SCORPION

Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir, 1832-1917

"Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom"

CHAPTER XIX.

CONCLUSION.

Practical results of the study of Primitive Culture Its bearing least
upon Positive Science, greatest upon Intellectual, Moral, Social,
and Political Philosophy Language Mythology Ethics and
Law Religion Action of the Science of Culture, as a means of
furthering progress and removing hindrance, effective in the
course of Civilization ...... 443

CHAPTER XIX.

CONCLUSION.

Practical results of the study of Primitive Culture Its bearing least upon
Positive Science, greatest upon Intellectual, Moral, Social, and Political
Philosophy Language Mythology Ethics and Law Religion
Action of the Science of Culture, as a means of furthering progress
and removing hindrance, effective in the course of Civilization.

IT now remains, in bringing to a close these investigations
on the relation of primitive to modern civilization, to urge
the practical import of the considerations raised in their
course. Granted that archaeology, leading the student's
mind back to remotest known conditions of human life,
shows such life to have been of unequivocally savage type ;
granted that the rough-hewn flint hatchet, dug out from
amidst the bones of mammoths in a drift gravel-bed to lie
on an ethnologist's writing-table, is to him a very type of
primitive culture, simple yet crafty, clumsy yet purposeful,
low in artistic level yet fairly started on the ascent toward
highest development what then? Of course the history
and prae-history of man take their proper places in the
general scheme of knowledge. Of course the doctrine of
the world-long evolution of civilization is one which
philosophic minds will take up with eager interest, as a
theme of abstract science. But beyond this, such research
has its practical side, as a source of power destined to
influence the course of modern ideas and actions. To
establish a connexion between what uncultured ancient men
thought and did, and what cultured modern men think and
do, is not a matter of inapplicable theoretic knowledge, for
it raises the issue, how far are modern opinion and conduct

443



444 CONCLUSION.

based on the strong ground of soundest modern knowledge,
or how far only on such knowledge as was available in the
earlier and ruder stages of culture where their types were
shaped. It has to be maintained that the early history of
man has its bearing, almost ignored as that bearing has
been by those whom it ought most stringently to affect, on
some of the deepest and most vital points of our intellectual,
industrial, and social state.

Even in advanced sciences, such as relate to measure and
force and structure in the inorganic and organic world, it is
at once a common and a serious error to adopt the principle
of letting bygones be bygones. Were scientific systems the
oracular revelations they sometimes all but pretend to be,
it might be justifiable to take no note of the condition of
mere opinion or fancy that preceded them. But the inves-
tigator who turns from his modern text-books to the
antiquated dissertations of the great thinkers of the past,
gains from the history of his own craft a truer view of the
relation of theory to fact, learns from the course of growth
in each current hypothesis to appreciate its raison d'etre
and full significance, and even finds that a return to older
starting-points may enable him to find new paths, where
the modern track seems stopped by impassable barriers.
It is true that rudimentary conditions of arts and sciences
are often rather curious than practically instructive,
especially because the modern practitioner has kept up, as
mere elementary processes, the results of the ancient or
savage man's most strenuous efforts. Perhaps our tool-
makers may not gain more than a few suggestive hints from
a museum of savage implements, our physicians may only
be interested in savage recipes so far as they involve the
use of local drugs, our mathematicians may leave to the
infant-school the highest flights of savage arithmetic, our
astronomers may only find in the star-craft of the lower
races an uninstructive combination of myth and common-
place. But there are departments of knowledge, of not less
consequence than mechanics and medicine, arithmetic and



PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE. 445

astronomy, in which the study of the lowest stages, as influ-
encing the practical acceptance of the higher, cannot be
thus carelessly set aside.

If we survey the state of educated opinion, not within the
limits of some special school, but in the civilized world at
large, on such subjects especially as relate to Man, his
intellectual and moral nature, his place and function among
his fellow-men and in the universe at large, we see existing
side by side, as if of equal right, opinions most diverse in
real authority. Some, vouched for by direct and positive
evidence, hold their ground as solid truths. Others, though
founded on crudest theories of the lower culture, have been
so modified under the influence of advancing knowledge,
as to afford a satisfactory framework for recognized facts ;
and positive science, mindful of the origin of its own
philosophic schemes, must admit the validity of such a
title. Others, lastly, are opinions belonging properly to
lower intellectual levels, which have held their place into
the higher by mere force of ancestral tradition ; these are
survivals. Now it is the practical office of ethnography to
make known to all whom it may concern the tenure of
opinions in the public mind, to show what is received on
its own direct evidence, what is ruder ancient doctrine
reshaped to answer modern ends, and what is but time-
honoured superstition in the garb of modern knowledge.

Topic after topic shows at a glimpse the way in which
ethnography bears on modern intellectual conditions.
Language, appearing as an art in full vigour among rude
tribes, already displays the adaptation of childlike devices
in self-expressive sound and pictorial metaphor, to utter
thoughts as complex and abstruse as savage minds demand
speech for. When it is considered how far the development
of knowledge depends on full and exact means of expressing
thought, is it not a pregnant consideration that the language
of civilized men is but the language of savages, more or less
improved in structure, a good deal extended in vocabulary,
made more precise in the dictionary definition of words ?



446 CONCLUSION.

The development of language between its savage and
cultured stages has been made in its details, scarcely in its
principle. It is not too much to say that half the vast
defect of language as a method of utterance, and half the
vast defect of thought as determined by the influence of
language, are due to the fact that speech is a scheme
worked out by the rough and ready application of material
metaphor and imperfect analogy, in ways fitting rather the
barbaric education of those who formed it, than our own.
Language is one of those intellectual departments in which
we have gone too little beyond the savage stage, but are
still as it were hacking with stone celts and twirling
laborious friction-fire. Metaphysical speculation, again, has
been one of the potent influences on human conduct, and
although its rise, and one may almost say also its decline
and fall, belong to comparatively civilized ages, yet its
connexion with lower stages of intellectual history may to
some extent be discerned. For example, attention may be
recalled to a special point brought forward in this work, that
one of the greatest metaphysical doctrines is a transfer to
the field of philosophy from the field of religion, made when
philosophers familiar with the conception of object-phantoms
used this to provide a doctrine of thought, thus giving rise
to the theory of ideas. Far more fully and distinctly, the
study of the savage and barbaric intellect opens to us the
study of Mythology. The evidence here brought together
as to the relation of the savage to the cultured mind in the
matter of mythology has, I think, at any rate justified this
claim. With a consistency of action so general as to amount
to mental law, it is proved that among the lower races all
^over the world the operation of outward events on the
inward mind leads not only to statement of fact, but to
formation of myth. It gives no unimportant clues to the
student of mental history, to see by what regular processes
myths are generated, and how, growing by wear and in-
creasing in value at secondhand, they pass into pseudo-
historic legend. Poetry is full of myth, and he who will



LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY. 447

understand it analytically will do well to study it ethno-
graphically. In so far as myth, seriously or sportively
meant, is the subject of poetry, and in so far as it is couched
in language whose characteristic is that wild and rambling
metaphor which represents the habitual expression of savage
thought, the mental condition of the lower races is the key
to poetry nor is it a small portion of the poetic realm
which these definitions cover. History, again, is an agent
powerful, and becoming more powerful, in shaping men's
minds, and through their minds their actions in the world ;
now one of the most prominent faults of historians is that,
through want of familiarity with the principles of myth-
development, they cannot apply systematically to ancient
legend the appropriate test for separating chronicle from
myth, but with few exceptions are apt to treat the mingled
mass of tradition partly with undiscriminating credulity and
partly with undiscriminating scepticism. Even more in-
jurious is the effect of such want of testing on that part of
traditional or documentary record which, among any section
of mankind, stands as sacred history. It is not merely that
in turning to the index of some book on savage tribes, one
comes on such a suggestive heading as this, ' Religion see
Mythology.' It is that within the upper half of the scale
of civilization, among the great historic religions of the
world, we all know that between religion and religion, and
even to no small extent between sect and sect, the narratives
which to one side are sacred history, may seem to the other
mythic legend. Among the reasons which retard the pro-
gress of religious history in the modern world, one of the
most conspicuous is this, that so many of its approved
historians demand from the study of mythology always
weapons to destroy their adversaries' structures, but never
tools to clear and trim their own. It is an indispensable
qualification of the true historian that he shall be able to
look dispassionately on myth as a natural and regular product
of the human mind, acting on appropriate facts in a manner
suited to the intellectual state of the people producing it,



448 CONCLUSION.

and that he shall treat it as an accretion to be deducted
from professed history, whenever it is recognized by the
tests of being decidedly against evidence as fact, and at the
same time clearly explicable as myth. It is from the ethno-
graphic study of savage and barbaric races that the know-
ledge of the general laws >f myth-development, required for
the carrying out of tnls critical process, may be best or
must necessarily be gained.

The two vast united provinces of Morals and Law have
been as yet too imperfectly treated on a general ethno-
graphic scheme, to warrant distinct statement of results.
Yet thus much may be confidently said, that where the
ground has been even superficially explored, every glimpse
reveals treasures of knowledge. It is already evident that
enquirers who systematically trace each department of
moral and legal institutions from the savage through the
barbaric and into the civilized condition of mankind.thereby
introduce into the scientific investigations of these subjects
an indispensable element which merely theoretical writers
are apt unscrupulously to dispense with. The law or
maxim which a people at some particular stage of its his-
tory might have made fresh, according to the information
and circumstances of the period, is one thing. The law or
maxim which did in fact become current among them by
inheritance from an earlier stage, only more or less modified
to make it compatible with the new conditions, is another
and far different thing. Ethnography is required to bridge
over the gap between the two, a very chasm where the argu-
ments of moralists and legists are continually falling in, to
crawl out maimed and helpless. Within modern grades of
civilization this historical method is now becoming more
and more accepted. It will not be denied that English
law has acquired, by modified inheritance from past ages, a
theory of primogeniture and a theory of real estate which
are so far from being products of our own times that we
must go back to the middle ages for anything like a satis-
factory explanation of them ; and as for more absolute






ETHICS AND LAW. 449

survival, did not Jewish disabilities stand practically, and
the wager of battle nominally, in our law of not many
years back ? But the point to be pressed here is, that the
development and survival of law are processes that did not
first come into action within the range of written codes of
comparatively cultured nations. Admitted that civilized
law requires its key from barbaric law ; it must be borne
in mind that the barbarian lawgiver too was guided in
judgment not so much by first principles, as by a reverent
and often stupidly reverent adherence to the tradition of
earlier and yet ruder ages.

Nor can these principles be set aside in the scientific
study of moral sentiment and usage. When the ethical
systems of mankind, from the lowest savagery upward, have
been analyzed and arranged in their stages of evolution,
then ethical science, no longer vitiated by too exclusive
application to particular phases of morality taken unrea-
sonably as representing morality in general, will put its
methods to fair trial on the long and intricate world-history
of right and wrong.

In concluding a work of which full half is occupied by
evidence bearing on the philosophy of religion, it may well
be asked, how does all this array of facts stand toward the
theologian's special province ? That the world sorely needs
new evidence and method in theology, the state of religion
in our own land bears witness. Take English Protestantism
as a central district of opinion, draw an ideal line through
its centre, and English thought is seen to be divided as by
a polarizing force extending to the utmost limits of repul-
sion. On one side of the dividing line stand such as keep
firm hold on the results of the i6th century reformation, or
seek yet more original canons from the first Christian ages ;
on the other side stand those who, refusing to be bound by
the doctrinal judgments of past centuries, but introducing
modern science and modern criticism as new factors in
theological opinion, are eagerly pressing toward a new
reformation. Outside these narrower limits, cxtremer



450 CONCLUSION.

partizans occupy more distant ground on either side. On
the one hand the Anglican blends gradually into the Roman
scheme, a system so interesting to the ethnologist for its
maintenance of rites more naturally belonging to barbaric
culture ; a system so hateful to the man of science for its
suppression of knowledge, and for that usurpation of
intellectual authority by a sacerdotal caste which has at
last reached its climax, now that an aged bishop can judge,
by infallible inspiration, the results of researches whose
evidence and methods are alike beyond his knowledge and
his mental grasp. On the other hand, intellect, here
trampled under foot of dogma, takes full revenge elsewhere,
even within the domain of religion, in those theological
districts where reason takes more and more the command
over hereditary belief, like a mayor of the palace supersed-
ing a nominal king. In yet farther ranges of opinion,
religious authority is simply deposed and banished, and the
throne of absolute reason is set up without a rival even in
name ; in secularism the feeling and imagination which in
the religious world are bound to theological belief, have to
attach themselves to a positive natural philosophy, and to a
positive morality which shall of its own force control the acts
of men. Such, then, is the boundless divergence of opinion
among educated citizens of an enlightened country, in an age
scarcely approached by any former age in the possession of
actual knowledge and the strenuous pursuit of truth as the
guiding principle of life. Of the causes which have brought
to pass so perplexed a condition of public thought, in so
momentous a matter as theology, there is one, and that a
weighty one, which demands mention here. It is the partial
and one-sided application of the historical method of enquiry
into theological doctrines, and the utter neglect of the
ethnographical method which carries back the historical
into remoter and more primitive regions of thought. Look-
ing at each doctrine by itself and for itself, as in the abstract
true or untrue, theologians close their eyes to the instances
which history is ever holding up before them, that one phase



RELIGION. 451

of a religious belief is the outcome of another, that in all
times religion has included within its limits a system of
philosophy, expressing its more or less transcendental con-
ceptions in doctrines which form in any age their fittest
representatives, but which doctrines are liable to modifica-
tion in the general course of intellectual change, whether
the ancient formulas still hold their authority with altered
meaning, or are themselves reformed or replaced. Christen-
dom furnishes evidence to establish this principle, if for
example we will but candidly compare the educated opinion of
Rome in the 5th with that of London in the igth century, on
such subjects as the nature and functions of soul, spirit, deity,
and judge by the comparison in what important respects the
philosophy of religion has come to differ even among men
who represent in different ages the same great principles of
faith. The general study of the ethnography of religion,
through all its immensity of range, seems to countenance
the theory of evolution in its highest and widest sense. In
the treatment of some of its topics here, I have propounded
special hypotheses as to the order in which various stages of
doctrine and rite have succeeded one another in the history
of religion. Yet how far these particular theories may hold
good, seems even to myself a minor matter. The essential
part of the ethnographic method in theology lies in admit-
ting as relevant the compared evidence of religion in all
stages of culture. The action of such evidence on theology
proper is in this wise, that a vast proportion of doctrines
and rites known among mankind are not to be judged as
direct products of the particular religious systems which
give them sanction, for they are in fact more or less
modified results adopted from previous systems. The
theologian, as he comes to deal with each element of belief
and worship, ought to ascertain its place in the general
scheme of religion. Should the doctrine or rite in question
appear to have been transmitted from an earlier to a later
stage of religious thought, then it should be tested, like
any other point of culture, as to its place in development.



452 CONCLUSION.

The question has to be raised, to which of these three cate-
gories it belongs : is it a product of the earlier theology,
yetsound enough to maintain a rightful place in the later?
is it derived from a cruder original, yet so modified as to be-
come a proper representative of more advanced views ? is
it a survival from a lower stage of thought, imposing on the
credit of the higher by virtue not of inherent truth but of
ancestral belief ? These are queries the very asking of
which starts trains of thought which candid minds should
be encouraged to pursue, leading as they do toward the
attainment of such measure of truth as the intellectual con-
dition of our age fits us to assimilate. In the scientific
study of religion, which now shows signs of becoming for
many a year an engrossing subject of the world's thought,
the decision must not rest with a council in which the
theologian, the metaphysician, the biologist, the physicist,
exclusively take part. The historian and the ethnographer
must be called upon to show the hereditary standing of each
opinion and practice, and their enquiry must go back as far
as antiquity or savagery can show a vestige, for there seems
no human thought so primitive as to have lost its bearing
on our own thought, nor so ancient as to have broken its
connection with our own life.

It is our happiness to live in one of those eventful periods
of intellectual and moral history, when the oft-closed gates
of discovery and reform stand open at their widest. How
long these good days may last, we cannot tell. It may be
that the increasing power and range of the scientific method,
with its stringency of argument and constant check of fact,
may start the world on a more steady and continuous course
of progress than it has moved on heretofore. But if history
is to repeat itself according to precedent, we must look for-
ward to stiffer duller ages of traditionalists and commenta-
tors, when the great thinkers of our time will be appealed
to as authorities by men who slavishly accept their tenets,
yet cannot or dare not follow their methods through better
evidence to higher ends. In either case, it is for those

EFFECT OF SCIENCE OF CULTURE. 453

among us whose minds are set on the advancement of
civilization, to make the most of present opportunities, that
even when in future years progress is arrested, it may be
arrested at the higher level. To the promoters of what is
sound and reformers of what is faulty in modern culture,
ethnography has double help to give. To impress men's
minds with a doctrine of development, will lead them in all
honour to their ancestors to continue the progressive work
of past ages, to continue it the more vigorously because
light has increased in the world, and where barbaric hordes
groped blindly, cultured men can often move onward with
clear view. It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office
of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old culture
which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark
these out for destruction. Yet this work, if less genial, is
not less urgently needful for the good of mankind. Thus,
active at once in aiding progress and in removing hind-
rance, the science of culfare is essentially a reformer's
science.