SIR JOHN LUBBOCK ON THE ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION.*

[FIRST NOTICE.]

Tills will prove a first-class book of facts and references even to• those who do not agree with its views. Sir John Lubbock arrives- at the conclusion that man's first state is his worst state. He does not hold with Comte that the natural progress of man is from? superstition to atheism, but, on the contrary, he sets the earliest state down as one of atheism, and considers that the idea of the divine power and goodness grows with the growth of humanity.

His third chapter, occurring early in the book, on the subject of marriage and relationship, is very interesting and instructive. We- think, however, that his facts will scarcely bear the inferences he- draws from them. We are sure they do not on all points. What, his facts do prove is that, as a rule, the instinct that prompts men. and women in a wild state to live together in pairs has scarcely more tenacity than it has with many birds and beasts ; that it has. nothing like the tenacity of the parento-filial or fraternal instinct ; that it often gives way before this latter instinct ; loses all tenacity whatever, and sinks into a mere sensual appetite. So that a woman. in many countries, instead of becoming the possession of the man who is the father of her children, remains, for the most part, together with her children, in the possession of her brother, or uncle, or- father.

He also makes it appear likely, by very ingenious inferences• from usages otherwise unaccountable, that the custom of marriage by capture, which is still existing here and there, was once of very wide prevalence indeed. Over large portions of the world, and especially among the Mongoloid races of Asia, etiquette forbids- all communication between a son-in-law and his wife's parents, —a witness, thinks Sir John Lubbock, still surviving in gentler times, of a ruder past, when the husband meant the marauder who had by force seized his wife from her guardians and made her his slave. This sounds plausible. But his inferences as to the primi- tive state of sexual relations generally are by no means sustained by facts.

The primitive state, he says, was a state of hetairia ; every woman, together with her children, was considered the common, property of the tribe. Now, for one thing, this presupposes a state- of tribal organization which is incompatible with the lowest con- dition of humanity, and a state wholly unlike anything we see in the lowest, wildest races. These, for the moat part, have little or no organization ; and the wildest of all wild men, the Veddas, live faithfully in pairs,—" like the monkeys," said a Candyan gen- tleman. (See our author's Prehistoric Times.) Where hetairia has. prevailed, it can only have been a camp usage in a tribe itself turned into a camp by constant warfare, and could only have been kept alive by the habit of counting as common property girls cap- tured in raids. Nothing short of the strongest proofs could con- vince one of the universal prevalence of a state of things now found neither amongst those men who are nearest to brutes, nor among those brutes which arc nearest to men. And his proofs ace no- proofs at all.

He infers primitive hetairia first from exogamy and marriage by capture. A man captures a wife from abroad, because the women at home belong to the tribe, and must not be appro- priated. Does he ? or why not rather because all the women in his tribe are appropriated either as slaves of the men who have snatched or bought them, or as wards of their male blood relations?

His second proof is, if possible, still weaker. A certain custom. existing or having existed here and there, in places few and far- between, is brought forward as pointing to a prehistoric state of hetairia. " Mela tells us that among the Auziles Feminis solemne est, nocte qua nubunt, omnium stupro patere.'" This desecration, he considers, is an acknowledgment of the pre- existing claims of the community, and a consideration for which they resign their claims to the possessor of the woman.. This custom if, instead of being rare, it was universal, would not bear the meaning he puts on it. According to him, the community renounce a right for the future, on condition of being allowed to exercise one which they already possess, which seems to us to. amount to no bargain at all. He brings forward Herodotus as showing that the Nasamones lived in a state of hetairia, and practised this usage. Yes : but this custom was not consideved, to exempt the woman who submitted to it from the tribal claims. If you compare Herodotus iv. 172 with Herodotus.

• The Origin of Cioilizaiion. By Sir John Lubbock, Bart. Second Edition- London : Longman.

1. 216 you will see the contrary stated. The fact is that the custom, where it existed, admitted of the simplest possible explanation. It rose out of marriage by capture. The man who wanted a wife had to seize one from a hostile tribe. He did not attempt this single-banded, but in company with a band of comrades, who being accomplices to the capture, claimed their fee, which thenceforth became here and there a constituent part of the marriage ceremony.

To the chapter on " Marriage and Relationship " follow those on ." Religion," of which Sir John Lubbock enumerates the following five successive stages :- 1. Atheism, when a man is yet asleep to all ideas of things unseen.

2. Fetichism (which we should call witchcraft, and put third in the series), the state in which man supposes he can force the deity (I should say the fetich) to comply with his requests.

3. Totemism or nature-worship (which I should call fetichism), in which natural objects, trees, lakes, stones, animals, &c., are worshipped. The word " totem " can hardly be used for this. The totem is not an individual thing or creature, but the ideal repre- sentative of a number of similar animals that we class together and call by one name, such as the bear, the wolf, the turtle, the deer, the beaver.

Venturing to alter his nomenclature, and to call the first stage atheism, the second fetichism, and the third witchcraft, we must say that the collection of facts and references to be found under these heads is beyond all praise. We should not think there could be such another collection in the English language. In the first stage, atheism, the imagination is too much buried in the things of sense to conceive of any occult dangers ; in the second, fetichism, the imagination grows more lively. Natural objects impress themselves on it, and exercise a fascination sometimes of horror, sometimes of delight mingled with awe. The first and most powerful fetich, which touches the dullest imagination, is one that we think Sir John Lubbock has rather overlooked, the corpse of one who has been known and clung to. You may ask how can a cannibal and habitual manslayer shudder at the sight of a parent's corpse ? We don't know, but that such is the fact, indications abound. Other objects also we find impress the imagination,— upright stones suggesting the human form, frowning rocks, the moon. This last is a great fetich, and exercises a strange weird in- fluence even on some who are lowest, hardest, most brutalized. The Fans, for instance, are ghouls as well as cannibals, and yet their moonlight dances, their gesticulations addressed to the moon, are something like worship. Some such fascination probably once drew .a nobler race in the East to moon-worship ; hence to the worship of the heavenly host, Mitra, Aryaman, and the devas ; and thence to the worship of the light of lights, the God whose garb is the bright and beautiful visible creation. Cyrus knew this God, and found him one with the God of Abraham. We can indeed well understand Sir John Lubbock's putting this fascination of natural objects above witchcraft, because witchcraft looks like a corruption or degradation, and it is, we think, rather a weakness of his to resume that the worst must always be the first ; but how a man can strive to pacify or propitiate the unseen powers before he suspects their existence, is more than we can see.

With regard, however, to what he says about witchcraft, it is so instructive that we would rather thank him as a teacher than criticize. He brings out with more copious references than we have ever seen elsewhere one very important world-wide and world-old superstition, the rational ground of which remains yet to be ex- plained. It is this. There is some being a man fears as a secret foe and wishes to control or pacify. He cannot reach to the being 'itself so as to influence it and so he gets a fragment or a likeness of it, or some conventional symbol of it, which he deals with, believing there to be a sympathy between it and the thing itself, and thinking to influence the thing through its effigy. This we call witchcraft, and this also is in reality nascent idolatry. But witchcraft also involves a belief in witches. The same instinct that makes a man dread a corpse or an animal, works in him with -equal force to make him dread occult powers of mischief in his fellow-men. These become objects of dread, and rejoice in the dread they inspire, believing it to be a power, and do all they -can to foster this fear. Thus we find men out of fetichism growing into a belief in witchcraft, and seeking the control of the -occult powers by means of dealings with wizards. Out of witchcraft grows, as we have shown, idolatry, though perhaps the worship of anthropomorphic carved images may still be a long way off. Out of it also grows, Sir John Lubbock's fourth stage, Shamanism. As men think more and dream more, it comes to be felt that the un- seen powers, the dead, the spectres of night, visit men for the most part, only in sleep or trance. Thus arises the influence of somna- bulists, men who naturally, or by fastings, or intoxicating drugs are lifted into that strange frenzied state which puts them in rapport with the world of dreams, and in which they appear as mediators between the real world and the spirit-world. Thus the witch or wizard becomes the shaman, the man who is in a trance having his eyes opened, and in broad day-light sees visions of the other world.

Why does a man so well armed for the work as Sir John Lubbock falter when he reaches a certain point, as though perplexed, and seem not to know how to carry out his programme ? It is that he does not quite see how to affiliate the later to the earlier phases of religion. He does not perceive a real vital continuity between them. And why ? We find our clue to the answer in the following passage, pp. 121-4:--"If the mere sensation of fear, and the recognition that there are probably other beings more power- ful than himself, are sufficient alone to constitute a religion, then we must, I think, admit that religion is general to the human race. But when a child dreads the darkness and shrinks from a lightless room, we never regard that as an evidence of religion. Moreover, if this definition be adopted, we can no longer regard religion as peculiar to man The baying of a dog to the moon is as much an act of worship as some ceremonies which have been described as religious by travellers." Again, p. 263, " We do not generally attribute moral feelings to quadru- peds and birds, yet there is perhaps no stronger feeling than that of the mother for her offspring."

These passages reveal to us the secret of this strong man's weak- ness, while they also reveal a potential strength ; for by a happy instinct he puts his finger on the indications of those very instincts that, under other shapes, the world recognize as religious. The dread of the dark, that fear and abhorrence of the unknown, said by Plato to be the token of a philosophic nature, if it is the root of fetichism, is the root also, or at least the precursor of, filial piety. A disquieting sense of strangeness drives the child for refuge to the one well-known being, its mother. The same oppressive sense of strangeness, coming over the grown man in later life, makes him a little child again, and makes him welcome the tidings of an unchanging God. Fetichism, filial piety, piety to Heaven, are really all awakened by one and the same impulse. Then, again, a mother's love, whether you see it in a walrus, or a gorilla, or a sea otter, is everywhere really one and the same signature. It is the paren t's love mirrored in nature. Never mind what the mirror is made of, the thing mirrored is the same, and is canonized by the great evangelist of Ephesus as the divinest thing in the universe.

Why does not Sir John Lubbock recognize these instincts as religious? Because he never seriously set himself to answer the question,—what does religion really mean? He said to himself, " I will stick to facts, and leave definitions and word-splitting to others." But a man who breaks new ground on these subjects has no business to say this. His task is to detect things that are passing under false names, and to give them their true ones.