History Of The Warfare Of Science With Theology In Christendom
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"Arma antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt, Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami, Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta, Sed prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus"---
the translation is that of Good. For a more exact prose translation, see Munro's Lucretius, fourth edition, which is much more careful, at least in the proof-reading, than the first edition. As regards Lucretius's propheitc insight into some of the greatest conclusiuons of modern science, see Munro's translation and notes, fourth edition, book v, notes ii, p. 335. On the relation of several passages in Horace to the ideas of Lucretius, see Munro as above. For the passage from Luther, see the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, p. 242.
During the mediaeval ages of faith this view was almost entirely obscured, and at the Reformation it seemed likely to remain so. Typical of the simplicity of belief in "the Fall" cherished among the Reformers is Luther's declaration regarding Adam and Eve. He tells us, "they entered into the garden about noon, and having a desire to eat, she took the apple; then came the fall--according to our account at about two o'clock." But in the revival of learning the old eclipsed truth reappeared, and in the first part of the seventeenth century we find that, among the crimes for which Vanini was sentenced at Toulouse to have his tongue torn out and to be burned alive, was his belief that there is a gradation extending upward from the lowest to the highest form of created beings.
Yet, in the same century, the writings of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal were evidently undermining the old idea of "the Fall." Bodin especially, brilliant as were his services to orthodoxy, argued lucidly against the doctrine of general human deterioration.
Early in the eighteenth century Vico presented the philosophy of history as an upward movement of man out of animalism and barbarism. This idea took firm hold upon human thought, and in the following centuries such men as Lessing and Turgot gave new force to it.
The investigations of the last forty years have shown that Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets: what they saw by the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius, has been now thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained and arranged--until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern archaeologists, have brought these prophecies to evident fulfilment, by presenting a scientific classification dividing the age of prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an old stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten copper, a period of bronze, and a period of iron, and arraying vast masses of facts from all parts of the world, fitting thoroughly into each other, strengthening each other, and showing beyond a doubt that, instead of a fall, there has been a rise of man, from the earliest indications in the Quaternary, or even, possibly, in the Tertiary period.[190]
[190] For Vanini, see Topinard, Elements of Anthropologie, p. 52. For a brief and careful summary of the agency of Eccard in Germany, Goguet in France, Hoare in England, and others in various parts of Europe, as regards this development of the scientific view during the eighteenth century, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, chap. i. For the agency of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal, see Flint, Philosophy of History, introduction, pp. 28 et seq. For a shorter summary, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Man. For the statements by the northern archaeologists, see Nilsson, Worsaae, and the other main works cited in this article. For a generous statement regarding the great services of the Danish archaeologists in this field, see Quatrefages, introduction to Cartailhac, Les Ages Prehistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal.
The first blow at the fully developed doctrine of "the Fall" came, as we have seen, from geology. According to that doctrine, as held quite generally from its beginnings among the fathers and doctors of the primitive Church down to its culmination in the minds of great Protestants like John Wesley, the statement in our sacred books that "death entered the world by sin" was taken as a historic fact, necessitating the conclusion that, before the serpent persuaded Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, death on our planet was unknown. Naturally, when geology revealed, in the strata of a period long before the coming of man on earth, a vast multitude of carnivorous tribes fitted to destroy their fellow-creatures on land and sea, and within the fossilized skeletons of many of these the partially digested remains of animals, this doctrine was too heavy to be carried, and it was quietly dropped.
But about the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrine of the rise of man as opposed to the doctrine of his "fall" received a great accession of strength from a source most unexpected. As we saw in the last chapter, the facts proving the great antiquity of man foreshadowed a new and even more remarkable idea regarding him. We saw, it is true, that the opponents of Boucher de Perthes, while they could not deny his discovery of human implements in the drift, were successful in securing a verdict of "Not prove " as regarded his discovery of human bones; but their triumph was short-lived. Many previous discoveries, little thought of up to that time, began to be studied, and others were added which resulted not merely in confirming the truth regarding the antiquity of man, but in establishing another doctrine which the opponents of science regarded with vastly greater dislike--the doctrine that man has not fallen from an original high estate in which he was created about six thousand years ago, but that, from a period vastly earlier than any warranted by the sacred chronologists, he has been, in spite of lapses and deteriorations, rising.
A brief review of this new growth of truth may be useful. As early as 1835 Prof. Jaeger had brought out from a quantity of Quaternary remains dug up long before at Cannstadt, near Stuttgart, a portion of a human skull, apparently of very low type. A battle raged about it for a time, but this finally subsided, owing to uncertainties arising from the circumstances of the discovery.
In 1856, in the Neanderthal, near Dusseldorf, among Quaternary remains gathered on the floor of a grotto, another skull was found bearing the same evidence of a low human type. As in the case of the Cannstadt skull, this again was fiercely debated, and finally the questions regarding it were allowed to remain in suspense. But new discoveries were made: at Eguisheim, at Brux, at Spy, and elsewhere, human skulls were found of a similarly low type; and, while each of the earlier discoveries was open to debate, and either, had no other been discovered, might have been considered an abnormal specimen, the combination of all these showed conclusively that not only had a race of men existed at that remote period, but that it was of a type as low as the lowest, perhaps below the lowest, now known.
Research was now redoubled, and, as a result, human skulls and complete skeletons of various types began to be discovered in the ancient deposits of many other parts of the world, and especially in France, Belgium, Germany, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America.
But soon began to emerge from all these discoveries a fact of enormous importance. The skulls and bones found at Cro Magnon, Solutre, Furfooz, Grenelle, and elsewhere, were compared, and it was thus made certain that various races had already appeared and lived in various grades of civilization, even in those exceedingly remote epochs; that even then there were various strata of humanity ranging from races of a very low to those of a very high type; and that upon any theory--certainly upon the theory of the origin of mankind from a single pair--two things were evident: first, that long, slow processes during vast periods of time must have been required for the differentiation of these races, and for the evolution of man up to the point where the better specimens show him, certainly in the early Quaternary and perhaps in the Tertiary period; and, secondly, that there had been from the first appearance of man, of which we have any traces, an upward tendency.[191]
[191] For Wesley's statement of the amazing consequences of the entrance of death into the world by sin, see citations in his sermon on The Fall of Man in the chapter on Geology. For Boucher de Perthes, see his Life by Ledieu, especially chapters v and xix; also letters in the appendix; also Les Antiquities Celtiques et Antediluviennes, as cited in previous chapters of this work. For an account of the Neanderthal man and other remains mentioned, see Quatrefages, Human Species, cha
p. xxvi; also Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, pp. 232 et seq.; also other writers cited in this chapter. For the other discoveries mentioned, see the same sources. For an engraving of the skull and the restored human face of the Neanderthal man, see Reinach, Antiquities Nationales, etc., vol. i, p. 138. For the vast regions over which that early race spread, see Quatrefages as above, p. 307. See also the same author, Histoire Generale des Races Humaines, in the Bibliotheque Ethnologique, Paris, 1887, p. 4. In the vast mass of literature bearing on this subject, see Quatrefages, Dupont, Reinach, Joly, Mortillet, Tylor, and Lubbock, in works cited through these chapters.
This second conclusion, the upward tendency of man from low beginnings, was made more and more clear by bringing into relations with these remains of human bodies and of extinct animals the remains of human handiwork. As stated in the last chapter, the river drift and bone caves in Great Britain, France, and other parts of the world, revealed a progression, even in the various divisions of the earliest Stone period; for, beginning at the very lowest strata of these remains, on the floors of the caverns, associated mainly with the bones of extinct animals, such as the cave bear, the hairy elephant, and the like, were the rudest implements then, in strata above these, sealed in the stalagmite of the cavern floors, lying with the bones of animals extinct but more recent, stone implements were found, still rude, but, as a rule, of an improved type; and, finally, in a still higher stratum, associated with bones of animals like the reindeer and bison, which, though not extinct, have departed to other climates, were rude stone implements, on the whole of a still better workmanship. Such was the foreshadowing, even at that early rude Stone period, of the proofs that the tendency of man has been from his earliest epoch and in all parts of the world, as a rule, upward.
But this rule was to be much further exemplified. About 1850, while the French and English geologists were working more especially among the relics of the drift and cave periods, noted archaeologists of the North--Forchammer, Steenstrup, and Worsaae--were devoting themselves to the investigation of certain remains upon the Danish Peninsula. These remains were of two kinds: first, there were vast shell-heaps or accumulations of shells and other refuse cast aside by rude tribes which at some unknown age in the past lived on the shores of the Baltic, principally on shellfish. That these shell-heaps were very ancient was evident: the shells of oysters and the like found in them were far larger than any now found on those coasts; their size, so far from being like that of the corresponding varieties which now exist in the brackish waters of the Baltic, was in every case like that of those varieties which only thrive in the waters of the open salt sea. Here was a clear indication that at the time when man formed these shell-heaps those coasts were in far more direct communication with the salt sea than at present, and that sufficient time must have elapsed since that period to have wrought enormous changes in sea and land throughout those regions.
Scattered through these heaps were found indications of a grade of civilization when man still used implements of stone, but implements and weapons which, though still rude, showed a progress from those of the drift and early cave period, some of them being of polished stone.
With these were other evidences that civilization had progressed. With implements rude enough to have survived from early periods, other implements never known in the drift and bone caves began to appear, and, though there were few if any bones of other domestic animals, the remains of dogs were found; everything showed that there had been a progress in civilization between the former Stone epoch and this.
The second series of discoveries in Scandinavia was made in the peat-beds: these were generally formed in hollows or bowls varying in depth from ten to thirty feet, and a section of them, like a section of the deposits in the bone caverns, showed a gradual evolution of human culture. The lower strata in these great bowls were found to be made up chiefly of mosses and various plants matted together with the trunks of fallen trees, sometimes of very large diameter; and the botanical examination of the lowest layer of these trees and plants in the various bowls revealed a most important fact: for this layer, the first in point of time, was always of the Scotch fir--which now grows nowhere in the Danish islands, and can not be made to grow anywhere in them--and of plants which are now extinct in these regions, but have retreated within the arctic circle. Coming up from the bottom of these great bowls there was found above the first layer a second, in which were matted together masses of oak trees of different varieties; these, too, were relics of a bygone epoch, since the oak has almost entirely disappeared from Denmark. Above these came a third stratum made up of fallen beech trees; and the beech is now, and has been since the beginning of recorded history, the most common tree of the Danish Peninsula.
Now came a second fact of the utmost importance as connected with the first. Scattered, as a rule, through the lower of these deposits, that of the extinct fir trees and plants, were found implements and weapons of smooth stone; in the layer of oak trees were found implements of bronze; and among the layer of beeches were found implements and weapons of iron.
The general result of these investigations in these two sources, the shell mounds and the peat deposits, was the same: the first civilization evidenced in them was marked by the use of stone implements more or less smooth, showing a progress from the earlier rude Stone period made known by the bone caves; then came a later progress to a higher civilization, marked by the use of bronze implements; and, finally, a still higher development when iron began to be used.
The labours of the Danish archaeologists have resulted in the formation of a great museum at Copenhagen, and on the specimens they have found, coupled with those of the drift and bone caves, is based the classification between the main periods or divisions in the evolution of the human race above referred to.
It was not merely in Scandinavian lands that these results were reached; substantially the same discoveries were made in Ireland and France, in Sardinia and Portugal, in Japan and in Brazil, in Cuba and in the United States; in fact, as a rule, in nearly every part of the world which was thoroughly examined.[192]
[192] For the general subject, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, p. 498, et passim. For examples of the rude stone implements, improving as we go from earlier to later layers in the bone caves, see Boyd Hawkins, Early Man in Britain, chap. vii, p. 186; also Quatrefages, Human Species, New York, 1879, pp. 305 et seq. An interesting gleam of light is thrown on the subject in De Baye, Grottes Prehistoriques de la Marne, pp. 31 et seq.; also Evans, as cited in the previous chapter. For the more recent investigations in the Danish shell-heaps, see Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, pp. 303, 304. For these evidences of advanced civilization in the shell-heaps, see Mortillet, p. 498. He, like Nilsson, says that only the bones of the dog were found; but compare Dawkins, p. 305. For the very full list of these discoveries, with their bearing on each other, see Mortillet, p. 499. As to those in Scandanavian countries, see Nilsson, The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, third edition, with Introduction by Lubbock, London, 1868; also the Pre-History of the North, by Worsaae, English translation, London, 1886. For shell-mounds and their contents in the Spanish Peninsula, see Cartailhac's greater work already cited. For summary of such discoveries throughout the world, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, pp. 497 et seq.
But from another quarter came a yet more striking indication of this same evolution. As far back as the year 1829 there were discovered, in the Lake of Zurich, piles and other antiquities indicating a former existence of human dwellings, standing in the water at some distance from the shore; but the usual mixture of thoughtlessness and dread of new ideas seems to have prevailed, and nothing was done until about 1853, when new discoveries of the same kind were followed up vigorously, and Rutimeyer, Keller, Troyon, and others showed not only in the Lake of Zurich, but in many other lakes in Switzerland, remains of former habitations, and, in the midst of these, great numbers of relics, exhibiting the grade of civilization which those lakedwellers had attained.
Here, too, were accumulated proofs of the upward tendency of the human race. Implements of polished stone, bone, leather, pottery of various grades, woven cloth, bones of several kinds of domestic animals, various sorts of grain, bread which had been preserved by charring, and a multitude of evidences of progress never found among the earlier, ruder relics of civilization, showed yet more strongly that man had arrived here at a still higher stage than his predecessor of the drift, cave, and shell-heap periods, and had gone on from better to better.
Very striking evidences of this upward tendency were found in each class of implements. As by comparing the chipped flint implements of the lower and earlier strata in the cave period with those of the later and upper strata we saw progress, so, in each of the periods of polished stone, bronze, and iron, we see, by similar comparisons, a steady progress from rude to perfected implements; and especially is this true in the remains of the various lake-dwellings, for among these can be traced out constant increase in the variety of animals domesticated, and gradual improvements in means of subsistence and in ways of living.
Incidentally, too, a fact, at first sight of small account, but on reflection exceedingly important, was revealed. The earlier bronze implements were frequently found to imitate in various minor respects implements of stone; in other words, forms were at first given to bronze implements natural in working stone, but not natural in working bronze. This showed the direction of the development--that it was upward from stone to bronze, not downward from bronze to stone; that it was progress rather than decline.