“O
TUT of the East came Light” has been the text on which all great historians of civilisation have preached, from the authors of the Mosaic literature down through Greek and Roman times to our own. Hebrew writers have looked back to Mesopotamia; Greek writers to Egypt; Roman writers to Greece; writers of Western and Northern Europe and the New World to Rome, Greece, and Palestine. Their belief is justified in so far as it is based on two great facts. Man first found in the warm, alluvial valleys of Southern Asia and North-Eastern Africa the conditions of climate and soil most favourable to his upward progress from the savage state; and from these regions, so soon as with increase of numbers he was moved to migrate, his steps were turned by the geographical conditions surrounding his early homes, in a general way, westward. He knew not yet how to cross broad seas; deserts, sandy steppes, high mountains and tropical forests and swamps were equally deterrent. The Polar ice-sheet, which had extended in Pleistocene times to the Caspian, Black Sea, and Danube basins, and still lay, in the dawn of human civilisation, far south of its present limits, probably rendered, with its wide fringe of impassable moraine, forest, and tundra country, all the lands included in the present Empire of Russia singularly inhospitable. Whoso looks at the map of the Western Hemisphere, bearing these facts in mind, will see at once that the line of least resistance, and, indeed, the only possible line, led the men of the great sub-tropic river valleys towards and along the Mediterranean coasts.
Civilisation from Without
In so far, therefore, as European civilisation is a state of things due to influences from without, it is due to the East; but that is very far from the whole explanation of its origin. The impulse to rise above savagery has not always—not, indeed, usually—come to peoples from without; and probably in primitive time, when communications were slow and difficult to a degree which we can hardly realise, the origin of local culture was seldom or never to be accounted for thus. In modern days there have been obvious instances to the contrary; but even now it remains to be seen how far civilisations originated among absolutely barbarous peoples by contact with higher races are real and living growths. Examples of the modification and possible elevation of ancient indigenous societies by incoming aliens, such as have been seen in Mexico or Peru, India or Japan, Egypt or Barbary, are not in point; for in these cases local civilisations certainly existed long before the foreign influence. We must look to the history of the relations of white and negro, or other savage, races in the homes of the latter, and the results of such inquiries are far from conclusive. Does civilisation so originated grow and thrive? Do even the races thus civilised themselves any longer thrive and grow? Our antipodean colonies, and the story of the native races of North America, if there were no other instances, would not admit a categorical affirmative. Nay, rather, the evidence so far available tends to discount the permanence of transferred civilisation, and to throw doubt on the continued vitality of races so civilised.
The Escape from Savagery
It is necessary to raise this question at the outset of the present essay because it has been too often assumed, both implicitly and explicitly, by historians of our civilisation, that all the cultural development of Central, Western, and Northern Europe has been due to alien influence, exerted from the south and south-east, and mainly by the agency of the Greek, Græco-Roman, and Græco-Romano-Semitic (the Christian) systems. Maine’s famous dictum that “Nothing moves in the world which is not Greek in origin” has long dominated our thoughts. Yet that magnificent generalisation is contrary not only to inherent probability, but to known fact. Escape from the savage state, as Buckle showed, depends in the first place on the existence of such conditions of geographical environment as favour the accumulation of wealth and the development of a leisured class—that is, such as conduce to the production of a good deal more than the minimum necessary for life. It can, therefore, have taken place wherever man found comparatively genial climate and remunerative soil, and, in process of time, made for himself, by clearing forests or draining swamps, an arable area which would feed him and his more abundantly than was absolutely necessary.
Where these conditions were presumably present it is unreasonable to suppose that the beginnings of civilisation were deferred age after age, until late in time some stimulus chanced to be imparted by an alien race or races which had, after all, advanced towards their own civilisation, albeit earlier, through the operation of similar conditions elsewhere. In the European areas inhabited by the Celtic and Germanic peoples, for instance, long before we have the slightest reason to believe that these can have come into intimate relation with the civilisations of the South and East, both climate and soil were unquestionably favourable, and local civilisations cannot but have been originated independently. As has been well said, “Man everywhere has the same humble beginnings”; and, up to a certain point, which is found to be, in fact, far later than the inception of some kind of culture, he will satisfy his primitive needs and desires in very much the same ways.