A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
12. PRIMITIVE THOUGHT
And now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation; how did it feel to be a man in those early days of the human adventure? How did men think and what did they think in those remote days of hunting and wandering four hundred centuries ago before seed time and harvest began. Those were days long before the written record of any human impressions, and we are left almost entirely to inference and guesswork in our answers to these questions.
The sources to which scientific men have gone in their attempts to
reconstruct that primitive mentality are very various. Recently the
science of psycho-analysis, which analyzes the way in which the
egotistic and passionate impulses of the child are restrained,
suppressed, modified or overlaid, to adapt them to the needs of social
life, seems to have thrown a considerable amount of light upon the
history of primitive society; and another fruitful source of suggestion
has been the study of the ideas and customs of such contemporary
savages as still survive. Again there is a sort of mental
fossilization which we find in folk-lore and the deep-lying irrational
superstitions and prejudices that still survive among modern civilized
people. And finally we have in the increasingly numerous pictures,
statues, carvings, symbols and the like, as we draw near to our own
time, clearer and clearer indications of what man found interesting and
worthy of record and representation.
Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks, that is to
say in a series of imaginative pictures. He conjured up images or
images presented themselves to his mind, and he acted in accordance
with the emotions they aroused. So a child or an uneducated person
does to-day. Systematic thinking is apparently a comparatively late
development in human experience; it has not played any great part in
human life until within the last three thousand years. And even to-day
those who really control and order their thoughts are but a small
minority of mankind. Most of the world still lives by imagination and
passion.
Probably the earliest human societies, in the opening stages of the
true human story, were small family groups. Just as the flocks and
herds of the earlier mammals arose out of families which remained
together and multiplied, so probably did the earliest tribes. But
before this could happen a certain restraint upon the primitive
egotisms of the individual had to be established. The fear of the
father and respect for the mother had to be extended into adult life,
and the natural jealousy of the old man of the group for the younger
males as they grew up had to be mitigated. The mother on the other
hand was the natural adviser and protector of the young. Human social
life grew up out of the reaction between the crude instinct of the
young to go off and pair by themselves as they grew up, on the one
hand, and the dangers and disadvantages of separation on the other. An
anthropological writer of great genius, J. J. Atkinson, in his _Primal
Law_, has shown how much of the customary law of savages, the _Tabus_,
that are so remarkable a fact in tribal life, can be ascribed to such a
mental adjustment of the needs of the primitive human animal to a
developing social life, and the later work of the psycho- analysts has
done much to confirm his interpretation of these possibilities.
Some speculative writers would have us believe that respect and fear of
the Old Man and the emotional reaction of the primitive savage to older
protective women, exaggerated in dreams and enriched by fanciful mental
play, played a large part in the beginnings of primitive religion and
in the conception of gods and goddesses. Associated with this respect
for powerful or helpful personalities was a dread and exaltation of
such personages after their deaths, due to their reappearance in
dreams. It was easy to believe they were not truly dead but only
fantastically transferred to a remoteness of greater power.
The dreams, imaginations and fears of a child are far more vivid and
real than those of a modern adult, and primitive man was always
something of a child. He was nearer to the animals also, and he could
suppose them to have motives and reactions like his own. He could
imagine animal helpers, animal enemies, animal gods. One needs to have
been an imaginative child oneself to realize again how important,
significant, portentous or friendly, strangely shaped rocks, lumps of
wood, exceptional trees or the like may have appeared to the men of the
Old Stone Age, and how dream and fancy would create stories and legends
about such things that would become credible as they told them. Some
of these stories would be good enough to remember and tell again. The
women would tell them to the children and so establish a tradition. To
this day most imaginative children invent long stories in which some
favourite doll or animal or some fantastic semi-human being figures as
the hero, and primitive man probably did the same—with a much stronger
disposition to believe his hero real.
For the very earliest of the true men that we know of were probably
quite talkative beings. In that way they have differed from the
Neanderthalers and had an advantage over them. The Neanderthaler may
have been a dumb animal. Of course the primitive human speech was
probably a very scanty collection of names, and may have been eked out
with gestures and signs.
There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of science of
cause and effect. But primitive man was not very critical in his
associations of cause with effect; he very easily connected an effect
with something quite wrong as its cause. “You do so and so,” he said,
“and so and so happens.” You give a child a poisonous berry and it
dies. You eat the heart of a valiant enemy and you become strong.
There we have two bits of cause and effect association, one true one
false. We call the system of cause and effect in the mind of a savage,
Fetish; but Fetish is simply savage science. It differs from modern
science in that it is totally unsystematic and uncritical and so more
frequently wrong.
In many cases it is not difficult to link cause and effect, in many
others erroneous ideas were soon corrected by experience; but there was
a large series of issues of very great importance to primitive man,
where he sought persistently for causes and found explanations that
were wrong but not sufficiently wrong nor so obviously wrong as to be
detected. It was a matter of great importance to him that game should
be abundant or fish plentiful and easily caught, and no doubt he tried
and believed in a thousand charms, incantations and omens to determine
these desirable results. Another great concern of his was illness and
death. Occasionally infections crept through the land and men died of
them. Occasionally men were stricken by illness and died or were
enfeebled without any manifest cause. This too must have given the
hasty, emotional mind of primitive man much feverish exercise. Dreams
and fantastic guesses made him blame this, or appeal for help to that
man or beast or thing. He had the child’s aptitude for fear and panic.
Quite early in the little human tribe, older, steadier minds sharing
the fears, sharing the imaginations, but a little more forceful than
the others, must have asserted themselves, to advise, to prescribe, to
command. This they declared unpropitious and that imperative, this an
omen of good and that an omen of evil. The expert in Fetish, the
Medicine Man, was the first priest. He exhorted, he interpreted
dreams, he warned, he performed the complicated hocus pocus that
brought luck or averted calamity. Primitive religion was not so much
what we now call religion as practice and observance, and the early
priest dictated what was indeed an arbitrary primitive practical
science.