Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

“ In language and in all ideas communicated by word of mouth there is a hiatus between the limits of our knowledge and the origin of culture which can never be bridged over, but we may hold in our hand the first tool ever created by the hand of man.
It has been said that the use of speech is the distinctive quality of man. But how can we know that? We are literally surrounded by brute language. We can imitate their calls, and we find that animals will respond to our imitations of them. But who has ever seen any of the lower animals construct a tool and use it. ”

“ No comprehensive scheme of progress need be searched for in the pigmy intellect of man, and if we are ever destined to acquire any knowledge of the laws which influence the growth of civilization, we must look for them in an investigation of the phenomenon itself, by studying its phases and the sequence of its mutations. In short we must apply to the whole range of human culture, to the arts, whether of peace or war, the same method which has already been applied with some success to the history of language. ”

“ Now, with respect to the first assumption, that of creation, though we are not, of course, in a position to deny the possibility of it, I confess it appears to me unwarranted by any of the phenomena of nature. We have no knowledge of the special creation of any organized being; and how can we scientifically assume as probable, that, for the probability of which there is no sort of evidence of a nature that inductive science would be warranted in building upon? Continuity and development are seen to be the order of the universe. ”

“ I am aware that it will be found extremely difficult to realize a condition of human existence so low as that which I am supposing, and that many persons will deny the possibility of mankind having ever existed in a condition so helpless as to have been incapable of designing the simple weapons which we find in the hands of savages at the present day. It is as difficult to place one’s self in the position of a being infinitely one’s inferior, as of a being greatly one’s superior in intellect. ”

“ If it is said that language as a whole is not a work of human design, the same may with equal truth be said of the arts as a whole. A man who constructs a building, a tool, or a weapon, can no more be said to have devised a scheme of arts, than the introducer of a new word can be said to have invented a language ”

“ But when we say that words and implements are both tools employed for the expression of thought, it is important to bear in view one difference between them, which has a practical bearing on the relative value of the two studies as a means of tracing the evolution of culture in prehistoric times and amongst savages. The word is the tool of the ear, the implement the tool of the eye; and for this reason language is the science of historic times, whilst the arts constitute the subject of science to be studied in relation to prehistoric times. ”

“ In the earliest ages of mankind, when all men were warriors, and before the division of labour, consequent on civilization, had separated the arts of peace and war into distinct professions, we must expect to find the same implement frequently employed in the capacity of both tool and weapon. Even long after the very earliest ages of which we have any historical or archaeological record, we often find a combination of tool and weapon in the same forms, especially amongst those semi-civilized and savage races of our own times, whom we regard as the representatives of antiquity. ”

“ A word may be said to be a tool for the communication of thought, just as a weapon is an implement of war.
But, says Professor Müller, ‘art, science, philosophy, religion, all have a history; language or any other production of nature admits only of growth.’ But unless it can be shown that words are entities having the power of generating and producing other words, which arts, tools, or weapons, do not possess, the word growth can only be applied figuratively to language as it is to the arts, and in that case growth and history are synonymous terms. ”

“ Every form marks its own place in sequence by its relative complexity or affinity to other allied forms, in the same manner that every word in the science of language has a place assigned to it in the order of development or phonetic decay.
If there is such a thing as a science of language, and none can doubt it, who shall affirm that there is no such thing as a science of the arts? Language, it is true, embraces a wider sphere, and includes the arts; but, on the other hand, it is liable to sources of uncertainty for the purposes of science, from which the arts are free. ”

“ Nobody doubts that there must be affinities and interdependencies between the race and the crop of ideas that is grown upon it; but the law, ex nihilo nihil fit, is as true of ideas as it is of races, and in the relations between them it is as true and has the same value, neither more nor less, as the statement that potatoes do spring out of the ground where no potatoes have been sown. To study culture is, therefore, to trace the history of its development, as well as the qualities of the people amongst whom it flourishes. ”

“ The more comprehensively the subject is viewed, the more restricted appear to be those limits over which the free will of mankind is permitted to range, and the more evident it becomes, that in his social advancement, his laws, arts, and wars, he moves on under the influence and development of those same laws which have been in force from the very first dawn of creation. The lower the archaeologist searches in the crust of the earth for the relics of human art, the more faint become the traces of that broad gulf, which in our times appears to separate man from the brute creation. ”

“ We are apt to speak of the creation of the universe as a thing of the past, and to suppose that the world, with all the varied life upon it, previous to man’s appearance, having been created for his especial happiness and supremacy, was afterwards left to his control and government. But this view of the subject belongs to an age in which the laws of nature in their all-sufficiency and completeness were but little studied and appreciated. Modern science finds no evidence of any such abandonment of the universe to man’s jurisdiction. ”

“ What reason is there to doubt that the rude bark-float of the Australian, the Tasmanian, and the Ethiopian; the catamaran of the Papuan; the dug-out of the New Zealander; the built-up canoe of the Samoan; and the improved ribbed vessel of the Ke islander, are survivals representing successive stages in the development of the art of ship-building, not lapses to ruder methods of construction as the result of degradation; that each stage supplies us with examples of what was at one time the perfection of the art, inconceivable ages ago? ”

“ It would be sheer moonshine, in the present state of knowledge, to study Anthropology on any other basis than the basis of development; nor must we, in studying development, fail to distinguish between racial development and the development of culture. The affinity of certain races for particular phases of culture, owing to the hereditary transmission of faculties, constitutes an important element of inquiry to be weighed in the balance with other things, just as the farmer weighs in the balance of probabilities the nature of the soil in which his turnips are growing ”

“ Taking a comprehensive view of the development of civilization, it may be compared to the growth of those plants whose vigour displays itself chiefly in the propagation of their leading shoots, which, overtopping the older and feebler branches, cause them to be everywhere replaced by a fresh growth of verdure. The vegetable kingdom thus furnishes us with the grand type of progress; continuity and bifurcation are principles of universal application, uniting the lowest with the highest created thing. ”

“ In endeavouring to trace back prehistoric culture to its root forms, we find that in proportion as the value of language and of the ideas conveyed by language diminishes, that of ideas embodied in material forms increases in stability and permanence. Whilst in the earliest phases of humanity the names for things change with every generation if not more frequently, the things themselves are handed down unchanged from father to son and from tribe to tribe, and many of them have continued to our own time, faithful records of the condition of the people by whom they were fabricated. ”

“ It is quite true, as stated by mythologists, that the history of myths is one of continued degeneration in so far as they can be traced, and that the element of decay enters far more into their composition than that of growth. But the whole accessible history of these myths represents drooping branches from the upward-growing stem of free thought out of which they sprang. What is the space of time which separates us from the Vedas, as compared with the whole upward growth of humanity before and since! ”

“ With equal if not greater truth we may combat the assertion that the science of culture is historical, whilst nature, on the other hand, as dealt with by the physical sciences, is incapable of progress. However valid this objection might have appeared during the empirical and comparative stages of the physical sciences, it cannot be maintained, since the researches of Darwin and others have fairly landed them in their evolutionary phase. The principles of variation and natural selection have established a bond of union between the physical and culture sciences which can never be broken. ”

“ The conception of man, not as a tool-using but as a tool-making animal, is clear, defined, and unassailable; probably if we could trace language to its sources, we should be able to draw the same line between natural sounds employed as a medium of communication, and the created word. Thus the arts which we can study may perhaps be taken to illustrate the origin of language, which we cannot study in this phase. ”

“ We must now turn to the development of the second great class of weapons—the spear and arrow. These may be classed together, the arrow being merely the diminutive of the spear; and it may be taken as a general rule, applicable to all the arts of prehistoric times, that when a given form has once been introduced, it will speedily be repeated in every possible size that can be applied to any of the various purposes for which such a form is capable of being used. Size, in the arts of the earliest ages, is no indication of progress. ”

“ History is but another term for evolution. There are histories and histories, as any one may determine who has read Green’s Short History of the English People, and compared it with the kind of matter which passed for history in his school days. But our position with regard to culture has always been one which has forced on our comprehension the reality of progress, whilst with respect to the slow progress of external nature, it has been concealed from us, owing to the brief span of human existence and our imperfect records of the past. ”

“ The savage is morally and mentally an unfit instrument for the spread of civilization, except when, like the higher mammalia, he is reduced to a state of slavery; his occupation is gone, and his place is required for [55] an improved race. Allowing for the rapidly increasing ratio in which progress advances, it is not too much to assume, that in half a century from the present time, savage life will have ceased to have a single true representative on the face of the globe, and the evidence which it has been the means of handing down to our generation will have perished with it. ”

“ There are many persons no doubt who regard utility, not as a primary stage, but as the final and highest result of science. But the highest achievements of science, even the highest practical achievements, would never have been reached by the [22] mere utilitarian. There is a force within us by which we are moved in the direction of acquiring knowledge for its own sake and for the sake of truth, regardless of any material advantage to be derived from such knowledge. Sooner or later such knowledge is sure to bear practical fruits, even though we may not live to realize them. ”

“ Men observe only those things which their occupations or their education enable them to understand and appreciate. When [46] a savage is introduced on board the deck of a European vessel, he notices only those objects with the uses of which he is familiar—the sewing of a coat, a chain, or a cable, at once rivets his attention, but he passes by the steam-engine without observation, and if a work of art is forced upon his notice, he is unable to say whether it represents a man, a ship, or a kangaroo! ”

“ Yet the complex civilization of our own time has been built on the foundations that were laid by these aborigines of our species, while the brute creation may be said to have produced little more than was necessary to their own wants or those of their immediate offspring. Man has been the agent employed in a work of continuous progression. Generation has succeeded generation, and race has succeeded race, each contributing its quota to the fabrication of the edifice, and then giving place to other workmen. ”

“ In the attempt to trace language to its origin, onomatopoeia, or the imitation of the sounds of animals and of nature, appears not only to have been the chief agent in initiating the growth of language, but it has also served to enrich it from time to time, so that even to this day, poetry and eloquence in a great measure depend on the employment of it. ”

“ Every new tool or weapon formed by the hand of man retains the same form as long as it continues to exist; it may be handed from man to man, from tribe to tribe, from father to son, from one generation to another ”

“ The materials for the science have not yet been even classified, and classification is a process which must always precede continuity in the study of nature. Classification defines the margin of our ignorance; continuity results from the extension of knowledge, by bridging over the distinction of classes. Travellers, for the most part, have been in the habit of bringing home, as curiosities, the most remarkable specimens of weapons and implements, without much regard to their history or the evidence they convey ”