BARBARIANS AND BRUTES.
SIR JOHN LUBBOCK'S remarkable address at Liverpool on the "social and religious condition of the lower races of man," contains certainly the most complete conceivable proof that in all human communities of which we can trace the history, the tendency has been upwards, and not downwards,—a history of pro- gress, and not a history of degradation. But we wish Sir John Lubbock had added to his lecture something which he, of all others, is best qualified to add, on the widely different results of the observations of the naturalist who watches and describes the habits and instincts of animals, and the observations of the student of the earliest stages of human history, who watches and describes the habits and customs of barbarous men. Curiously enough, every feature Sir John Lubbock has contributed to the history of barbarism,—and no one has so good a right as he to be called in some sense the historian of barbarism,—is a feature tending to distinguish man from the brutes, or, at least, to distinguish essentially the characteristic brutality of man from the brutality of brutes. Take any one of Sir John Lubbock's curious list of savageries, and you will find that, intellectually speaking, it constitutes not a link between civilized man and the lower animals, but a chasm between them. He quotes, for instance, at the very outset a celebrated saying of a negro to Cap- tain Burton. "What? Am Ito starve while my sister has children whom she can sell ?" Now, is not the feeling of civilization about the claims of children on their parents far more nearly an intellec- tual reflection of the instincts exhibited by almost all the lower animals with relation to their young, than a development of this savage sentiment? Where is the bird that will cast one of its Toung to the hawk to save itself, or the doe that will not fight far more fiercely for its fawn than for itself ? The self-assertion of -this savage selfishness represents a gap between civilized man and the lower animals, not a link. Then take the practice,—of the great prevalence of which among savages Sir John Lubbock produces curi- ous evidence,—of the father's going to bed with a new-born child, while the mother gets up and does all the work of the household. Is not this, again, a case of a capricious break in the chain between -animal instinct and civilized sense ? Or take Sir John Lubbock's -account of the extravagant passion of the savage for not only -artificial, but positively inconvenient and painful ornament, such as bones stuck through the nose, studs in the cheeks, and so forth. Without saying that civilized man, or at least woman, has -entirely abandoned all these savage practices, is it not evident that the tendency of civilization has been to abolish the inconvenient -ornamentations of savage vanity, and to return towards the simplicity of the unconscious creature ? Again, consider Sir John Lubbock's remarks on the laws of savage tribes. It is often supposed, -he says, that savages are personally more free than civilized men, but "there cannot be a greater mistake. The savage is nowhere free. All over the world his life is regulated by a complicated set of rules and customs as forcible as laws, of general prohibitions, and unjust privileges." "The Australians," for example, "instead of -enjoying perfect personal freedom, as would at first appear, are governed by a code of rules and a set of customs which form one of the most cruel tyrannies that has ever perhaps existed on the dace of the earth, subjecting not only the will, but the property and life of the weak to the dominion of the strong." Of this, again, there is no trace among gregarious animals ; for though one -tribe will prey upon another, creatures of the same kind, like bees -or beavers, live for the most part in instinctive peace and order. And here again, the great aim of civilization is to strike off the alien yoke of tyrannic law and custom which barbarism imposes. Again, in the relation between the sexes, the most marked dis- tinction of savage life is the violence with which woman is habitually treated, being carried off at first by violence, and -reduced to the position of a kind of slave afterwards. Here ,again, we find nothing parallel in the life of the lower animals, and lye do find much more trace of fidelity. A Kandyan, expressing his scorn for a rather exceptional savage, a Veddah, cited in proof of -the contemptible character of the Veddahs that they remain true -to -one wife till death, which, said the Kaudyan, was exactly like .the practice of monkeys. What Sir John Lubbock thinks the most -common rule of marriage in the lowest savage tribes, the system -of communal marriage, is certainly not an improvement on, but a deterioration from, the habits of the higher brutes. Of -religion of course there can be no trace in the brutes, and the mere power of fancying and speculating, however rudely, .on the unseen, is, of course, a great advance in faculty; but -the first restdt of that power, as in the lower religions de- scribed by Sir John Lubbock,—for instance, the worship of the serpent, because of his deadly venom,—is to start man off -again on the track of mutilation of nature, instead of conformity -to it, such as we see in the animal world. Any one who follows Sir John Lubbock carefully through his description of savage customs and habits, will see, in almost every one, not a link, but a .chasm, between the life of what is called instinct, and the life of what is called educated reason. Formulated selfishness and -caprice are of the very essence of savage customs. Unselfish and -orderly instincts, which produce many of the effects of the highest intelligent organization, are of the very essence of the animal life in the stage beneath. The more we learn of the lowest types of barbarism, the more clear it seems that the first stirrings of human -character were not "improvements by the method of natural selec- tion" on the habits of the brutes, but in most cases absolute .deteriorations on those habits, due to the disturbing power of self- will and caprice. Men instead of gaining an advantage over -the brutes by their rude attempts at laws, and by the suggestions -of their superstitious fears, distinctly lose by them. In the struggle for existence with the lower animals, savages are weighted, handi- capped, by their chief social and religious rites, and only their superior cunning as foes enables them to win the battle in spite of
these disadvantages. The principle of "natural selection" might, of course, explain how the cunninger creature gets the victory over the less cunning, but it will not explain why cunning, Once developed, rushes into so many pure insanities of artificial custom, law, ornament, and incantation,—insanities positively prejudicial to the race, and which are extinguished one by one as civilization begins to study and apprehend the limits of existence.
It seems to us that the new investigations of the facts of savage life all go to show quite as wide a natural distinction between man and the lower animals as the old assumptions of the deterioration- ists. There must be a distinctive sense of self-guiding capacity and of inchoate desire to use it effectually, in those random gropings after better rules of living than the inexhorable power of habit had imposed on the lower animals. The fruits of a past eternity of slowly-improved habits,—supposing that to be the Darwinian history assigned to the ancestors of man,—could not result in this burst of wild caprice, in these haphazard attempts to make his lot happier, and to beautify his person, by arbitrary and mischievous rules. You can only account for those wild lashings-out against nature, which are observable in the first moral and social experi- ments of barbarous man, by his dim consciousness of possessing a power of ruling himself and ruling the world around him, which is neither observable in any other animal, nor yet justified by its first tentative efforts even in man himself. If the savage is more loaded physically with ugly ornaments, and morally with still uglier laws, than any civilized being, is it not clear that his blind sense of power was not, in its initial state, an advantage to him, but a disadvantage, and yet that it was so strong within him that it would image itself in all sorts of arbitrary whims in spite of that dis- advantage? Now, what is utterly incompatible with all the laws of nature, including those of animal life, is anything arbitrary or capricious. Mr. Darwin shows that the moment any variety of type develops itself which is disadvantageous to the race to which it belongs, in the circumstances in which it is placed, there is an immediate tendency to extinguish it. How, then, could a variety arise and prosper whose distinctive characteristic was an arbitrary self-will,—a disposition to cast about in the world for a larger measure of happiness than the average of that species could enjoy, and to adopt the most inju- dicious methods for securing that happiness? Surely, unless such a characteristic were accompanied by some great and critical rise in the dead level of his intelligence above that of other animals, such a creature would be immediately extinguished in the struggle for existence ? You can in no way imagine the gradual rise of self- will, and vanity, and superstition, and the other distinctive forma of savage life, as animal tendencies simply engrafted upon the ordinary animal cunning,—for they would be so adverse to the existence of the creatures in whom they sprang up as to cause their extinction. An elephant impeded by a bit of wood stuck through his trunk by way of ornament, or a baboon subject to the superstition that particular stones had the power to kill it, would clearly have a very bad chance with other elephants and baboons. What we seem to see in Sir John Lubbock's investigations is the proof that man is a species raised a whole stratum of intelli- gence above the animals next in intelligence to him, or he would not survive the enormous disadvantage of the growth of an imagi- nation and of social passions, the first stirrings of which are not advantageous, but dangerous and anarchical. To our minds, the new lights we are getting upon savage life go a great way towards proving that the human race cannot be a variety produced by the Darwinian law from lower races, simply because the varieties of living introduced into the universe by the germinal human faculties are so distinctly unfavourable varieties of living, varieties which have all to be cleared away as reason takes its fuller development, and the imagination begins to understand the limits within which it works under the divine law.
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