THE PRIMITIVE CONDITION OF MAN.
Popular will be seen, from what has been said, that the general argument of evolution or development, whether this is taken in its zoological or merely in its historical sense, assumes that the primitive condition of man was an exceedingly low one, removed but one step above that of an intelligent brute.
This is a scientific inference only, as no such condition of man is known to history, and no tribe has ever been found even nearly approach ing such a low stage of culture. Moreover, it is in contradiction to the generally-accepted opinions on the subject both among cultivated and uncultivated peoples. In the traditions of almost every nation we hear of an Age of Gold, an Arcadian or Saturnian epoch, during which their remote ancestors lived in peace and joy, and were men in all respects of mightier powers than their descendants. From this high estate they fell through some act of disobedience to the supernal powers or through the machinations of some potent enemy.
When these mythical conceptions had in a measure lost their hold upon the cultivated fancy, they were replaced by the dreams of philos ophers, who pictured the natural condition of man as one of harmless happiness, culling the fruits of the forest for his food, and ignorant of laws or morals because it had not entered his mind to go counter to their principles or to injure his fellow-mortals.
Scientific assumption of science is very different from either of these pictures. It regards early man as a savage lower than the lowest known to us—a brute without speech, without ambition, with out religion. He was utterly dependent on his natural surroundings and the slave of his appetites and lusts. Family life he had none, nor the sense of shame, nor the appreciation of the beautiful. Less cleanly than many beasts, far less warm and fixed in his affections than many, he was content with his condition, and felt no inborn longings for anything higher, anything better.
Argument from accuracy of this portraiture is guaran teed by many lines of argument, which may be briefly mentioned. First is the historical. The records of every nation carry it back to a period of barbarism. The story is everywhere one of improvement, beginning with arts which are rudimentary and an imperfect social condition. Continue this universal statement by the method of analogy, and we reach a condition of culture indefinitely low as that of the earliest pre-historic society.
Arguments from results are justified by archae ology. We have already seen that this begins with a period when a rough stone and a club were the highest expressions of human art. The
relics of the Cave men in the caverns of Belgium prove that they lacked the neatness of the fox, as they allowed the remains of their repasts to lie where they fell, not even cleaning the holes that served them as dwellings. The customs of marriage and descent in the oldest and rudest tribes render it probable that the relations of the sexes were at first very loose, that there was not even that permanent pairing seen among most birds, and that unions often began with violence and con tinued with the slavery of the female.
Argument from into the origin of language testify to the same effect. Wherever commenced, they point back to a period when human speech was a series of cries, each a sentence in itself, without syntax, and limited to the concrete needs of a wholly physical existence. These interjectional cries constitute the radicals or root-words of languages. They are not identical nor numerous, but by a series of extraordinary devices, never the same in any two examples, nations have built upon them all the stately structure of vocal expression. We have even seen that the jaws from the Schipka cave and the Troll de la Nan lette have been believed to cast doubt on any power of articulate speech whatever in the early ancestors of man. (See p. 3o.) From the Tendency to the natural condition of man was an exceedingly low one seems further to be indicated by his strong tendency to retrogression. History is full of examples where nations, after having gained a certain degree of civilization, lost it far more rapidly than it had been acquired. Their arts and laws were forgotten, and their descendants, as in Asia, Egypt, and Central America, wander through the ruined halls of their ancestral palaces without a glimmer of tradition as to their past greatness. Nor is modern history lacking in similar instances. Many of the Spanish and Portuguese in America have sunk to the level of the lowest natives. St. Hilaire found some in Brazil who had lost the knowledge of money and the taste for salt ; Von Tschudi discovered pure-blood Spaniards in the remote valleys of the Peruvian Andes who had forgotten their native tongue, whose religion had degenerated into the grossest superstition, and who in no respect were superior to the natives about them. The Portuguese of the Gold Coast have become as low as the Negroes in moral qualities, and beneath them in courage ; and it is generally conceded that the Nor wegian colony in Greenland in the twelfth century was amalgamated and sank into the neighboring Eskimos.