Primitive Culture/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX.
CONCLUSION.
Practical results of the study of Primitive Culture—Its bearing least upon Positive Science, greatest upon Intellectual, Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy—Language—Mythology—Ethics and Law—Religion—Action of the Science of Culture, as a means of furthering progress and removing hindrance, effective in the course of Civilization.
It now remains, in bringing to a close these investigations on the relation of primitive to modern civilization, to urge the practical import of the considerations raised in their course. Granted that archæology, leading the student's mind back to remotest known conditions of human life, shows such life to have been of unequivocally savage type; granted that the rough-hewn flint hatchet, dug out from amidst the bones of mammoths in a drift gravel-bed to lie on an ethnologist's writing-table, is to him a very type of primitive culture, simple yet crafty, clumsy yet purposeful, low in artistic level yet fairly started on the ascent toward highest development — what then? Of course the history and præ-history of man take their proper places in the general scheme of knowledge. Of course the doctrine of the world-long evolution of civilization is one which philosophic minds will take up with eager interest, as a theme of abstract science. But beyond this, such research has its practical side, as a source of power destined to influence the course of modern ideas and actions. To establish a connexion between what uncultured ancient men thought and did, and what cultured modern men think and do, is not a matter of inapplicable theoretic knowledge, for it raises the issue, how far are modern opinion and conduct based on the strong ground of soundest modern knowledge, or how far only on such knowledge as was available in the earlier and ruder stages of culture where their types were shaped. It has to be maintained that the early history of man has its bearing, almost ignored as that bearing has been by those whom it ought most stringently to affect, on some of the deepest and most vital points of our intellectual, industrial, and social state.
Even in advanced sciences, such as relate to measure and force and structure in the inorganic and organic world, it is at once a common and a serious error to adopt the principle of letting bygones be bygones. Were scientific systems the oracular revelations they sometimes all but pretend to be, it might be justifiable to take no note of the condition of mere opinion or fancy that preceded them. But the investigator who turns from his modern text-books to the antiquated dissertations of the great thinkers of the past, gains from the history of his own craft a truer view of the relation of theory to fact, learns from the course of growth in each current hypothesis to appreciate its raison d'être and full significance, and even finds that a return to older starting-points may enable him to find new paths, where the modern track seems stopped by impassable barriers. It is true that rudimentary conditions of arts and sciences are often rather curious than practically instructive, especially because the modern practitioner has kept up, as mere elementary processes, the results of the ancient or savage man's most strenuous efforts. Perhaps our tool-makers may not gain more than a few suggestive hints from a museum of savage implements, our physicians may only be interested in savage recipes so far as they involve the use of local drugs, our mathematicians may leave to the infant-school the highest flights of savage arithmetic, our astronomers may only find in the star-craft of the lower races an uninstructive combination of myth and common-place. But there are departments of knowledge, of not less consequence than mechanics and medicine, arithmetic and astronomy, in which the study of the lowest stages, as influencing the practical acceptance of the higher, cannot be thus carelessly set aside.
If we survey the state of educated opinion, not within the limits of some special school, but in the civilized world at large, on such subjects especially as relate to Man, his intellectual and moral nature, his place and function among his fellow-men and in the universe at large, we see existing side by side, as if of equal right, opinions most diverse in real authority. Some, vouched for by direct and positive evidence, hold their ground as solid truths. Others, though founded on crudest theories of the lower culture, have been so modified under the influence of advancing knowledge, as to afford a satisfactory framework for recognized facts; and positive science, mindful of the origin of its own philosophic schemes, must admit the validity of such a title. Others, lastly, are opinions belonging properly to lower intellectual levels, which have held their place into the higher by mere force of ancestral tradition; these are survivals. Now it is the practical office of ethnography to make known to all whom it may concern the tenure of opinions in the public mind, to show what is received on its own direct evidence, what is ruder ancient doctrine reshaped to answer modern ends, and what is but time-honoured superstition in the garb of modern knowledge.
Topic after topic shows at a glimpse the way in which ethnography bears on modern intellectual conditions. Language, appearing as an art in full vigour among rude tribes, already displays the adaptation of childlike devices in self-expressive sound and pictorial metaphor, to utter thoughts as complex and abstruse as savage minds demand speech for. When it is considered how far the development of knowledge depends on full and exact means of expressing thought, is it not a pregnant consideration that the language of civilized men is but the language of savages, more or less improved in structure, a good deal extended in vocabulary, made more precise in the dictionary definition of words? The development of language between its savage and cultured stages has been made in its details, scarcely in its principle. It is not too much to say that half the vast defect of language as a method of utterance, and half the vast defect of thought as determined by the influence of language, are due to the fact that speech is a scheme worked out by the rough and ready application of material metaphor and imperfect analogy, in ways fitting rather the barbaric education of those who formed it, than our own. Language is one of those intellectual departments in which we have gone too little beyond the savage stage, but are still as it were hacking with stone celts and twirling laborious friction-fire. Metaphysical speculation, again, has been one of the potent influences on human conduct, and although its rise, and one may almost say also its decline and fall, belong to comparatively civilized ages, yet its connexion with lower stages of intellectual history may to some extent be discerned. For example, attention may be recalled to a special point brought forward in this work, that one of the greatest metaphysical doctrines is a transfer to the field of philosophy from the field of religion, made when philosophers familiar with the conception of object-phantoms used this to provide a doctrine of thought, thus giving rise to the theory of ideas. Far more fully and distinctly, the study of the savage and barbaric intellect opens to us the study of Mythology. The evidence here brought together as to the relation of the savage to the cultured mind in the matter of mythology has, I think, at any rate justified this claim. With a consistency of action so general as to amount to mental law, it is proved that among the lower races all over the world the operation of outward events on the inward mind leads not only to statement of fact, but to formation of myth. It gives no unimportant clues to the student of mental history, to see by what regular processes myths are generated, and how, growing by wear and increasing in value at secondhand, they pass into pseudo-historic legend. Poetry is full of myth, and he who will understand it analytically will do well to study it ethnographically. In so far as myth, seriously or sportively meant, is the subject of poetry, and in so far as it is couched in language whose characteristic is that wild and rambling metaphor which represents the habitual expression of savage thought, the mental condition of the lower races is the key to poetry — nor is it a small portion of the poetic realm which these definitions cover. History, again, is an agent powerful, and becoming more powerful, in shaping men's minds, and through their minds their actions in the world; now one of the most prominent faults of historians is that, through want of familiarity with the principles of myth-development, they cannot apply systematically to ancient legend the appropriate test for separating chronicle from myth, but with few exceptions are apt to treat the mingled mass of tradition partly with undiscriminating credulity and partly with undiscriminating scepticism. Even more injurious is the effect of such want of testing on that part of traditional or documentary record which, among any section of mankind, stands as sacred history. It is not merely that in turning to the index of some book on savage tribes, one comes on such a suggestive heading as this, 'Religion — see Mythology.' It is that within the upper half of the scale of civilization, among the great historic religions of the world, we all know that between religion and religion, and even to no small extent between sect and sect, the narratives which to one side are sacred history, may seem to the other mythic legend. Among the reasons which retard the progress of religious history in the modern world, one of the most conspicuous is this, that so many of its approved historians demand from the study of mythology always weapons to destroy their adversaries' structures, but never tools to clear and trim their own. It is an indispensable qualification of the true historian that he shall be able to look dispassionately on myth as a natural and regular product of the human mind, acting on appropriate facts in a manner suited to the intellectual state of the people producing it, and that he shall treat it as an accretion to be deducted from professed history, whenever it is recognized by the tests of being decidedly against evidence as fact, and at the same time clearly explicable as myth. It is from the ethnographic study of savage and barbaric races that the knowledge of the general laws of myth-development, required for the carrying out of this critical process, may be best or must necessarily be gained.
The two vast united provinces of Morals and Law have been as yet too imperfectly treated on a general ethnographic scheme, to warrant distinct statement of results. Yet thus much may be confidently said, that where the ground has been even superficially explored, every glimpse reveals treasures of knowledge. It is already evident that enquirers who systematically trace each department of moral and legal institutions from the savage through the barbaric and into the civilized condition of mankind.thereby introduce into the scientific investigations of these subjects an indispensable element which merely theoretical writers are apt unscrupulously to dispense with. The law or maxim which a people at some particular stage of its history might have made fresh, according to the information and circumstances of the period, is one thing. The law or maxim which did in fact become current among them by inheritance from an earlier stage, only more or less modified to make it compatible with the new conditions, is another and far different thing. Ethnography is required to bridge over the gap between the two, a very chasm where the arguments of moralists and legists are continually falling in, to crawl out maimed and helpless. Within modern grades of civilization this historical method is now becoming more and more accepted. It will not be denied that English law has acquired, by modified inheritance from past ages, a theory of primogeniture and a theory of real estate which are so far from being products of our own times that we must go back to the middle ages for anything like a satisfactory explanation of them ; and as for more absolute survival, did not Jewish disabilities stand practically, and the wager of battle nominally, in our law of not many years back? But the point to be pressed here is, that the development and survival of law are processes that did not first come into action within the range of written codes of comparatively cultured nations. Admitted that civilized law requires its key from barbaric law; it must be borne in mind that the barbarian lawgiver too was guided in judgment not so much by first principles, as by a reverent and often stupidly reverent adherence to the tradition of earlier and yet ruder ages.
Nor can these principles be set aside in the scientific study of moral sentiment and usage. When the ethical systems of mankind, from the lowest savagery upward, have been analyzed and arranged in their stages of evolution, then ethical science, no longer vitiated by too exclusive application to particular phases of morality taken unreasonably as representing morality in general, will put its methods to fair trial on the long and intricate world-history of right and wrong.
In concluding a work of which full half is occupied by evidence bearing on the philosophy of religion, it may well be asked, how does all this array of facts stand toward the theologian's special province? That the world sorely needs new evidence and method in theology, the state of religion in our own land bears witness. Take English Protestantism as a central district of opinion, draw an ideal line through its centre, and English thought is seen to be divided as by a polarizing force extending to the utmost limits of repulsion. On one side of the dividing line stand such as keep firm hold on the results of the 16th century reformation, or seek yet more original canons from the first Christian ages; on the other side stand those who, refusing to be bound by the doctrinal judgments of past centuries, but introducing modern science and modern criticism as new factors in theological opinion, are eagerly pressing toward a new reformation. Outside these narrower limits, extremer partizans occupy more distant ground on either side. On the one hand the Anglican blends gradually into the Roman scheme, a system so interesting to the ethnologist for its maintenance of rites more naturally belonging to barbaric culture; a system so hateful to the man of science for its suppression of knowledge, and for that usurpation of intellectual authority by a sacerdotal caste which has at last reached its climax, now that an aged bishop can judge, by infallible inspiration, the results of researches whose evidence and methods are alike beyond his knowledge and his mental grasp. On the other hand, intellect, here trampled under foot of dogma, takes full revenge elsewhere, even within the domain of religion, in those theological districts where reason takes more and more the command over hereditary belief, like a mayor of the palace superseding a nominal king. In yet farther ranges of opinion, religious authority is simply deposed and banished, and the throne of absolute reason is set up without a rival even in name; in secularism the feeling and imagination which in the religious world are bound to theological belief, have to attach themselves to a positive natural philosophy, and to a positive morality which shall of its own force control the acts of men. Such, then, is the boundless divergence of opinion among educated citizens of an enlightened country, in an age scarcely approached by any former age in the possession of actual knowledge and the strenuous pursuit of truth as the guiding principle of life. Of the causes which have brought to pass so perplexed a condition of public thought, in so momentous a matter as theology, there is one, and that a weighty one, which demands mention here. It is the partial and one-sided application of the historical method of enquiry into theological doctrines, and the utter neglect of the ethnographical method which carries back the historical into remoter and more primitive regions of thought. Looking at each doctrine by itself and for itself, as in the abstract true or untrue, theologians close their eyes to the instances which history is ever holding up before them, that one phase of a religious belief is the outcome of another, that in all times religion has included within its limits a system of philosophy, expressing its more or less transcendental conceptions in doctrines which form in any age their fittest representatives, but which doctrines are liable to modification in the general course of intellectual change, whether the ancient formulas still hold their authority with altered meaning, or are themselves reformed or replaced. Christendom furnishes evidence to establish this principle, if for example we will but candidly compare the educated opinion of Rome in the 5th with that of London in the 19th century, on such subjects as the nature and functions of soul, spirit, deity, and judge by the comparison in what important respects the philosophy of religion has come to differ even among men who represent in different ages the same great principles of faith. The general study of the ethnography of religion, through all its immensity of range, seems to countenance the theory of evolution in its highest and widest sense. In the treatment of some of its topics here, I have propounded special hypotheses as to the order in which various stages of doctrine and rite have succeeded one another in the history of religion. Yet how far these particular theories may hold good, seems even to myself a minor matter. The essential part of the ethnographic method in theology lies in admitting as relevant the compared evidence of religion in all stages of culture. The action of such evidence on theology proper is in this wise, that a vast proportion of doctrines and rites known among mankind are not to be judged as direct products of the particular religious systems which give them sanction, for they are in fact more or less modified results adopted from previous systems. The theologian, as he comes to deal with each element of belief and worship, ought to ascertain its place in the general scheme of religion. Should the doctrine or rite in question appear to have been transmitted from an earlier to a later stage of religious thought, then it should be tested, like any other point of culture, as to its place in development. The question has to be raised, to which of these three categories it belongs: — is it a product of the earlier theology, yet sound enough to maintain a rightful place in the later? — is it derived from a cruder original, yet so modified as to become a proper representative of more advanced views? — is it a survival from a lower stage of thought, imposing on the credit of the higher by virtue not of inherent truth but of ancestral belief? These are queries the very asking of which starts trains of thought which candid minds should be encouraged to pursue, leading as they do toward the attainment of such measure of truth as the intellectual condition of our age fits us to assimilate. In the scientific study of religion, which now shows signs of becoming for many a year an engrossing subject of the world's thought, the decision must not rest with a council in which the theologian, the metaphysician, the biologist, the physicist, exclusively take part. The historian and the ethnographer must be called upon to show the hereditary standing of each opinion and practice, and their enquiry must go back as far as antiquity or savagery can show a vestige, for there seems no human thought so primitive as to have lost its bearing on our own thought, nor so ancient as to have broken its connection with our own life.
It is our happiness to live in one of those eventful periods of intellectual and moral history, when the oft-closed gates of discovery and reform stand open at their widest. How long these good days may last, we cannot tell. It may be that the increasing power and range of the scientific method, with its stringency of argument and constant check of fact, may start the world on a more steady and continuous course of progress than it has moved on heretofore. But if history is to repeat itself according to precedent, we must look forward to stiffer duller ages of traditionalists and commentators, when the great thinkers of our time will be appealed to as authorities by men who slavishly accept their tenets, yet cannot or dare not follow their methods through better evidence to higher ends. In either case, it is for those among us whose minds are set on the advancement of civilization, to make the most of present opportunities, that even when in future years progress is arrested, it may be arrested at the higher level. To the promoters of what is sound and reformers of what is faulty in modern culture, ethnography has double help to give. To impress men's minds with a doctrine of development, will lead them in all honour to their ancestors to continue the progressive work of past ages, to continue it the more vigorously because light has increased in the world, and where barbaric hordes groped blindly, cultured men can often move onward with clear view. It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction. Yet this work, if less genial, is not less urgently needful for the good of mankind. Thus, active at once in aiding progress and in removing hindrance, the science of culture is essentially a reformer's science.