The New Stone Age in Northern Europe Part 11

But the tendency was based upon something far broader and deeper than changing social and economic conditions and religious feeling. Even the "mere man" must admit that it was biological and natural. "Nature," says Humboldt, "has taken woman under her special protection." She has always been partial to the female. Throughout the long period of mammalian evolution she has showed very little regard for the males. The more they fight and kill one another off, the fewer useless individuals to feed.

The same tendency reaches its logical conclusion in the parthenogenesis of insects. Havelock Ellis says of woman: "She bears the special characteristics of humanity in a higher degree than man, and represents more nearly than man the human type which man is approximating." He boldly a.s.serts that man seems to be the "weaker vessel," and brings strong arguments for his a.s.sertion.[171]

"Das Ewig-weibliche Zieht uns hinan."

The buried Pelasgic religion regained its rightful place. It had more vital reality than the Olympian. Has the great Roman Catholic Church, in its worship of the Virgin, retained at least the symbol of an element of vital reality which we Protestants, in our recoil from so-called "Mariolatry," have neglected to our cost in favor of a purely paternal conception of G.o.d? We leave this question to the theologians.

CHAPTER XI

PROGRESS

It is a far cry and long and weary road from the ape descending from the trees and the ape-man shuffling over the ground, keeping close to his arboreal refuge, to the lake-dweller and builder of stone monuments.

There was very little in the appearance or structure of the ape-man to encourage great hopes for the future. The sleek, graceful, wiry, well-armed cats were far more attractive, promising, and thrilling actors on the world's stage. Why did not they progress, win the future, and insure that all the future meetings of art and learning should be held on the back fence? They certainly did not progress--that is a stubborn fact.

They had largely or completely exhausted the possibilities of their special line of development; as cats they were perfect and could dominate the portion of the world in which as cats they were solely interested. This was an impa.s.sable bar to progress. Why should they change? They were so thoroughly conformed to the environment of their time and conditions that any marked change would have been a disadvantage. But when conditions did change, and the fashion of the world which had produced them pa.s.sed away, they became out of fashion, "back numbers," incapable of meeting new emergencies and crises--like men, parties, and governments in all ages of human history. They suffered from over-adaptation and the resulting limitations.

Man did not make this mistake. Isolated tribes and even races might settle down in contentment, become completely adapted to easy conditions of life, and stagnate or degenerate. But a saving remnant was always marching out into new physical or social surroundings, exposed to new needs, fears, and opportunities, and readapting itself to meet and profit by them. Man was not, and could not be, precocious. He was always a bundle of possibilities and great expectations, which he has even now only begun to realize.

Overpopulation, or other pressure in his primeval home, resulted in great racial migrations, sending him all over the world to seek his fortune. He became one of the very few physically cosmopolitan animals, living everywhere from the equator to the Arctic zone. He became toughened and hardened and adaptable, able to live under the most trying circ.u.mstances. Everywhere he had to be a close observer, watchful and wary. He was weak and defenseless, and his life depended upon his quick recognition of "nature's signs of displeasure," upon the full exercise of his few small wits. He learned to be faithful in a few things. We need not repeat or review this weary chapter of his history.

"There were years that no one talked of. There were times of horrid doubt.

There was faith and hope and whacking and despair."

Man was experimenting with all kinds of climates and conditions. It was in the hard and cold northern regions that he developed farthest, though less rapidly at first. We have already glanced at the educational results of language, of family life in the rock-shelter around the fire, of the fashioning and use of tools, of his love of ornaments and display, of his dawning and clearing self-consciousness, of the beginnings of ownership. We have noticed his burial rites and their suggestions. All these may have been rude and crude, but they contained the germs of vast possibilities, though painfully slow of development.

His "castles in Spain" were his richest possessions, though he probably never knew or suspected them. One hundred thousand years of human life in Europe produced nothing higher than Neanderthal man.

Suddenly, at the beginning of Upper Paleolithic time Cro-Magnon man appeared. His splendid physique and large brain, his production and appreciation of art, and many other qualities, have led some one to speak of him as the "prehistoric Greek." In our enthusiasm we may easily overestimate his powers; but, as we study him and his work, we feel that here was a great race, and that now some great human possibilities are to be fully attained and made permanent. Apparently he had come from the plateau region of western Asia. Near his birthplace there must have been other peoples capable of great things. We remember that Susa was probably founded not much later than the beginning of the Magdalenian epoch in Europe. But the Cro-Magnon folk decreased in numbers, in stature, apparently also in ability and vitality. During the period of transition to Neolithic time Europe was occupied only by a spa.r.s.e population of fishermen along the rivers, while barbarous hunting tribes were working their way northward toward the Baltic. The sh.e.l.l-heaps of Denmark are the monuments of the attainments of this epoch.

A higher civilization had already entered the Mediterranean basin. It was building houses, villages, possibly forerunners of the Greek city-states. Especially in Greece they were sufficiently separated to allow independence of development and great variety, and yet near enough to one another to prevent the ill effects of complete isolation. Here there was rapid interchange and improvement of physical and mental attainments, mental stimulation and rivalry, change and progress.

Implements, weapons, pottery; new discoveries, inventions, ideas, arts, and habits of life and thought spread slowly and gradually from these centres of progressing culture far to the northward. This was undoubtedly one important source of stimuli. But we must not overestimate its influence.[172]

It spread through France into England and Denmark. As time went on this northward current increased and strengthened until, during the Bronze period, the Baltic region, especially Denmark, became almost a second Mediterranean centre of culture and art; just as at a far later time Flemish cities became the Venices of the north. But the north was never a beggarly dependent and imitator of the south. It selected and accepted only what it would, almost always modified and frequently improved what it had selected.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANCIENT FISHERMEN

From the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris.]

The larger part of central and northern Europe lay outside of this great current and was reached by it only slightly and very indirectly.

These regions or provinces were largely working out their own civilization and culture.

What then was the real source of Neolithic progress?[173] It is not to be sought in great wars and revolutions. Genuine wars are carried on by nations with a national government, and as yet there were no nations, and even tribal government--outside of religion, the great bond of tribal unity at this stage--was probably weak, loose, and inefficient. There were no such strong towns or city-states as sprang up later in Greece.

There were here no nomadic hordes to be driven by drought from their withering pastures to migrate _en ma.s.se_ and force their way into less thirsty and starving regions. There was, as yet, no great overpopulation of mountainous areas compelling raids or forays into piedmont zones. The nearest approach to this condition is the slow, evidently peaceful penetration of parts of France by broad-heads from its eastern uplands filtering in and mixing with the long-headed older population, and betraying their arrival mainly by a change in form of head and rise of cephalic index.

There was little wealth to tempt invasion. There were no cities or large towns to plunder. There were wide stretches of land thinly or not at all populated and open to any newcomer. All that we know of Neolithic religion, far more dominant in tribal life and action than the very feebly developed political or social organization, the cult of the G.o.ddess, and the accompanying mother-right, suggest peace. The great invasions of the Bronze and Iron periods introduced or stimulated the cult of war G.o.ds and patriarchal family life and kinship. But these were still in the future. The picture of Europe at this time as a great arena of roving savages, thirsting for blood and always at war, seems to be a caricature.

The people of the banded pottery were evidently peaceful. They left no weapons except mattocks and hammers. No one, I believe, has ever accused the broad-heads of blood-thirst. The graves of northern hunters with corded pottery are all about Grosgartach. The little village was deserted and decayed. It showed no signs of having been burned. The lake-dwellings were open to attack at all times, especially after the ice had formed during the winter. Robenhausen during its long history burned several times; hardly as often as most of our New England villages. Here a single brand or fire-tipped arrow in a thatched roof would have destroyed the whole settlement.

Only in northern Europe, in the country of the corded pottery, do we find great attention paid to the making of fine weapons like the flint daggers and axes. Here we have chiefly herdsmen and hunters. Here there were probably village incompatibilities--Donnybrook fairs, cattle-lifting, and forays. But these should hardly be dignified with the name of wars. We find then some North German peoples at the very end of the Neolithic period pushing southward, often by peaceable infiltration, sometimes perhaps by violent incursions, when the resistance was great.[174]

Says Wundt:[175] "So long as he is not obliged to protect himself against peoples that crowd in upon him, primitive man is familiar with the weapon only as an implement of the chase. The old picture of a war of all with all, as Thomas Hobbes once sketched the natural state of man, is the very reverse of what obtained. The natural condition is one of peace, unless this is disturbed by external circ.u.mstances, one of the most important of which is contact with a higher culture."

We remember, also, the fewness of fortified villages in northern Europe until toward the end of the Neolithic period, and then mainly along great routes of migration; and around mines and workshops. They seem to fail altogether in Scandinavia at this time. Even the wars, battles, or quarrels which occurred probably hindered progress far more than they aided it. Haeckel in his younger days was fierce in his denunciations of the stupidity of war.

Political or economic revolutions could hardly occur when there was probably little organized government and even less wealth and cla.s.s difference.

Conditions in France may have been somewhat different. Here the great stone monuments suggest a denser population under a more advanced organization, religious or political, or both, reminding us of conditions in the Mediterranean region, with whose culture it was closely connected. Here fortifications seem to have been quite numerous.[176] But our knowledge is too slight to allow even a conjecture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EARLY AGRICULTURE

From the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris.]

In the southeastern part of Europe we find the people of the banded pottery who practised an advanced form of agriculture. Here apparently the men as well as the women worked in the fields. We find their stone mattocks and ploughshares. Hoe-culture was giving place to ploughing.

Here men were receiving a very different education and training from the hunters, fishermen, and herdsmen of the north, though there also a gradual increase of tillage was doubtless taking place. They were tilling the ground laboriously, monotonously, doing what was wearisome and disagreeable for a reward sometimes large, sometimes scanty. The peasant farmer learns forethought, thrift, economy, industry, and a host of homely virtues, far less known to hunter or herdsman. He is no more a collector taking what he finds: he has gone into partnership with nature. He is studying her ways, moods, and whims. He ama.s.ses a steadily increasing store of most valuable lore concerning climate, weather, soil, plants, animals, and things. He is rooted in a little patch of ground. His outlook is narrow and he is slow to change. But he learns his lessons thoroughly. He may enter the school unwillingly but he stays in it.

He has a permanent home even if it is hardly more than a hut, which is the centre of his life and thought. It is a hard, healthy life, and population increases rapidly under such conditions. He probably has a large family of children, and they educate and socialize him and one another. He is trained and moulded by "home surroundings." Is not this the history of the frontiersman or homesteader everywhere at all times?

The home and family attachments and instincts are deeply rooted because very ancient and entirely natural.

He lives in a village or neighborhood, which is hardly more than a great patriarchal family, closely united by intermarriage, and by the pressure of common work to satisfy common needs, common ownership of the soil, mutual aid in hard times. The religious rites and ceremonies, the feasts and mysteries, the prayers or magic, are all community affairs. Many of the divinities are local. These religious bonds are all the firmer and more compelling because, in the lack of any developed and permanent political organization, religion is the great tribal bond. We easily forget the civilizing, refining, and improving unremitting pressure and power of these simple, uninteresting peasant influences. He is learning to get on with the members of the family and neighborhood. He is experimenting upon his neighbors: his experiments and experiences may often be very trying to himself and them; the results may sometimes be discouraging. But he is not only practising the essentials and fundamentals of morality, very incomplete and without code; but a sort of preparatory course in government. It may easily be self-government in these small villages. The town-meeting originated here or somewhat farther north.

We have already seen that his religion had grown out of the experiences of his daily life. May we not claim that science and a sort of philosophy may have sprung from the same source? He knew nothing of cause and effect in the material world. But he was seeking diligently the invisible bond of relations of things and events. The relation, according to his views, was mainly of a spiritual character through the agency of daemons. His ritual, call it magic if you will, was the expression of his conviction that results in the material world might be modified by his lending a helping hand to all the beneficent spirits. He indulged freely in hypotheses, but these were the outgrowth of millennia of experience and life, a very healthy form of pragmatism. He who has never laughed at a modern scientific theory, useful and fruitful in its time but now outgrown and replaced by a somewhat better one, may cast the first stone at his "benighted" Neolithic ancestor.

We might even venture to suspect that in his own crude way he was a philosopher. He must have had something like a philosophy of life, even if it was hardly more than a dumb instinct.

Says Miss Harrison: "Dike" (usually translated justice), "in common Greek parlance is the way of life, normal habit. Dike is the way of the world, the way things happen, and Themis is that specialized way for human beings which is sanctioned by the collective conscience, by herd instinct. A lonely beast in the valley, a fish in the sea, has his Dike, but it is not till man congregates together that he has his Themis.

Greeks and Indians alike seem to have discovered that the divine way was also the truth and the life. This notion of the way, which was also the truth and the life, seems to have existed before the separation of Indian from Iranian. Closely allied to Dike and to Vedic Rta is the Chinese Tao, only it seems less moralized and more magical. Deep-rooted in man's heart is the pathetic conviction that moral goodness and material prosperity go together, that if man keep the Rta, he can magically affect for good nature's ordered going."[177]

Thus primitive man, long before the dawn of anything like civilization, was seeking, finding, clearing, and treading out the "way" to an ordered, right, and healthy individual and social life--not through, but to, codes of morals and systems of philosophy. His thought was more or less chaotic, perhaps; it was crudely, often indecently, expressed in ugly form or action; but it was always acted upon, kept close to life.

We might possibly call him an "Ur-pragmatist," if you will pardon the barbarism. He had neither the language nor the "conveniences for thinking" and other things, to write out a cool, logical abstract system in long words. In this we have outrun him until we have left him out of sight. His philosophy was not a guidebook or map, but a rough and often miry trail.

We have tried to express briefly the results of a glance at the agriculturists of southeastern Europe. Before the close of the Neolithic period they were in fairly close communication with aegean culture and owed considerable or much progress to stimuli from this source. In the great essentials of human training and development something quite similar might be said of the lake-dwellers and the broad-heads of eastern France. North Germany had a different culture and probably somewhat different religious cults and general views and conceptions.

France and England, too, represented a quite distinct province whose peoples were always under Mediterranean influence. Denmark was already a meeting-place for a variety of cultures, thoughts, and influences.

Peoples were gradually closing in from all directions on the central provinces of northern Europe, and here apparently they met. We find here a mixture of head-forms, of culture; mixture or modifications of styles of ceramic ornament, of burial customs--all suggesting a mingling of peoples of a variety of cultures. Here at or toward the end of the Neolithic period was the "melting-pot" for the fusion of these peoples and their cultures. There was conflict of customs and ideas, of _ways_ of life. There was probably much incompatibility, many broken heads. The pacific people of the banded pottery seem largely to have withdrawn, or been driven out, before the infiltration or invasions of northern folk.

It was hardly a comfortable place for conservative pacificists. There were doubtless battles in many regions--perhaps now and here we might speak of wars. In some places there may have been extermination of the fighting men. But in most parts there was large fusion, and out of this mixture of cultures, ideas, thoughts, and habits of life came the culture of the beginning of the Bronze Age.

The great characteristic of Neolithic culture seems to be a rude, often barbarous, sometimes ugly but generally healthy, always hardy and vigorous growth--it grew "like a weed"--the manifestation of an intense vitality. Because it was healthy it was essentially and generally fairly sane, matter-of-fact, whole, and balanced. The Neoliths were certainly no "reversed cripples," in whom one or two of the less essential powers had outgrown and dwarfed the man. It was an adaptable stock giving rise to many marked and vigorous varieties, from whose intercrossing something great and good could hardly fail to arise.

Green refuses to write a "trumpet-and-drum history of England." "Happy the people--here we cannot say nation--that has no annals." Here is surely a certain amount of truth which we may be in danger of forgetting. In plants, and often in men, a long period of silent unnoticeable growth usually precedes the brief season of flowers and fruit. Is this the rule in racial, or internal, development?

Is it true, as some historians tell us, that a dormant period of national history best repays investigation, and that dormant peoples will bear watching? Is the dormant nation often storing up nutriment, strength, vitality, just as the plant is doing in its ugly underground roots and stem? Are fallow periods necessary to its fertility and apparently dormant times essential to its life and growth? Must periods of energetic action and effort be followed by times of exhaustion and rest, as in the history of the strong athlete rejoicing to run a race?

Is China awakening from just such a dormant period? What of India, still the home of philosophy? Because a nation, after bearing a marvellous harvest of culture, thought, art, or religion, seems barren and exhausted, does this discourage or arouse the hope that it will some day produce an equal or greater fruitage?

How about "darkest Africa"? Here surely we have a case of degeneration beyond all hope of recovery, not to mention a great future. But is this quite as certain as some of us seem to think? Is not much of our so-called Occidental progress really an orgy of wasted energy, neurotic excitement, half-camouflaged decadence, which will end in degeneration?

We do not know yet. May there some day be a family rather than league of nations to which every one will contribute according to its special ability? If this be granted, will Huxley's statement concerning the individual be applicable to races and peoples: "Its aim will be not so much the survival of the fittest as the fitting of as many as possible to survive"? These are sphinx questions demanding an answer from statesmen. Unfortunately most of our statesmen are only waiting to be gathered to their fathers in the graveyard of dead politicians. We will turn homeward after our excursion, gladly leaving our little bundle of facts and questions at the door of the philosopher of history.