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

BOOK 9

CHAPTER 2

THE PRESENT PHASE OF HUMAN ASSOCIATION

§ 1. The Religious Tradition. § 2. The Passing of Traditionalism. § 3. The Supersession of War. § 4. The Change in the Nature of Education. § 5. The Breeding of

Mankind. § 6. The Superfluous Energy of Man. Collective Human Mind and Will.

§ 1 The Religious Tradition

E have considered how the Hominide

became more gregarious not by a diminution of individual lust, combativeness and self-assertion through variation and selection, but by the suppression of egoistic passions by countervailing inhibitions. Man’s social evolution has been a mental process, through the development of a tradition of restraint upon impulsive conduct. Possibly there has been a selective preference for inhibitory types, so that now he restrains himself with increasing ease, but that must remain a guess. Nothing has been subtracted from man in the processes of socialization but something has been added and imposed. He is not a fierce animal that has become a weak one, but he is a fierce animal bridled and trained. He has been “caught young,” he is now trained from the plastic days of childhood to control himself, and this observance of self-control and the rules that determine it is in most savage communities regulated by the system known, broadly speaking, as tabu. The same carefully cherished infantile awe more highly elaborated and directed, the same organization of an inner moral conflict for the good of the community, becomes in the larger, more complex societies that dawn upon us in the Mediterranean region and east central Asia, at the very beginning of history, the core of religion.

There remain some wide gaps in our direct knowledge of the evolution of human society. It is only in a few regions of the world that any systematic search for traces and vestiges of early man has yet been possible. We have still to piece together the stages by which man under favourable conditions passed from the phase of a casual feeder and hunter, not very definitely fixed, to a definite place, to the condition of a settled cultivator. In Egypt, in Mesopotamia, we find him already settled more

866

7. The Possibility of One § 8. Life Under Control.

than seven or eight thousand years ago. But it is not certain that the early stages of this change-over from casual to economic living occurred in these regions. Presently we may find remains of these phases in the Near East or North Africa or elsewhere, or they may have occurred in lands now submerged and inaccessible to us—the basin of the Mediterranean, for example. At present we have to fill the hiatus with speculative matter.

On one side of the hiatus we have the later Paleolithic men such as inhabited Spain and the South of France some twenty thousand years ago. They seem to have had a tribal organization of unknown range. They were wandering barbarians who had made very considerable upward progress from primordial savagery. The artistic value of their sculptures and their drawings upon rocks (see Figs. 337-9) is well known. The South African bushmen who make similar drawings to this day believe they have magic power, and that they cast a favourable spell over the hunted game they depict. In addition to his tabu system, the later Paleolithic savage had also, it would seem, a practical science and art, a fetish or magic system. We find the similar mingling of awe and rather badly reasoned practical magic in surviving savage communities, and it is reasonable to conclude that in the later Paleolithic period over most of their wide range the human tribes had arrived or were arriving at about the same level of mental development. Then on the near side of the hiatus, without any satisfactory connecting bridge, we find these early agricultural communities in the Neolithic stage.

There is nothing to indicate that these Neolithic peoples and culture developed directly from the later Paleolithic. These two cultures may have developed divergently from a common origin at the lower Paleolithic level. Except for a certain want of artistic freedom, the Neolithic