It is that truth is chainless here,
And swift her march from shore to shore;
And little need her children fear
For coming days—though clouded o'er;
For God must shape a gracious plan
Where truth is free, and man is man.[127]
July, 1868.
ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.[128]
Sir John Lubbock, though his name is not euphonious, is, we understand, an English scientist, highly distinguished and of no mean authority in the scientific world, as his father was before him. He certainly is a man of large pretensions, and of as much logical ability and practical good sense as we have a right to expect in an English scientist. He, of course, adopts the modern theory of progress, and maintains that the savage is the type of the primitive man, and that he has emerged from his original barbarism and superstition to his present advanced civilization and religious belief and worship by his own energy and persevering efforts at self-evolution or development, without any foreign or supernatural instruction or assistance.
One, Sir John contends, has only to study and carefully ascertain the present condition of the various contemporary savage tribes, or what he calls the "lower races," to know what was the original condition of mankind, and from which the superior races started on their tour of progress through the ages; and one needs only to ascertain the germs of civilization and religion which were in their original condition, to be able to comprehend the various stages of that progress and the principles and means by which it has been effected and may be carried on indefinitely beyond the point already reached. Hence, in the volume before us the author labors to present us a true picture of the present mental and social condition of contemporary savages as that of the primeval man. He assumes that the mental and social condition is that of the infancy of the human race, and by studying it we can attain to the history of "prehistoric" times, assist, as it were, if we may be pardoned the Gallicism, at the earliest development of mankind, and trace step by step the progress from their first appearance on the globe upward to the sublime civilization of the nineteenth century—the civilization of the steam-engine, the cotton spinner and weaver, the steamboat, the steam-plough, the railway, and the lightning telegraph.
This theory, that finds in the savage the type of the primitive man, is nothing very new. It was refuted by the late Archbishop Whately, by the Duke of Argyll in his Primeval Man, and on several occasions by the present writer in The Catholic World. The facts Sir John adduces in the support of this theory, as far as facts they are, had been adduced long ago, and were as well known by us before we abandoned the theory as untenable, as they are by Sir John Lubbock or any of his compeers. They may all, so far as they bear on religion, be found summed up and treated at length in the work of Benjamin Constant, La Religion considerée dans sa Source, ses Developpements, et ses Formes, published in 1832, as well as in a mass of German writers. Sir John has told us nothing of the mental and social condition of savages that we had not examined, we had almost said, before he was born, and which we had supposed was not known by all men with any pretension to serious studies. In fact, we grow rather impatient as we grow old of writers who, because they actually have learned more than they knew in their cradles, imagine that they have learned so much more than all the rest of mankind. No men try our patience more than our scientific Englishmen, who speak always in a decisive tone, with an air of infallibility from which there would seem to be no appeal, and yet utter only the veriest commonplaces, old theories long since exploded, or stale absurdities. We have no patience with such men as Herbert Spencer, Huxley, and Darwin. We are hardly less impatient of the scientists who in our own country hold them up to our admiration and reverence as marvellous discoverers, and as the great and brilliant lights of the age. We love science, we honor the men who devote their lives to its cultivation, but we ask that it be science, not hypothesis piled on hypothesis, nor simply a thing of mere conjectures or guesses.
The modern doctrine of progress or development, which supposes man began in the lowest savage, if not lower still, is not a doctrine suggested by any facts observed and classified in men's history, nor is it a logical induction from any class of known facts, but a gratuitous hypothesis invented and asserted against the Biblical doctrine of creation, of Providence, of original sin, and of the supernatural instruction, government, redemption, and salvation of men. The hypothesis is suggested by hostility to the Christian revelation, prior to the analysis and classification of any facts to sustain it, and the scientists who defend it are simply investigating nature, not in the interests of science properly so-called, but, consciously or unconsciously, to find facts to support a hypothesis which may be opposed to both. Any facts in nature or in history, natural or civil, political or religious, that seem to make against Christian teaching, are seized upon with avidity, distorted or exaggerated, and paraded with a grand fanfaronade, sounding of trumpets, beating of drums, and waving of banners, as if it were a glorious triumph of man to prove that he is no better than the beasts that perish; while the multitude of facts which are absolutely irreconcilable with it are passed over in silence or quietly set aside, as of no account, or simply declared to be anomalies, which science is not yet in a condition to explain, but, no doubt, soon will be, since it has entered the true path, has found the true scientific methods, and is headed in the right direction. Science is yet in its infancy. In its cradle it has strangled frightful monsters, and, when full-grown, it will not fail to slay the hydra, and rid the world of all its "chimeras dire." But while we do not complain that your infantile or puerile science has not done more, we would simply remind you, men of science, that it is very unscientific to reason from what you confess science has not yet done as if it had done it. Wait till it has done it, before you bring it forward as a scientific achievement.
We confess to a want of confidence in this whole class of scientists, for their investigations are not free and unbiassed; their minds are prejudiced; they are pledged to a theory in advance, which makes them shut their eyes to the facts which contradict it, and close their intelligence to the great principles of universal reason which render their conclusions invalid. There are other scientists who have pushed their investigations as far into nature and history as they have, perhaps even further, who know and have carefully analyzed all the facts they know or ever pretended to know, and yet have come to conclusions the contrary of theirs, and find nothing in the facts or phenomena of the universe that warrant any induction not in accordance with Christian faith, either as set forth in the Holy Scriptures or the definitions of the church. Why are these less likely to be really scientific than they? They are biassed by their Christian faith, you say. Be it so: are you less biassed by your anti-christian unbelief and disposition? Besides, are you able to say that these have not in their Christian faith a key to the real sense or meaning of the universe and its phenomena which you have not, and therefore are much more likely to be right than you? Do you know that it is not so? There is no science where knowledge is wanting.