Alleviation

“ Tribes, clans, castes, orders of nobility, and reigning families, are familiar illustrations of the sway of this idea; in killing, banishing, and confining criminals mankind has in all ages been defending itself, blindly, to be sure, but effectually, against evils which incidentally flow from hereditary transmission; but it has been reserved for natural science in this generation to demonstrate the universality of this principle, and its controlling influence upon the families, nations, and races of men, as well as upon all lower orders of animate beings. ”

“ Science, like a hundred-handed Briareus, working in many a field, yet watching with the eyes of an Argus all the richly varied ingathering, has learned how to probe among the very roots of social thought, and speech, and action. The hands of the mighty Titan have found the clan ideas, the clan facts, at the roots of property and political institutions, of legal rights, religious doctrines, and moral principles. ”

“ If you place them upon the witness stand, they must confine themselves to that branch or theory of evolution which teaches that man descended from a lower order of animals. That is because the act says so; that is because the act states in so many words, that they shall not teach that man descended from a lower order of animals, I think under the construction, what I concede to be a proper construction of the act that any other theory of evolution might be lawfully taught. ”

“ When dragged before the tribunal of Heaven, unable to lift your guilty eyes to behold the great original parents of your race, abhorred too by every tribe and every nation of the human family, the just decision of Him who will render to every man according to his works, will not allow you to mingle with the common damned, but will assign to the murderers of their species a place of torment far apart by itself in the shades of darkness. ”

“ In fact, in those very societies where it is preponderating, the novices do not have the right of taking any animal as their individual totem; to each clan a certain definite number of species are assigned, outside of which it may not choose. ”

“ In later stages of savage or semicivilized life the clan constitution as a rule has been succeeded by the formation of secret societies, and then initiation into a society takes the place of the old initiation into the clan.327 Initiation into such a society is often elaborate and solemn—it is carried out in great detail in many Polynesian, African, and North American tribes—but its general features are the same as those of the earlier procedure. Savage societies and civilized mysteries all have their secrets and their moral instruction, and they all represent an advance in individualism. ”

“ The abstract idea of judgment or justice is derived from a word which signifies to cut or divide; it being originated by the circumstance that when the primitive hunters had killed a stag, or other prey, one divided the flesh with a knife, among those who assisted in the pursuit, distributing a just portion to each. Thus, the act of cutting and dividing their prey, which was the first circumstance that called into exercise and placed before their senses the principle of justice, was the circumstance from which they derived this most important abstract idea. ”

“ A reader is impressed by the extraordinary number and variety of cases with their still more numerous details and circumstances accumulated in the course of long ages, the manner in which the laws are inextricably interwoven with the interlocking clan system, and the absence of scientific arrangement or guiding principle except those of moral justice, clemency, and the good of the community. ”

“ Not only should the men of a clan abstain from killing and eating their totem-animal themselves, but they should also do all in their power to force this same abstention upon others. But as a matter of fact, far from imposing such a renunciation upon the whole tribe, each clan, by rites which we shall describe below, takes care that the plant or animal whose name it bears shall increase and prosper, [Pg 177] so as to assure an abundant supply of food for the other clans. ”

“ Evolution, on the contrary, promises a gradual release from low ancestral conditions—the original sin of the theologians—and opens up to the race a way of redemption, not only through natural selection and spontaneous variations resulting in higher and nobler types of mankind, but also through the modification of inherited traits by careful breeding, thorough discipline and the conscious and constant endeavour of every human being to improve and perfect himself. ”

“ One clan may not eat the tiger, another the ape, another the crocodile, another the dog, another the cat, another the dove, another the white buffalo. The reason given by members of a clan for abstaining from the flesh of the particular animal is either that they are descended from animals of that species, and that their souls after death may transmigrate into the animals, or that they or their forefathers have been under certain obligations to the animals. ”

“ I n the earlier portions of the Old Testament we have, very curiously, the history of the deliberate formation of an influential race, to which was given a most important mission in the world's history. The principle of selection, much talked of now in science, is the principle which is represented in the patriarchal history as operating under a direct Divine guidance. From the calling of Abraham, there seems to have been this continued watchfulness in selecting the party through whom the chosen race was to be continued. Every marriage thus far is divinely appointed and guided. ”

“ If by direct proof of an unbroken descent a full pedigree is made out, or if, when some link is wanting, the collateral proof from strong family or race resemblances is sufficient to warrant the belief that the link once existed, we might accept it as a fact that the individual descended from the supposed ancestors in a direct line, or that some peculiarity of blood came into his constitution at some point in the descent of individuals from individuals. ”

“ But although it might be allowable, in making out the descent of an individual man or any other animal, from a certain ancestor or pair of ancestors, to aid the pedigree by strong family or race resemblance, even when a link is wanting, it could only be for the purpose of establishing a pedigree, a connection of lives with lives, that such collateral evidence could be resorted to. ”

“ Strengthen Thou them to keep the secret of their faith and race—to teach it to their offspring as they received it from their fathers. Pardon Thou, them and us, the deceit we do to keep holy Thy law and Thine inheritance. In the land of the persecutor, the exterminator, be Thou their shield, and save them for Thy Holy name. ”

“ If the two kinds of control which eventually grow into civil and religious governments, originally include scarcely anything beyond observance of ceremonies, the precedence of ceremonial control over other controls is a corollary.
Divergent products of evolution betray their kinship by severally retaining certain traits which belonged to that from which they were evolved; and the implication is, that whatever traits they have in common, arose earlier in time than did the traits which distinguish them from one another. ”

“ For a time she prohibited her disciples from propagating their species, but soon after gave them ample license, restricting them, indiscriminately, to the pale of her sanctified church, for that she needed more souls to complete the number of her elect. ”

“ The process includes the comparison of an isolated custom or belief belonging, perhaps secretly, to a particular place, a particular class of persons, or perhaps a particular family or person, with a custom or belief which is part of a whole system belonging to a savage race or tribe; of a custom or belief whose only sanction is tradition, the conservative instinct to do what has been done by one's ancestors, with a custom or belief whose sanction is the professed and established polity or religion of a people ”

“ The animal thus serving as a receptacle for a venerated being becomes a holy thing, the object of a cult, that is, a totem, for all the descendants of the ancestor, who form the clan descended from him. ”

“ Every clan or family lived by itself and formed a guild for mutual protection, each kinsman being his brother's keeper, and bound to avenge his death by feud with the tribe or clan which had killed him. ”

“ Probably the most useful mode of classification is the genetic, beginning with the family, and then expanding according to the particular situation in view—in the primitive group to the clan, tribe and confederacy; in the civilized to the school, the interest group, the religious affiliation, the political nation, the international ideals and bonds of union. ”

“ Exogamy is, or has been, as widely spread as the opposed rule of endogamy just described. It is the duty enforced by custom, religion, and law, of marrying outside one’s own clan, and is usually in force amongst small and barbarous communities. Its 50former distribution is attested by the survival in nearly all countries, of ceremonies based on “marriage by capture.” ”

“ The great progress made by comparative psychology and ethnology, and historical and prehistorical research, in the second half of the nineteenth century, confirms us in the conviction that a long scale of intermediate stages joins the rudiments of law in the social primates and other mammals to the sense of law in the lower savage, and this again to that of the barbarian and the civilized human being—right up to the science of law in modern Europe. ”

“ Evidences of the control of law in the construction of the earth, and in the development of the animal and plant series.—They arose by Evolution, not by Creation.
The reign of law is exhibited by the historic career of human societies, and in the case of individual man. ”

“ Yet said God to Abraham: And thou shalt keep thy covenant to me, and thine heirs after thee in their generations, and this shall be the covenant that ye shall keep and thine heirs after thee. Every child masculine that shall be born shall be circumcised when he is eight days old. And see that the men in your generation be circumcised, begin at thyself and thy children. ”

“ Myths arose to make this strange ambiguity of human nature more easily representable in the mind. To explain this, they imagined that the animal was the ancestor of the men, or else that the two were descended from a common ancestor. Thus came the conception of bonds of kinship uniting each clan to the animal species whose name it bore. ”

“ Thus the law of "natural selection," instead of dispensing with anterior causation and enabling the animal races to be their own Providence and do all their own work, distinctly testifies to a constitution of the world pre-arranged for progress, externally spread with large choice of conditions, and with internal provisions for seizing and realizing the best. ”

“ Bees and any other kind of winged creatures, if they have flown away far from my property and have settled on another’s, cannot be reclaimed. And do you seek to reclaim men, who are not only free creatures, but masters of others, when they set themselves free by force of arms, [reclaim them] not by force of arms, but by law, as though you were a man, and they sheep? ”

“ All this being supplemented by the intercalation of armies of enemies, multitudes of ancestors of all kinds, and myriads of connecting forms, whose raison d'être may be simply their utility or necessity for the support of the theory of "Natural Selection." ”

“ But this is not possible where a group of men is composed of various clans, a given animal being spared by one clan but freely hunted and killed by all the other clans921—a state of things that was presumably universal. ”

“ The effect of selective breeding and culture is beyond dispute, and to many it seems obvious that all that is needed to perfect the human race and wipe out misery and crime is to supervise human breeding in the same way, so that the species may be controlled. ”

“ Before passing to a detailed account of ceremonial government under its various aspects, it will be well to sum up the results of this preliminary survey. They are these:
That control of conduct which we distinguish as ceremony precedes the civil and ecclesiastical controls. It begins with sub-human types of creatures; it occurs among otherwise ungoverned savages; it often becomes highly developed where the other kinds of rule are little developed; it is ever being spontaneously generated afresh between individuals in all societies ”

“ Thus the animal kingdom is divided, first of all, into Sub-kingdoms, then each Sub-kingdom into so many Classes containing those which have further characteristics in common, the Classes into Orders, the Orders into Families, the Families into Genera, and these again into species or kinds. ”

“ Although our chief concern is in protecting man from the demoralization involved in accepting a brute ancestry, it is better to put the advocates of evolution upon the defensive and challenge them to produce proof in support of their hypothesis in plant life and in the animal world. ”

“ Species developed from a common genus will show some common traits and some rules of mutual observance, savage peoples which have divided into tribes being an exception to the latter part of the statement, for the reason that lower societies have very little moral cohesion; they may be compared to lower organisms which reproduce themselves by fission, or to homogeneous colonies of animals, like sponges. Under the generic institutions we must not include those which arise merely as the result of similar circumstances. ”