The life of
savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and groups of
savages influence one another but little. The first rudimentary
beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call
civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far the
most important creature on the planet. The history of the living world
had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something
totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been
before. There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in
the development of life generally and what has gone on in the
development of human society, and these I shall discuss elsewhere.[9]
But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.
[9] In the Romanes Lecture at Oxford.--L.F.A.
Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization--for,
properly speaking, there was no one movement--were very slow, were
local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed
along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early
stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such
extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and
the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these
inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes,
still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who
know none of them except fire--and the discovery and use of fire may
have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of
the savagery which separated man from brute.
Pages:
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122