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

BOOK 9

flooding lands may have responded with more and more efficient irrigation systems as the world grew dry.

§ 2 The Passing of Traditionalism

The development of human societies was a development of traditions. Usage, justified by mythology, was the method of human association for scores of centuries. But the different conditions under which our widely diffused species was living in different regions of the world forbade the establishment of any uniform usage and mythology. By wars, raids, and the clash of traditions, the spirit of comparison, disputation, and inquiry was fostered. Undirected thinking gave place here and there in a few minds to a more sceptical, sustained and efficient process. The climatic fluctuations that brought the Semitic and Aryan-speaking peoples down upon the primitive civilizations opened the human mind to the possibility of alternatives in tradition. Men asked “What is truth?’ Inventions in thought and method no longer awakened the same effective distrust and opposition. Plato’s Utopias display the full-fledged realization that tradition could be set aside and a social order still exist. Aristotle embodies the release of the human mind towards new knowledge and power. These are the pioneers of modern thought and effort. How their initiatives lost force and were renewed again in the birth of modern Science, the historian must tell.

There is a very able and too little known book upon the Fijians by Sir Basil Thomson —a “study of the decay of custom,’? which illustrates very admirably the tentative and intermittent way in which progress has been achieved in the human past, and the new spirit in which man now faces his world. We thank Sir Basil for the liberty of quoting a striking passage from the book, so well does it say what we wish to express here. It is all the better that it says it at an angle of approach and with implications rather different from our own.

“The law of custom was the law of our own forefathers until the infusion of new blood and new customs shook them out of the groove and set them to choosing between the old and the new, and then to making new laws to meet new needs. This happened so long ago that if it were not for a few ceremonial survivals we might well doubt whether our forefathers were ever so held in bondage. With the precept—

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 2

to do as your father did before you—an isolated race will remain stationary for centuries. There is, I believe, in all the history of travel, only one instance in which the absolute stagnation of a race has been proved, and that is the case of the Solomon Islands, the first of the Pacific groups to be discovered and the last to be influenced by Europeans. In 1568 a Spanish expedition under Alvaro de Mendana set sail from Peru in quest of the Southern continent. Missing all the great island groups Mendana discovered the islands named by him Islas de Saloman, not because he found any gold there, but because he hoped thereby to inflame the cupidity of the Council of the Indies into fitting out a fresh expedition. Gomez Catoira, his treasurer, has left us a detailed account of the customs of the natives and about forty words of their language. And now comes the strange part of the story. Expedition after expedition set sail for the Isles of Solomon; group after group was discovered ; but the Isles of Solomon were lost, and at last geographers, having shifted them to every space left vacant in the chart, treated them as fabulous and expunged them altogether. They were rediscovered by Bougainville exactly two centuries later, but it was not until late in the nineteenth century that any attempt was made to study the language and customs of the natives. It was then found that in every particular, down to the peitiest detail in their dress, their daily life and their language, they were the same as when Catoira saw them two centuries earlier, and so no doubt they would have remained until the last trump had not Europeans come among ETc

“In the sense that no race now exists which is not in some degree touched by the influence of Western civilization, the present decade *’—(the book is dated 1908)—** may be said to be a fresh starting point in the history of mankind. Whithersoever we turn, the laws of custom, which have governed the uncivilized races for countless generations, are breaking down ; the old isolation which kept their blood pure is vanishing before railway and steamship communication which imports alien labourers to work for European settlers; and ethnologists of the future, having no pure race left to examine, will have to fall back upon hearsay evidence in studying the history of human institutions.

“ All this has happened before in the world’s history but in a more limited area. To the Roman armies, the Roman system