the pro-anthropos is more unintelligible to us than even the protanthropos would be. If we trace back the whole solar system to a rotating nebula, that wonderful nebula which by evolution and revolution could become an inhabitable universe is, again, far more mysterious than the universe itself.
The lesson that there are limits to our knowledge is an old lesson, but it has to be taught again and again. It was taught by Buddha, it was taught by Socrates, and it was taught for the last time in the most powerful manner by Kant. Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge; it might be called more truly the knowledge of our ignorance, or, to adopt the more moderate language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.—Nineteenth Century.
LE BONHOMME CORNEILLE.
BY HENRY M. TROLLOPE.