The Unity of Civilization

data of history, we cannot emancipate ourselves from the need to present them from a point of view which must in the last resort be our own. We may bring ourselves by training and criticism nearer

ge of two, and of how the third looks from both of them. And even if we were indeed at the centre of things, I su

im, and set him gazing at a world in which, as now, half his own career is inside the picture; not perhaps very easy to find in a moment-as on

n his great book on Man he 'appeals to the experience of all countries and ages, that if a people has power, and attempts wrongdoing against another, it also does not omit to conceive the other as very worthless and incompetent, and to repeat this conviction often and emphatically' (Der Mensch, ii. 235). It is easy for us to dot the i and cross the t here; less easy perhaps to realize that what troubled von Baer was the persistence of British and American ethnologists in the polygenist heresy, which he traced (and rightly) to their reluctance to treat their 'black brother

prehistoric culture in what has been called elsewhere the 'north-west quadrant' of the Old-World land-mass west of Ararat and the Median hills and north of Sahara, the cradle and nursery of the modern 'western world'; and (3) the convergen

in one Blood, one Speech, one Cult, one congruous Way of Living.'[2] Modern ethnology, indeed, tends to subsume cult under way-of-living, as a peculiarly delicate test of conformity-and to regard language, alongside of both cult and way-of-living, as another manifestation of the same human reason; distinguishing therefore two kinds of unity-one phy

MANKIND AS AN

ept any other breed that Nearchus or Pytheas might confront them with, as members of one brotherhood, just as they accepted white, brown, or black sheep, with horns of Ammon or with none. Eratosthenes, most philosophical, and therewith most political of them all, was bred in Cyrene, where some Greeks seem to have been black; and h

ity of evidence, the impression grew that the zoological distance between these races was greater than had been supposed. On the other hand, eighteenth-century formulators of the 'Rights of Man' challenged reconsideration of the current practice of negro slavery; and the upshot was a controversy. Abolitionists contended that the 'black brother' was indeed a blood brother, and entitled to the 'Rights of Man'; their opponents replied that the negro, being (as they held) of another species, might justly be treated in all respects as one of white man's domestic animals, and be his property as well as his drudge. At the turn of the century, the adherence of Cuvier gave prestige to Polygenesis on its s

e than a platform phrase; and separatists (who are always wit

MANKIND AS A

ion to them. For proof of the uniformity of human reasoning, indeed, we have to begin almost from an animal plane. 'Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is?' And not only is men's hunger, and their sensitiveness to 'the same summer and winter' similar: their ways of satisfying hunger, their conduct of the food-quest, their el

proceed in the reverse direction, from a criterion of utility to a hypothesis of design, and the conclusion that certain stones, of reputedly prehuman antiquity, must be the work of human hands, geared to human brains like ours. Tylor's wider range of observation, co

nd (in the widest sense) of 'barbarities', that the charitable hypothesis that here and there man has lost his way and just stopped thinking hardly seems adequate to account for things, and writers like Lévy-Bruhl are provoked to the pessimist guess that th

doing and thinking, there are countless ways of going wrong. Among the most reasonable people (at their highest) that the world has yet seen, there were some of the worst miscarriages of reason and of morals; and throughout their great centuries there was no word either for the devil or for sin in their l

past Lucretius, from the Ionian physicist. It is only in superficial appearance that 'though reason is common to all, most men live as if they had a way of thinking of their own',[5] Heraclitus' momentary despair anticipating Lévy-Bruhl almost verbally. Once penetrate, with Heraclitus himse

wrong, as the fabric of knowledge is cumulatively and elaborately right. 'Hath this man sinned, or his parents, that he was born blind?' That is the tragedy of primitive cult

the last analysis is a derangement of the higher activities extending to abdication. Its onset is an ataxy; and its culmination

s than is Lucretian fear. It is the 'lie-in-the-soul', the conviction, assailed by Socrates and before his time as well as after, that we know how things stand,

of irrationality to so much of the behaviour of mankind, and disguise its native rationalism and its morality too. Beset by fear and pride, craftsman and cultivator and explorer and reformer alike are in the same predicament. 'I could do this or that and do it thus, but may I?' and if such opinion as counts says 'Thou shalt not', the fallacious substitution of 'shalt n

ative tribe, for the population at once began to exceed the means of subsistence; and it was only when the committee in London was induced (just in time) to apply mission funds to the purchase of seeds and implements of agriculture that the danger was averted. It is not my purpose here to commend infanticide; only to indicate that while man cannot live by bread alone, he cannot go on living, even a good life, if he really falls short of bread. So with devotion to an ideal unity of culture, we are to combine toleration of wide diversity, seeing how diverse are the surroundi

e. Variety in Man's behaviour is no impish trick of original sin: it is the response of his single reason to variety in Nature. Only when experience added intimacy with alien individuals to observations of their habits of life, did a common humanity in their behaviour begin to be so frequent and obvious as to cause surprise. Acquiescence in the discovery is implicit in Thucydides and Hobbes, and confessed in Aristotl

TURE IN THE NORTH-WEST

ld where the stream-heads of our modern culture seem to take their rise? The qualification which has slipped from my pen is half the answer already, for we are to deal not with one homogeneous region but with a c

by the spread of less infantile views about Noah's Ark, goes on to question the suff

ce not merely human beings but organized societies of men made their appearance in Europe, which far exceeds the period required, or commonly assumed, for the spread of any known Indo-European language, from any possible 'home' to any region where it was spoken at the beginning of historic time. And not only does archaeological evidence enable us to detect such societies sedenta

at the time of its discovery by Europeans. Here, within the same geographical limits of the north temperate zone, and with the far simpler scheme of surface relief which characterizes the New World, we have civilizations as different as those of the Eskimo, the Algonkin peoples of the coniferous forests, the Huron and Iroquois of the deciduous hardwoods, horticultural Muscogeans in

regions offered to prehistoric man; and consider, granting him all the reason in the world, and uniform physique (if you please) as well, how he is to

-shore beasts, and trap small-deer very ingeniously; we fish in the large northward-flowing rivers; and eventually (heaven knows after how long, or how far back from now) we borrowed a notion, probably from pastorals imprudently straying too far along those northward river-lanes through the forests, and domesticated our best

e animals (poor sport, both of them, for sportsmen like us) come blundering in off the parkland away south, up the grassy glades, trampling undergrowth and scaring the game. People are saved from all that 'over there', because no one can tame the prairie buffalo and drive him over the hunting grounds; some sport, too, the prairie buffalo! And worse still, there are the people who come hacking and burning our great trees, and tearing up the turf and u

ion of the Old World. Here and there, in detached plateaux enfolded among the ranges (like the Salt Lake basin and the Shoshonean plateaux in America), there are isolated grassy plains, repeating on a smaller s

e like a northerly extension of tropical Hackbau, as the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work their Virgilian plough through the rec

ll by the extent to which the rainfall is concentrated into a few winter months, so that a dry warm summer is assured, which Man can mitigate and even exploit if he has access to perennial water. It extended, therefore, in quite early times, and still predominates, all round the mountainous shores of the Mediterranean, from Syria by Southern Europe to Algeria and Tunis, and penetrates i

. In this northern region grain crops pass from red to white wheat, from barley to oats, and from both to rye. The ease with which the Muskogean potato and tomato have been acclimatized, and their respective prevalence now in the Atlantic and Mediterranean sections, illustrate exactly the place which primitive hoe-culture

re, if Man is to maintain himself at all, he must be master of tame animals which can eat the grass, and in turn sustain him. South of the eastward continuation of the woodland Mountain Zone, through Asia Minor into Persia, and also south of the Mediterranean lake-region and the ridges of Syria and the 'A

rgin, where it passes over into the northern forest, to construct wheeled carts and ox-ploughs. Equipped with these fundamental implements of civilization, wheel-borne nomads have penetrated the Mountain Zone from the north again and again, introducing the cart into Egypt rather late, and perhaps even into Babylonia; though with these exceptions no secondary centre of cart-folk was ever established in the south. Obvious reasons for this failure lie in the scarcity of parkland and of perennial pasture for large cattle. At best, Assyria and Syria adopted the horsed chariot for war; but these regions, like the Hitti

ore, and yet have leisure for other pursuits within the ploughing season. But it is not yet clear in what region ploughing first began. Probably it was in the comparatively well-watered and well-wooded margin of one of the large grasslands; but whether north or south of the Mountain Zone, or round the discontinuous plateaux within it, is not clear. The presumption of large cattle favours the north, yet Babylonia, and eve

f fats is the forest-bred pig: in a land rolling with ham and sausages we reach the Bread-and-Bacon culture. Further afield still, and later, in proportion as the forest is opened out by semi-pastoral folk, the moister summer permits open meadow-land, with perennial grass, and the possibility of hay. Here too the grain crops may be so large that there is something over to fatten stock; and to Bread and Cheese the farmer of the north-western plains adds Beef. When there is coarse grain in plenty, of course, the large-boned horse of the north gradually replaces the ox at the plough, and permits him to be bred, as with ourselves, not for draught at all, but for milking and killing exclusively. It is in this final phase that the Bread-and-Beef culture passes over eventually into the New World, and into the South Temperate Zone. It has been rather a long story to te

y brandies of Central Europe; with the copious cereals and meadow-grass, the beers and whiskies of the North. In details, of course, the distribution of types is

AND CULTURE AS

ated by considerations of language than by considerations of race. The second reason is historical or archaeological. The spread of the Bread culture is dated so far back in the history of man in this region, as to make it certain that it preceded not merely the spread of the prevalent Indo-European group of languages, but even the present distribution of racial types. It certainly reached Italy, and the Atlantic seaboard as the British Isles, before the b

ip or indulgence. Of these three breeds of man, only one, the blond Boreal giants (the only 'white men' in the strict sense of defect of pigment in skin, hair, and eyes) is exclusively European now, and has his habitat within the area of the 'Boreal' groups of animals and plants. His champions in ethnological propaganda seem to be of two minds about his earlier distribution; either his 'home' was round the Baltic, in which case it is difficult to see why he should be represented as a civilizing agency, in view of the cultural backwardness of that region; or else it was out on the Eurasian gras

e Atlantic seaboard, is admitted. More doubt arises as to the extent to which he penetrated from these southern and western bases into the heart of peninsular Europe. Certainly as we trace him to the south-east he seems more and more restricted to the Mediterranean coast

on is concerned, no less than in its animals and plants. Biological continuity is as complete at the Bosphorus as it is at Gibraltar. Here, what remains in dispute is not so much whether 'Alpine' types are ultimately of Anatolian origin, as whether their spread in Europe has been early or late, and whether their predec

Tienshan and the Carpathians, there has been a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enough Muscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also

luence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe' amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so in

s tragic respect, which the Turkish conquest, with its linguistic and religious sequel, has done little more than aggravate, Europe ends still at the Save; whereas Rome's greatest daughters have reconquered more than all that Carthage ever held in Africa. And the re-incorporation of Brita

, nor even so near to the Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that we get our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. If northern genealogies are any guide,-and they are not likely to have reduced the real interval wittingly-Rome's empire reached its full extent while Asgard was in buildi

resent prove far too much. The open-air gods of Tacitus (Germania, chap. 9) are common to Semitic folk, and to many peoples fur

, we have only objects of the least perishable sorts, stone, metal, pottery, we have, at all events, in the pottery the most imitative of arts, and therefore the widest basis for conclusions as to the principles of a style. Moreover, outside the sea-borne culture of the Mediterranean, pottery does not travel far: its uses are domestic, not commercial. John Gilpin's fate is typical of those who would carry things on horseback in bottles. Like words, however, potsherds enlighten us mo

unity, nor for the present any prospect of it. For anything more, we are reduced to the great crises of material culture, such as the introduction of bronze, of iron, of glass and glazed earthenware; and these we perceive increasingly not as turning points of the whole, but as processes within i

be sure, and by comparing the sequences on different sites we can go far towards tracing the spread and supersession of a style, sometimes over wide areas, and occasionally, with the help of the geography, we can be pretty sure of the routes by which innovations travelled. We can infer nothing, however, from this as to the movements of people: the vogue of the willow-pattern plate is no measure of our 'yellow-peril'. But where works of

ne in a systematic way on this topic, but the rapidity with which a really important change in equipment and organization passes from camp to camp, and revolutionizes not only

covering (or biosphere) of the planet. Typical high-pressure regions are the Arabian peninsula with its repeated crises of Semitic eruption, and the great Eurasian grasslands. Typical regions of low man-pressure, and repeated irruption, are the South European peninsulas. Occasionally a region plays both parts, alternately accepting inhabitants, and unloading them on to other lands; examples are the Hungarian plai

outhward drifts, subsidiary to this, from East Central Europe into the Balkan lands and round the head of the Adriatic. The course of these drifts is laid out in deta

ore with the opportunity, or the need, for a change of habit, in the course of a migration for example, they must either refuse it, like a shy horse, or (if they accept it) enter on their new career imperfectly trained, and extemporizing adjustments here and there in very unworkmanlike fashion. Only rarely does the statesman or 'lawgiver' appear, just when he is wanted, to bring Israel up out of Egypt into the desert, and out of the desert into t

oes not greatly concern us, for the White Sea cuts through it, and deep into the woodland, and bars off the Lapps from the Samoyeds and their kin. Classical descriptions of the inhabitants of the North German plain make it clear that its culture, even so late as the first century B.C., was at its best a broken prolongation of the pastoral life of the steppe margin, and that less

ble to a forest régime, any more than to industrial life. Certainly forest folk outside peninsular Europe only display it rarely and imperfectly. But it is characteristic of all pastoral folk; once established, it coheres and persists under great external stresses; and in early Europe its liability (strong though its structure is) to b

n the far past which has left us the great goddesses and other matrilineal survivals; in industrial Babylonia; in the Minoan palaces; in fifth-and fourth-century Greece, as Aristophanes joins with Euripides to admit, and Euripi

r insulation and their inability to offer anything but passive resistance to the forces which were to dissolve them, were an insuperable bar to anything politically larger. 'If only these could hold together, they wou

commercial, at the one end, and of the federalism of the city state, at the other. For Aristotle the village-community was the 'colony' ([Greek: apoikia]) or direct offspring of the patriarchal household, but he nowhere admits the city-state to be the 'colony' of the village-community. On the contrary, at the risk of upsetting his own theory of the state as a natural outgrowth of man's political nature, he lays stress on 'the man who first introduced them to each other' as the 'author of the greatest advantages'. And it was precisely this process of 'introducing them to one ano

loosest of federations, and involved annually, somewhere or other, in intertribal feuds and war; but sufficiently acquainted with each other's customs to know that they were based on the same large needs, not merely of 'living' somehow but of 'living well', and to respect this common heritage of intertribal customs, so far that in their uttermost dealings with admitted alie

al society beyond the Alps in the times of Caesar and Tacitus. But apart from these variations, tribal Europe was a coherent whole; and it was so because, and as long as, no new problems of adjustment between Man and Nature arose to upset the balance struck by that Bread-culture with which we were

ed irrevocably as soon as contact was made with a region, like ancient Scythia, where, as Herodotus puts it, 'there are no earthquakes and they grow wheat to sell'; for in the Mountain Zone you are never secure against shocks, and almost never have any surplus of grain.

rld where wealth of any kind was literally 'so little good'. And this industrial wealth, like its commercial counterpart, was personal wealth, owed wholly to skill and push, and in no way due to your clansmen or your clan. When the poet cursed the discovery of metals, he put his finger on the 'key-industry' of the whole industrial development; and when he cursed the invention of shipping, he struck

utside Europe is no matter of prehistoric times. The task of this essay is over when it has presente

FOR RE

ology. Home Uni

n of History. Home

TNO

has not seen. Being for some time abroad on war-work, it was impossible to communicate with him; and it is th

envoy to desert the Greek cause, they say they cannot betray what 'is of one blood and of one spe

us in Anthropology and the Classics; and E

i alla tis apodeixeie, to palaion Hellênik

tos xynon, z?ousin oi polloi

pasi metesti gin?skein e

ing a primitive Old World, round the Aegean shores of Gre

sis of American His

andres], 'acorn-eating men',

Further Explorations, 1903. I begin to suspect that the stippled and shaded enclosures which

iend Dr. John Sampson, of the University of Liverpool; but

28 [Greek: pel?r,

ssey ix.

leusesthai megalê

kas en eidota o

ode xvi. In his

o contendit

a Colchis int

pi? secrevit

vit ?re te

erro duravit

a, vate me,