Social Environment and Moral Progress. Alfred Russel Wallace
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and used for such observations, and that by no other means could the same amount of accuracy have been attained.
I have given a rather full account of what the Pyramid builders really did, because it forms a very important part of the argument I am developing as to the stationary condition of the human intellect during the historical period.
The great majority of educated persons hold the opinion that our wonderful discoveries and inventions in every department of art and science prove that we are really more intellectual and wiser than the men of past ages—that our mental faculties have increased in power. But this idea is totally unfounded. We are the inheritors of the accumulated knowledge of all the ages; and it is quite possible and even probable, that the earliest steps taken in the accumulation of this vast mental treasury required even more thought and a higher intellectual power than any of those taken in our own era.
We can perhaps best understand this by supposing any one of our great men of science to have been born and educated in one of the earliest of the civilisations. If Newton had been born in Egypt in the era of the Pyramid builders, when there were no such sciences as mathematics, perhaps even no decimal notation which makes arithmetic so easy to us, he could probably have done nothing more than they have actually done. In building up the sciences each of the early steps was the work of a genius. But now that there has been nearly a hundred centuries of discovery and specialisation by thousands or even millions of workers, that by means of writing and of the printing press every discovery is quickly made known, and that ever larger and larger numbers devote their lives to study, the rate of progress becomes quicker and quicker, till the total result is amazingly great. But that does not prove any superiority of the later over the earlier discoveries. There is, therefore, no proof of continuously increasing intellectual power.
But we have now evidence of another kind, which adds to the force of this argument.
Quite recently, papyri have been discovered which give us information as to the ideas, the beliefs, and the aspirations of a period even earlier than that of the Great Pyramid. The result of the study of these and other records of early Egypt is thus stated by Professor Adolf Erman in The Historian's History of the World:
"But when one considers the ancient resident of the valley of the Nile as a human being, with desires, emotions, and aspirations almost precisely like our own; a man struggling to solve the same problems of practical Socialism that we are struggling for to-day—then, and then only, can the lessons of ancient Egyptian history be brought home to us in their true meaning, and with their true significance. And clearest of all will that significance be, perhaps, if we constantly bear in mind the possibility that the whole sweep of Egyptian history, during the three or four thousand years that separated the Pyramid builders from the contemporaries of Alexander, was a time of national decay—a dark age, if you will—in Egyptian history."
That a great historian, from a study of the ideas and social aspirations of the earliest known civilisations, should have arrived at similar views as to the identity of their mental capacity with our own as I have deduced from their scientific attainments, must be held to be a very strong argument in support of the accuracy of our independent conclusions.
CHAPTER V
SPEECH AND WRITING AS PROOFS OF INTELLIGENCE
There is yet another proof that the faculties of mankind at a very early epoch were fully equal to those of our own time. There is perhaps nothing more difficult in its nature, more utterly beyond the mere lower animal, than the faculty of articulate speech possessed by every race of mankind. We cannot but believe that its acquisition was an extremely slow process, and that it is rendered possible by special cerebral developments giving the necessary mental power for its acquirement.
How long a process this would be, it is impossible to say, but it would certainly have had to reach a high degree of perfection before the equally difficult process of inventing a mode of writing could have been brought to such perfection as to facilitate the further development of the higher faculties through poetry on the one hand and the preservation of facts and discoveries, as well as trains of reasoning, on the other.
Now, I wish to call attention to the very important fact that the origin and development of speech, and later, of writing, were apparently almost simultaneous, and certainly quite independent of each other, in countries not very distant apart. This is shown by the radical diversity of the different groups of languages in Europe, Eastern Asia and North Africa, and the equal diversity of Egyptian, Assyrian, and Chinese writing. All other written characters are believed to be derived from one or other of these, and it is known that the forms and peculiarities of alphabetic characters have been greatly modified by the various materials employed, such as wood and stone slabs, clay, or wax; papyrus, paper or parchment; and whether engraved, impressed or painted, whether written with a reed or quill pen, or with a small brush.
But if intellectual man as a species of mammal had developed by the preservation of variations of survival-value, we should expect to find such an important faculty as speech to have originated in one centre and to have spread rapidly over the world with only slight modifications in isolated communities. The fundamental diversities we find seem to accord better with the conception that when, as a mere animal, his material organism had reached the required degree of perfection, there occurred the spiritual influx which alone enabled him to begin that course of intellectual and moral development, and that marvellous power over the forces of Nature, in which speech and writing, followed by printing, have been such important factors.
In order for man to develop speech he must have possessed a brain and an intellect far above that of the brutes. As in the more fundamental problem of the origin of life, it is admitted that organisation is a product of life—not life of organisation—so we must believe that speech was a product of a brain and an intellect sufficient for their development. But such brain and intellect were not necessary for the lower animals, which have reached their highest lines of development in the dog, horse, elephant, and ape without making any definite approach to the acquirement of such higher faculties.
CHAPTER VI
SAVAGES NOT MORALLY INFERIOR TO CIVILISED RACES
If the facts and arguments set forth in the preceding chapters are correct we should not expect to find any living examples of the unspiritualised man, since the assumption is that the whole race received the influx which started them on their course of purely human development within a strictly limited period, perhaps of a very few generations or even one generation. The ancestral form—the supposed missing link—would then have become extinct.
If this were not so we should expect to find some isolated groups of speechless man, and of this there is no example; but, on the contrary, the very lowest of existing races are found to possess languages which are often of extreme complexity in grammatical structure and in no way suggestive of the primitive man-animal of which they are supposed to be surviving relics. So long as we got our knowledge respecting them from the low-class Europeans who captured them for slaves or shot them down as wild beasts, we could not possibly acquire any real knowledge of them as human beings. But now that we have more trustworthy accounts of them by intelligent travellers or missionaries, we find ample evidence that when by kindness and sympathy we penetrate to their inner nature, we discover that they possess human qualities of the same kind as our own. A few examples of what unprejudiced witnesses say of them will be very instructive.
Darwin, after attending a meeting between Captain Fitzroy and the chief of a small island near Tahiti to settle a question of compensation for injury to an English ship, says: "I cannot sufficiently express our surprise at the extreme good sense, the reasoning powers, moderation, candour, and prompt resolution which were displayed on all sides."
Captain Cook himself, who saw them in their primitive condition, speaks of the natives of the Friendly Isles as being "liberal, brave, open and candid, without either suspicion or treachery, cruelty, or revenge"; and a century later Admiral Erskine remarks that "they carry their habits of cleanliness and decency to a higher point than the most civilised nations"; while all the Polynesian races are kind and attentive to the sick and aged, and unlimited hospitality is everywhere practised by them.
Even the Australian aborigines, who are often said to be one of the lowest