Progress and History. Various
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as we can tell; and that is why, perhaps, his peculiar type of brow-ridge no longer adorns the children of men.
Before we leave the Mousterians, another side of their culture deserves brief mention. Not only did they provide their dead with rude graves, but they likewise furnished them with implements and food for use in a future life. Herein surely we may perceive the dawn of what I do not hesitate to term religion. A distinguished scholar and poet did indeed once ask me whether the Mousterians, when they performed these rites, did not merely show themselves unable to grasp the fact that the dead are dead. But I presume that my friend was jesting. A sympathy stronger than death, overriding its grisly terror, and converting it into the vehicle of a larger hope—that is the work of soul; and to develop soul is progress. A religious animal is no brute, but a real man with the seed of genuine progress in him. If Neanderthal man belonged to another species, as the experts mostly declare and I very humbly beg leave to doubt, we must even so allow that God made him also after his own image, brow-ridges and all.
The presence of soul in man is even more manifest when we pass on to the Late Palaeolithic peoples. They are cave-dwellers; they live by the chase; in a word, they are savages still. But they exhibit a taste and a talent for the fine arts of drawing and carving that, as it were, enlarge human existence by a new dimension. Again a fresh power has been released, and one in which many would seem to have participated; for good artists are as plentiful during this epoch as ever they were in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. They must have married-in somewhat closely, one would think, for this special aptitude to have blossomed forth so luxuriantly. I cannot here dwell at length on the triumphs of Aurignacian and Magdalenian artistry. Indeed, what I have seen with my own eyes on the walls of certain French caves is almost too wonderful to be described. The simplicity of the style does not in the least detract from the fullness of the charm. On the contrary, one is tempted to doubt whether the criterion of complexity applies here—whether, in fact, progress has any meaning in relation to fine art—since, whether attained by simple or by complex means, beauty is always beauty, and cannot further be perfected. Shall we say, then, with Plato that beauty was revealed to man from the first in its absolute nature, so that the human soul might be encouraged to seek for the real in its complementary forms of truth and goodness, such as are less immediately manifest? For the rest, the soul of these transcendently endowed savages was in other respects more imperfectly illuminated; as may be gathered from the fact that they carved and drew partly from the love of their art, but partly also, and, perhaps, even primarily, for luck. It seems that these delineations of the animals on which they lived were intended to help them towards good hunting. Such is certainly the object of a like custom on the part of the Australian aborigines; there being this difference, however, that the art of the latter considered as art is wholly inferior. Now we know enough about the soul of the Australian native, thanks largely to the penetrating interpretations of Sir Baldwin Spencer, to greet and honour in him the potential lord of the universe, the harbinger of the scientific control of nature. It is more than half the battle to have willed the victory; and the picture-charm as a piece of moral apparatus is therefore worthy of our deepest respect. The chariot of progress, of which the will of man is the driver, is drawn by two steeds, namely, Imagination and Reason harnessed together. Of the pair, Reason is the more sluggish, though serviceable enough for the heavy work. Imagination, full of fire as it is, must always set the pace. So the soul of the Late Palaeolithic hunter, having already in imagination controlled the useful portion of the animal world, was more than half-way on the road to its domestication. But in so far as he mistook the will for the accomplished deed, he was not getting the value out of his second horse; or, to drop metaphor, the scientific reason as yet lay dormant in his soul. But his dream was to come true presently.
The Neolithic Period marks the first appearance of the 'cibi-cultural' peoples. The food-seekers have become food-raisers. But the change did not come all at once. The earlier Neolithic culture is at best transitional. There may even have been one of those set-backs in culture which we are apt to ignore when we are narrating the proud tale of human advance. Europe had now finally escaped from the last ravages of an Arctic climate; but there was cruel demolition to make good, and in the meantime there would seem, as regards man, to have been little doing. Life among the kitchen-middens of Denmark was sordid; and the Azilians who pushed up from Spain as far as Scotland did not exactly step into a paradise ready-made. Somewhere, however, in the far south-east a higher culture was brewing. By steps that have not yet been accurately traced legions of herdsmen and farmer-folk overspread our world, either absorbing or driving before them the roving hunters of the older dispensation. We term this, the earliest of true civilizations, 'neolithic', as if it mattered in the least whether your stone implement be chipped or polished to an edge. The real source of increased power and prosperity lay in the domestication of food-animals and food-plants. The man certainly had genius and pluck into the bargain who first trusted himself to the back of an unbroken horse. It needed hardly less genius to discover that it is no use singing charms over the seed-bearing grass in order to make it grow, unless some of the seed is saved to be sowed in due season. Society possibly brained the inventor—such is the way of the crowd; but, as it duly pocketed the invention, we have perhaps no special cause to complain.
By way of appreciating the conditions prevailing in the Later Neolithic Age, let us consider in turn the Lake-dwellers of Switzerland and the Dolmen-builders of our Western coast-lands. I was privileged to assist, on the shore of the Lake of Neuchâtel, in the excavation of a site where one Neolithic village of pile-dwellings had evidently been destroyed by fire, and at some later date, just falling within the Stone Age, had been replaced by another. Here we had lighted on a crucial instance of the march of cultural progress. The very piles testified to it, those of the older settlement being ill-assorted and slight, whereas the later structure was regularly built and heavily timbered. It was clear, too, that the first set of inhabitants had lived narrow lives. All their worldly goods were derived from strictly local sources. On the other hand, their successors wore shells from the Mediterranean and amber beads from the Baltic among their numerous decorations; while for their flint they actually went as far afield as Grand Pressigny in West-Central France, the mines of which provided the butter-like nodules that represented the ne plus ultra of Neolithic luxury. Commerce must have been decidedly flourishing in those days. No longer was it a case of the so-called 'silent trade', which the furtive savage prosecutes with fear and trembling, placing, let us say, a lump of venison on a rock in the stream dividing his haunts from those of his dangerous neighbours, and stealing back later on to see if the red ochre for which he pines has been deposited in return on the primitive counter. The Neolithic trader, on the other side, must have pushed the science of barter to the uttermost limits short of the invention of a circulating medium, if indeed some crude form of currency was not already in vogue.
When we turn to the Dolmen-builders, and contemplate their hoary sanctuaries, we are back among the problems raised by the philosophic conception of progress as an advance in soul-power. Is any religion better than none? Does it make for soul-power to be preoccupied with the cult of the dead? Does the imagination, which in alliance with the scientific reason achieves such conquests over nature, give way at times to morbid aberration, causing the chill and foggy loom of an after-life to obscure the honest face of the day? I can only say for myself that the deepening of the human consciousnesses due to the effort to close with the mystery of evil and death, and to extort therefrom a message of hope and comfort, seems to me to have been worth the achievement at almost any cost of crimes and follies perpetrated by the way. I do not think that progress in religion is progress towards its ultimate abolition. Rather, religion, if regarded in the light of its earlier history, must be treated as the parent source of all the more spiritual activities of man; and on these his material activities must depend. Else the machine will surely grind the man to death; and his body will finally stop the wheels that his soul originally set in motion.
The panorama is over. It has not been easy, at the rate of about a millennium to a minute, to present a coherent account of the prehistoric record, which at best is like a jig-saw puzzle that has lost most of the pieces needed to reconstitute the design. But, even on this hasty showing, it looks as if the progressive nature of man were beyond question. There is manifest gain in complexity of organization, both physical and cultural; and only less manifest, in the sense that the inwardness of the process cannot make appeal to the eye, is the corresponding gain in realized power of soul.