Chapter 23. Our Debt to the Savage.
IT would be easy to extend the list of royal and priestly taboos, but
the instances collected in the preceding pages may suffice as
specimens. To conclude this part of our subject it only remains to
state summarily the general conclusions to which our enquiries
have thus far conducted us. We have seen that in savage or
barbarous society there are often found men to whom the
superstition of their fellows ascribes a controlling influence over the
general course of nature. Such men are accordingly adored and
treated as gods. Whether these human divinities also hold temporal
sway over the lives and fortunes of their adorers, or whether their
functions are purely spiritual and supernatural, in other words,
whether they are kings as well as gods or only the latter, is a
distinction which hardly concerns us here. Their supposed divinity
is the essential fact with which we have to deal. In virtue of it they
are a pledge and guarantee to their worshippers of the continuance
and orderly succession of those physical phenomena upon which
mankind depends for subsistence. Naturally, therefore, the life and
health of such a god-man are matters of anxious concern to the
people whose welfare and even existence are bound up with his;
naturally he is constrained by them to conform to such rules as the
wit of early man has devised for averting the ills to which flesh is
heir, including the last ill, death. These rules, as an examination of
them has shown, are nothing but the maxims with which, on the
primitive view, every man of common prudence must comply if he
would live long in the land. But while in the case of ordinary men
the observance of the rules is left to the choice of the individual, in
the case of the god-man it is enforced under penalty of dismissal
from his high station, or even of death. For his worshippers have far
too great a stake in his life to allow him to play fast and loose with
it. Therefore all the quaint superstitions, the old-world maxims, the
venerable saws which the ingenuity of savage philosophers
elaborated long ago, and which old women at chimney corners still
impart as treasures of great price to their descendants gathered
round the cottage fire on winter evenings-all these antique fancies
clustered, all these cobwebs of the brain were spun about the path
of the old king, the human god, who, immeshed in them like a fly in
the toils of a spider, could hardly stir a limb for the threads of
custom, "light as air but strong as links of iron," that crossing and
recrossing each other in an endless maze bound him fast within a
network of observances from which death or deposition alone could
release him. 1
Thus to students of the past the life of the old kings and priests
teems with instruction. In it was summed up all that passed for
wisdom when the world was young. It was the perfect pattern after
which every man strove to shape his life; a faultless model
constructed with rigorous accuracy upon the lines laid down by a
barbarous philosophy. Crude and false as that philosophy may
seem to us, it would be unjust to deny it the merit of logical
consistency. Starting from a conception of the vital principle as a
tiny being or soul existing in, but distinct and separable from, the
living being, it deduces for the practical guidance of life a system
of rules which in general hangs well together and forms a fairly
complete and harmonious whole. The flaw-and it is a fatal one-of
the system lies not in its reasoning, but in its premises; in its
conception of the nature of life, not in any irrelevancy of the
conclusions which it draws from that conception. But to stigmatise
these premises as ridiculous because we can easily detect their
falseness, would be ungrateful as well as unphilosophical. We
stand upon the foundation reared by the generations that have
gone before, and we can but dimly realise the painful and
prolonged efforts which it has cost humanity to struggle up to the
point, no very exalted one after all, which we have reached. Our
gratitude is due to the nameless and forgotten toilers, whose patient
thought and active exertions have largely made us what we are.
The amount of new knowledge which one age, certainly which one
man, can add to the common store is small, and it argues stupidity
or dishonesty, besides ingratitude, to ignore the heap while
vaunting the few grains which it may have been our privilege to
add to it. There is indeed little danger at present of undervaluing
the contributions which modern times and even classical antiquity
have made to the general advancement of our race. But when we
pass these limits, the case is different. Contempt and ridicule or
abhorrence and denunciation are too often the only recognition
vouchsafed to the savage and his ways. Yet of the benefactors
whom we are bound thankfully to commemorate, many, perhaps
most, were savages. For when all is said and done our
resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our
differences from him; and what we have in common with him, and
deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage
forefathers who slowly acquired by experience and transmitted to
us by inheritance those seemingly fundamental ideas which we are
apt to regard as original and intuitive. We are like heirs to a fortune
which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of
those who built it up is lost, and its possessors for the time being
regard it as having been an original and unalterable possession of
their race since the beginning of the world. But reflection and
enquiry should satisfy us that to our predecessors we are indebted
for much of what we thought most our own, and that their errors
were not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity, but simply
hypotheses, justifiable as such at the time when they were
propounded, but which a fuller experience has proved to be
inadequate. It is only by the successive testing of hypotheses and
rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited. After all, what we
call truth is only the hypothesis which is found to work best.
Therefore in reviewing the opinions and practices of ruder ages
and races we shall do well to look with leniency upon their errors
as inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and to give them
the benefit of that indulgence which we ourselves may one day
stand in need of: cum excusatione itaque veteres audiendi sunt. 2