will bring a nation to destruction if set to fight with a nation at all equal otherwise, who have a religion without omens. Clearly, then, if all early men unanimously, or even much the greater number of early men, had a religion without omens, no religion or scarcely a religion anywhere in the world could have come into existence with omens: the immense majority possessing the superior military advantage, the small minority destitute of it would have been crushed out and destroyed. But on the contrary, all over the world religions with omens once existed, in most they still exist; all savages have them, and deep in the most ancient civilizations we find the plainest traces of them. Unquestionably, therefore, the prehistoric religion was like that of savages; viz., in this, that it largely consisted in the watching of omens, and in the worship of lucky beasts and things which are a sort of embodied and permanent omens. It may indeed be objected-an analogous objection was taken as to the ascertained moral deficiencies of prehistoric mankind-that if this religion of omens was so pernicious and so likely to ruin a race, no race would ever have acquired it; but it is only likely to ruin a race contending with another race otherwise. equal. The fancied discovery of these omens-not an extravagant thing in an early age, as I have tried to show, not a whit then to be distinguished as improbable from the discovery of healing herbs or springs which prehistoric men also did discover-the discovery of omens was an act of reason as far as it went, and if in reason the omen-finding race were superior to the races in conflict with them, the omenfinding race would win; and we may conjecture that omen-finding races were thus superior, since they won and prevailed in every latitude and in every zone. In all particulars, therefore, we would keep to our formula, and say that prehistoric man was substantially a savage like present savages, in morals, [in] intellectual attainments, and in religion; but that he differed in this from our present savages, - that he had not had time to ingrain his nature so deeply with bad habits, and to impress bad beliefs so unalterably on his mind, as they have. They have had ages to fix the stain on themselves, but primitive man was younger and had no such time. I have elaborated the evidence for this conclusion at what may seem needless and tedious length, but I have done so on account of its importance. If we accept it, and if we are sure of it, it will help us to many most important conclusions; some of these I have dwelt upon in previous papers, but I will set them down again. First, it will in part explain to us what the world I was about, so to speak, before history: it was making, so to say, the intellectual consistence - the connected and coherent habits, the preference of equable to violent enjoyment, the abiding capacity to prefer if required the future to the present-the mental prerequisites without which civilization could not begin to exist, and without which it would soon cease to exist even had it begun. The primitive man, like the present savage, had not these prerequisites, but unlike the present savage he was capable of acquiring them and of being trained in them; for his nature was still soft and still impressible, and possibly - strange as it may seem to say-his outward circumstances were more favorable to an attainment of civilization than those of our present savages. At any rate, the prehistoric times were spent in making men capable of writing a history and having something to put in it when it was written; and we can see how it was done. Two preliminary processes indeed there are which seem inscrutable. There was some strange preliminary process by which the main races of men were formed; they began to exist very early, and except by intermixture no new ones have been formed since. It was a process singularly active in early ages and singularly quiescent in later ages. Such differences as exist between the Aryan, the Turanian, the negro, the red man, and the Australian are differences greater altogether than any causes now active are capable of creating in present men, at least in any way explicable by us; and there is therefore a strong presumption that (as great authorities now hold) these differences were created before the nature of men, especially before the mind and the adaptive nature of men, had taken their existing constitution. And a second condition precedent of civilization seems (at least to me) to have been equally inherited, if the doctrine of evolution be true, from some previous state or condition: I at least find it difficult to conceive of men at all like the present men, unless existing in something like families, - that is, in groups avowedly connected, at least on the mother's side, and probably always with a vestige of connection more or less on the father's side, and unless these groups were like many animals, gregarious, under a leader more or less fixed. It is almost beyond imagination how man, as we know man, could by any sort of process have gained this step in civilization. And it is a great advantage, to say the least of it, in the evolution theory that it enables us to remit this difficulty to a pre-existing period in nature, where other instincts and powers than our present ones may perhaps have come into play, and where our imagination can hardly travel. At any rate, for the present I may assume these two steps in human progress made and these two conditions realized. The rest of the way, if we grant these two conditions, is plainer. The first thing is the erection of what we may call a custom-making power: that is, of an authority which can enforce a fixed rule of life; which by means of that fixed rule can in some degree create a calculable future; which can make it rational to postpone present violent but momentary pleasure for future continual pleasure, because it insures what else is not sure-that if the sacrifice of what is in hand be made, enjoyment of the contingent expected recompense will be received. Of course I am not saying that we shall find in early society any authority of which these shall be the motives: we must have traveled ages (unless all our evidence be wrong) from the first men before there was a comprehension of such motives. I only mean that the first thing in early society was an authority of whose action this shall be the result, little as it knew what it was doing, little as it would have cared if it had known. The conscious end of early societies was not at all, or scarcely at all, the protection of life and property, as it was assumed to be by the eighteenth-century theory of government. Even in early historical ages -in the youth of the human race, not its childhoodsuch is not the nature of early states. Sir Henry Maine has taught us that the earliest subject of jurisprudence is not the separate property of the individual, but the common property of the family group. What we should call private property hardly then existed, or if it did, was so small as to be of no importance: it was like the things little children are now allowed to call their own, which they feel it very hard to have taken from them, but which they have no real right to hold and keep. Such is our earliest property law; and our earliest life law is that the lives of all members of the family group were at the mercy of the head of the group; as far as the individual goes, neither his goods nor his existence were protected at all: and this may teach us that something else was lacked in early societies besides what in our societies we now think of. I do not think I put this too high when I say that a most important if not the most important object of early legislation was the enforcement of lucky rites. I do not like to say religious rites, because that would involve me in a great controversy as to the power or even the existence of early religions: but there is no savage tribe without a notion of luck; and perhaps there is hardly any which has not a conception of luck for the tribe as a tribe, of which each member has not some such a belief [as] that his own action or the action of any other member of it-that he or the others doing anything which was unlucky or would bring a "curse"-might cause evil not only to himself but to all the tribe as well. I have said so much about "luck" and about its naturalness before that I ought to say nothing again; but I must add that the contagiousness of the idea of "luck" is remarkable. It does not at all, like the notion of desert, cleave to the doer: there are people to this day who would not permit in their house, people to sit down thirteen to dinner; they do not expect any evil to themselves particularly for permitting it or sharing in it, but they cannot get out of their heads the idea that some one or more of the number will come to harm if the thing is done. This is what Mr. Tylor calls survival in culture: the faint belief in the corporate liability of these thirteen is the feeble relic and last dying representative of that great principle of corporate liability to good and ill fortune which has filled such an immense place in the world. The traces of it are endless. You can hardly take up a book of travels in rude regions without finding"I wanted to do so and so; but I was not permitted, for the natives feared it might bring ill luck on the 'party,' or perhaps the tribe." Mr. Galton, for instance, could hardly feed his people: the Damaras, he says, have numberless superstitions about meat which are very troublesome. In the first place, each tribe or rather family is prohibited from eating cattle of certain colors, savages "who come from the sun" eschewing sheep spotted in a particular way, which those who come from the rain" have no objection to. "As," he says, "there are five or six eandas or VOL. IV. 34 |