The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (mini ebook reader .TXT) π
The Egyptians were islanders, cut off from the rest of the world by sand and sea. They were rooted in their valley; they lived entirely upon its fruits, and happily these fruits sometimes failed. Had they always been able to obtain enough to eat, they would have remained always in the semi-savage state.
It may appear strange that Egypt should have suffered from famine, for there was no country in the ancient world where food was so abundant and so cheap. Not only did the land produce enormous crops of corn; the ditches and hollows which were filled by the overflowing Nile supplied a harvest of wholesome and nourishing aquatic plants, and on the borders of the des
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will now deny; βlet me ask them how it is that Europeans have
advanced (this involving a change in the structure of the
brain), while others have remained in the savage state, others
in the pastoral condition, others fixed at a certain point of
culture, as the Hindus and the Chinese? The analogy is
perfect, and the answer is in either case the same. Those forms
remain stationary which are able to preserve their conditions
of life unchanged. The savages of the primeval forest, when the
game is exhausted in one region, migrate to another region
where game exists. They remain therefore in the hunting state.
The shepherds of the boundless plains, when one pasture is
devoured by their flocks, migrate to another pasture where they
find grass and water in abundance. But when, in a land like
Egypt, the inhabitants are confined to a certain tract of land
they are unable to evade the famine of food produced by the
vicissitudes of nature and the law of population; they are
compelled to invent in order to subsist; new modes of life, new
powers, new desires, new sentiments arise; and the human animal
is changed. Then a second period of immobility arrives; by
means of despotism, caste, slavery, and infanticide, the status
quo is preserved.
In the primeval sea the conditions of life were constantly
changing, but its inmates could usually keep them constant by
migration. For instance, let us imagine a species accustomed to
dwell at the bottom of the sea, feeding on the vegetable matter
and oxygen gas which come down by liquid diffusion from the
waters of the surface. By elevation of the sea-bed, or by the
deposit of sediment from rivers, that part of the sea which
this species inhabits becomes gradually shallow and light. The
animal would migrate into deep dark water, and would therefore
undergo no change. But let us suppose that it is prevented from
migrating by a wall of rocks. It would then be exposed to
light, and to other novel forces, and it would either change or
die.
Here progress is the result of absolute necessity, and such
must always be the case. Animals which inhabit the waters have
no innate desire to make acquaintance with the land; but it
sometimes happens that they live in shallow places, where
they are left uncovered at low water for a certain time, and so
in the course of geological periods the species becomes
amphibious in habit; and then the hard struggle for life in the
water, with the abundance of food upon the land, leads them to
adopt terrestrial life. There are creatures now existing of
whom it is not easy to say whether they belong to the water or
the land: there are fishes which walk about on shore, and climb
trees: It is not difficult to imagine such animals as these
deserting the water, and entirely living upon land.
But the development of life, in its varied aspects, must always
remain incomprehensible to those who have not studied the noble
science of geology, or who at least have not made themselves
acquainted with its chief results. Unless the student
understands what extraordinary transformation scenes have taken
place upon the globe, all that is now land, having formerly
been sea, and all that is now sea having formerly been land,
not only once, but again, and again, and again; unless he
understands that these changes have been produced by the same
gradual, and apparently insignificant, causes as those which
are now at work before our eyes; the sea gnawing away the cliff
upon the shore; the river carrying soil to the sea; the glacier
gliding down the mountain slope; the iceberg bearing huge
boulders to mid ocean; the coralline insects building
archipelagoes; the internal fires suddenly spouting forth
stones and ashes, or slowly upheaving continents; unless he
fully understands how deliberate is Natureβs method, how
prodigal she is of time, how irregular and capricious she is in
all her operations β he will never cease to wonder that allied
forms should be distributed in apparent disorder and confusion,
instead of being arranged on a regular ascending scale. And,
moreover, unless he understands how Nature, like the Sibyl,
destroys her own books, he will never cease to wonder at
missing links.
For it is not one missing link, but millions, that we require.
It would however be just as reasonable to expect to find every
book that ever was written; every clay-tablet that ever was
baked in the printing ovens of Chaldaea; every rock that
was ever inscribed; every obelisk that was ever engraved,
every temple wall that was ever painted with
hieroglyphics, as to expect to find every fossil of
importance. Where are the missing links in literature, and
where are the primeval forms? Where are the ancient Sanskrit
hymns that were written without ink on palm leaves with an iron
pen? Where are the thousands of Hebrew bibles that were written
before the tenth century A.D.? Where are the lost books of the
Romans and the Greeks? We know that many manuscripts have been
consumed in great fires; the fire of Alexandria in the time of
Julius Caesar, which no doubt destroyed papyri that could never
be replaced; the fire in the time of Omar; the fires lighted
by Popes and reverend Fathers of the Church; and the fire of
Constantinople during the Crusades, which robbed us for ever of
Arianβs history of the successors of Alexander; Ctesiasβ
history of Persia, and his description of India; several books
of Diodorus, Agatharcides, and Polybius; twenty orations of
Demosthenes, and the Odes of Sappho. But the material of books,
whether paper or parchment, bark, clay, or stone, is always of
a perishable nature, and, under ordinary circumstances, is
destroyed sooner or later by the action of the atmosphere. Were
it not that books can be copied, what would remain to us of the
literature of the past?
In a rainless country such as Egypt, which is a museum
of Nature, a monumental land, not only painted
and engraven records, but even paper scrolls of an
immense antiquity, have been preserved. But if we add to these
the rock inscriptions, the printed bricks, and inscribed
cylinders of Western Asia, how scanty and fortuitous are the
remains! Let us now remember that fossils cannot be copied;
once destroyed, they are for ever lost. Is it wonderful,
therefore, that so few should be left? Fires greater than those
of Alexandria and Constantinople are ever burning beneath our
feet; at this very moment a precious library may be in flames.
Yet that is not the worst. The action of air and water is fatal
to the archives of Nature, which it is not part of Natureβs
plan to preserve for our instruction. Those animals which have
neither bones nor shells are at once destroyed; and those which
possess a solid framework are only preserved under special and
exceptional conditions. The marvel is not that we find so
little, but that we find so much. The development of man from
the lower animals is now an authenticated fact. We believe,
therefore, that connecting links between man and some ape-like
animal existed for the same reason that we believe the Second
Decade of Livy existed. It is not impossible that the missing
books of Livy may be, discovered at some future day beneath the
Italian soil. It is not impossible that forms intermediate
between man and his ape-like ancestors may be discovered in the
unexplored strata of equatorial Africa, or the Indian
Archipelago. But either event is improbable in the extreme; and
the existence of such intermediate forms will be admitted by
the historians of the next generation, whether they are found
or not.
We shall now proceed to describe the rise and progress of the
mental principle. The origin of mind is an inscrutable mystery,
but so is the origin of matter. If we go back to the beginning
we find a world of gas, the atoms of which were kept asunder by
excessive heat. Where did those atoms come from? How were they
made? What were they made for? In reply to these questions
theology is garrulous, but science is dumb.
Mind is a property of matter. Matter is inhabited by mind.
There can be no mind without matter; there can be no matter
without mind. When the matter is simple in its composition, its
mental tendencies are also simple; the atoms merely tend to
approach one another and to cohere; and as matter under the
influence of varied forces (evolved by the cooling o the world)
becomes more varied in its composition, its mental tendencies
become more and more numerous, more and more complex, more and
more elevated, till at last they are developed into the desires
and propensities of the animal, into the aspirations and
emotions of the man. But the various tendencies which inhabit
the human mind, and which devote it to ambition, to religion,
or to love, are not in reality more wonderful than the tendency
which impels two ships to approach each other in a calm. For
what can be more wonderful than that which can never be
explained? The difference between the mind of the ship and the
mind of man is the difference between the acorn and the oak.
The simplest atoms are attracted to one another merely
according to distance and weight. That is the law of
gravitation. But the compound atoms, which are called elements,
display a power of selection. A will unite itself to C in
preference to B; and if D passes by, will divorce itself from
C, and unite itself to D. Such compounds of a compound are
still more complex in their forms, and more varied in their
minds. Water, which is composed of two gases β oxygen and
hydrogen β when hot, becomes a vapour; when cold, becomes a
crystal. In the latter case it displays a structural capacity.
Crystals assume particular forms according to the substances of
which they are composed; they may be classed into species, and
if their forms are injured by accident, they have the power of
repairing their structure by imbibing matter from without. A
live form is the result of matter subjected to certain complex
forces, the chief of which is the chemical power of the sun. It
is continually being injured by the wear and tear of its own
activity; it is continually darning and stitching its own life.
After a certain period of time it loses its self-mending power,
and consequently dies. The crystal grows from without by simple
accretions or putting on of coats. The plant or animal grows
and re-grows from within by means of a chemical operation.
Moreover, the crystal is merely an individual; the plant or
animal is the member of a vast community; before it dies, and
usually as it dies, it produces a repetition of itself. The
mental forces which inhabit the primeval jelly-dot are more
complex than those which inhabit the crystal; but those of the
crystal are more complex than those of a gas, and those of a
gas than those of the true elementary atoms which know only two
forces β attraction and repulsion β the primeval βPull and
Pushβ, which lie at the basis of all Natureβs operations.
The absorption of food and the repetition of form in the animal
are not at first to he distinguished from that chemical process
which is termed growth. Then from this principle of growth, the
root of the human flower, two separated instincts like twin
seed-leaves arise. The first is the propensity to preserve
self-life by seeking food; from this instinct of self-preservation our intellectual faculties have been derived. The
second is the propensity to preserve the life of the species;
and from this instinct of reproduction our moral faculties have
been derived.
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