The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 4g

again was completely carnivorous. Difference of habitat means difference of habit and difference of physique and successful type. No human varieties survive to-day that we can call “ primitive” in the proper meaning of the term. We can only speculate about the nature of the “ primitive” life of man. But even as late as the nineteenth century various savage races remained sufficiently isolated to contrast very vividly in their customs, physical types, and social organization with the main masses of mankind. There were, for example, the aboriginal Tasmanians, a people who had still lingered at the early Paleolithic level and were out of all comparison inferior to the Solutrean and Magdalenian Europeans. There are still the Brazilian forest folk and the Pigmies of Central Africa. There are also the Veddahs of the Indian forests, the Australian Blackfellows, and the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert.

All these are divergent or retrograde forms of human life. Indubitably men, their little communities of at most a few score individuals, with their crude equipment of implements, their limited language, and their rigid traditions, keep before us a realization of the narrow limitations from which the mass of our species is now escaping. None of these folk seem ever to have lived in larger groupings than they do at the present time, but most of them have been influenced and sophisticated by some intercourse with less specialized humanity. They are not to be rashly taken as primitive. Rather they are the preservers of aberrant and_ less successful tabu experiments. Many of the more peculiar institutions of the vanishing savage societies of our time are the sociological equivalents of the platypus and echidna. They are not ancestral survivals but side branches.

§ 4 The Development of Human Interaction

In Chapter 7 of the preceding Book, we have considered the intricate system of associations and symbols by means of which three writers, working together in a country house in Essex, in England, are able to arouse the thought, form and flavour of an orange in the minds of readers in America, Australia, Africa, China or anywhere else to which this work may penetrate. We pointed out _ how it is that the human mind is able and free to isolate qualities and pursue generalizations, to form, analyse, and reconstruct concepts, because of its use of word-symbols.

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER i

This does not merely carry the power and range of the individual human mind immeasurably beyond that of any other living creature; it also establishes a new and strange interdependence among human individuals. The development of that interdependence is one of the leading motifs in The Outline of History, and we refer to it only briefly here. Probably the first language was a language of gesture and mimicry. Imitative sounds were an obvious way of suggesting other animals, or any other noisemaking objects, such as a stream or a breeze. With most gestures, as Sir R. Paget has recently pointed out, goes an associated movement of the vocal apparatus, and it was a convenient and labour-saving expedient to detach this concomitant as a symbol of the gesture it accompanied. Man also drew early. The aggregation of his sound symbols into grammatical speech and of his pictorial gestures into picture-writing and at last into script, once it had begun, may have progressed very rapidly. Symbolism must have involved a great economy in association. It was a process that probably took a few thousands rather than scores of thousands of years. Later Paleolithic man and early Neolithic man were already freely-talking and picture-writing animals.

With the development of speech and image and picture and with the multiplication of instruments and constructions, man began to supplement his heredity in an entirely unprecedented fashion. We have told how with the evolution of parental care among the higher vertebrata, education appeared in life. All the Hominide were exceptionally educational animals, and with the development of speech, precept was added to example and memories began to be transmitted from old to young. Homo was the first living creature to form a picture of his universe that transcended individual experience. The elders supplemented their stories of what had happened to them and what they had been told by their predecessors with imaginations about the beasis and rocks and the sun and moon; myth and legend were added to tradition.

It is not so very difficult to imagine, once the process of symbolization was begun, once the point of crystallization was reached and language became possible, a very rapid development of the traditional element in human life. Men began to “ explain” things, and particularly the tabus and customs, by telling stories about them. Man added tradition to heredity. He is the first and only traditional animal. There