Man's Primitive Condition.
By J. B. Drury
REV. J. B. DRURY, D. D., by the appointment of the General Synod of the Reformed Church, delivered the Vedder course of lectures before the faculties and students of the Theological Seminary and Rutger's College. His subject, "Evolution," was treated with admirable discrimination, and in the light of the best thought from many points of view. The following is a condensed statement of his fourth lecture on "Man's Primitive Condition:"— It is essential in any theory of mechanical evolution, which makes man only a modification of the anthropoid ape, that his original condition be a brute-like savagery. Hence, much research and learning has been expended on the endeavor to substantiate this postulate. Man's reason, self-determining will, and moral sense have marked him as so widely separated from the brutes that the effort has confessedly failed. This is conceded by many who believe in the ability of natural selection or uncontrolled evolution to account for the previous steps in the process. Notably, Alfred R. Wallace maintains it is inapplicable to man. His argument from the size of man's brain, the loss of such useful peculiarities as the hairy covering for the back, and the prehensile character of the feet, the long undeveloped potentialities of the human hand and voice, his intellectual and moral attributes, has never been satisfactorily met. The question is to be settled only by a careful examination of facts. Evidence as to original condition to be decisive must be looked for in man's original home. For evolutionists concede the unity of the race, and ethnologists have fixed his original habitat on the plateaux of Central Asia. There, if anywhere, the records of his primitive state are to be found. Thus far there has been produced no proof of a stone age, prior to all others, as existing either at the original center or in the countries adjacent. The oldest remains discovered in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile, in India or China, tell of an advanced civilization rather than savagery. The relics relied upon to demonstrate the condition of primitive man are gathered from the scenes of his migration, and are confined to western Europe. Even there is found nothing to betoken a half-man and half-brute condition. The earliest crania, as the Engis and Neanderthal skulls, Huxley concedes denote no inferiority of mental capacity. The smaller of the two had a brain measurement nearly double that of the highest of the apes. Existing savages, as well as the oldest remains of man, give no shadow of evidence that there has ever existed a connecting link between men and brutes. Man everywhere gives evidence of capacity for improvement; possesses all the essential elements, as speech, reason, and moral sense, of a true humanity. Present savage races when brought under the influence of civilization and religion for only a short time prove this. Savagery expresses the conditions or environment under which the struggle for existence is carried on, not innate capacity. Man everywhere wages successfully the warfare against unpropitious circumstances and natural enemies. His devices, utensils, and weapons, when viewed in the light of his surroundings and condition, will be found well adapted to his need. They are found, however, widely separated by distance or time, to be substantially alike in principles, form, and even ornamentation; showing that men in the same circumstances or conditions meet their necessities in practically the same way, thus manifesting that men are made to differ through circumstances rather than natural capacity. Robinson Crusoe, deprived of his wreck, despite his acquaintance with civilization, would have begun and continued life on his island in the same way as the savage, and it may be doubted if he would have waged the struggle for existence as successfully. There is no particular objection to the division of civilization into the Palæolithic and Neolithic Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages, as has been proposed as the consequence of the study of prehistoric remains of western Europe, provided they may be considered expressive of condition, and not of succession in time. They denote the severity of the struggle for existence, degree of isolation, and absence of division of labor, and give no reliable evidence of antiquity. The evidence increases of large contemporaneousness in northern and western Europe, and is almost conclusive as to their existence, at the same time as a high civilization in the older houses of the race. The palæolithic and neolithic men of the drift and the caves were the crowded or driven out members of the older communities, and most probably the ancestors of what history calls the Iberian and Celtic races. The ages of stone, and bronze, and iron passed one into the other just as the severity of the struggle for existence relaxed, and the barriers of isolation were broken down. The bronze age, in the very materials of which the metal is composed, and the shape and form of its articles, is demonstrably the result of commerce with the older seats of civilization. The ages were not only frequently contemporaneous, but merged rapidly one into the other, and the stone often followed as well as preceded the bronze. This has been conclusively demonstrated by Schleimann's excavations on the sites of ancient Troy and Mycenæ. There has been degradation as well as progress. Civilizations have been lost as well as gained. Indeed, the two processes go on side by side. Society has its waifs and wrecks as well as its successful ventures. When in the severity of competition men are crowded out and down, when called upon to live away from the appliances of civilization, there is ever a reversion to that which is simple and unexacting in skill and labor. This Dr. Mitchell has well shown in his admirable book "The Past in the Present." But more than all else the mechanical evolutionist's theory of a slow and gradual upward progress of man from a brute-like condition is negatived by a true conception of human progress. The advances of the past fifty years have fostered the idea that as men we are far in advance of all who have lived in the past; that we are in the midst of a continuous, universal, and unlimited upward progress. But a little reflection will show all this a mistake. What we call progress is only an advance in particular and narrow lines. It is by discoveries—leaps. A new force is applied, a new device introduced, and it works a wide-reaching revolution in certain directions. But in a short time the full effects are reached, the potentialities are exhausted, and progress ceases. The great advances of the nineteenth century have been largely due to the applications of steam. One or at most two generations, sufficed to exhaust its capabilities, and for twenty-five years nothing new has been added. Every labor-saving invention—the spinning jenny, the sewing machine, the reaper and mower, reaches in a generation or two relative perfection, and thenceforth the world is richer for the devices, but progress ceases. We are now busy examining the capabilities and applications of electricity. The progress has been and is wonderful. But it requires no prophet to predict that fifty years will suffice to perfect the analysis and reach the limits of its potentialities. The most essential and valuable of inventions and discoveries are of hoary antiquity, and have had nothing added to them for thousands of years, e.g., bread-making, the making of pottery, the mechanical powers, etc. Changes of condition cause often the loss of valuable practices and arts. Many a so-called modern discovery is only a re-discovery, and it is often found that the ancient artisan was the superior of the modern. The true conception of progress shows us that condition of civilization is no criterion by which to measure the lapse of time or the capabilities and powers of man as man. Civilization is dependent on causes which affect the severity of the struggle for existence, and the relation of men and communities to each other. The civilization which is in the van of all that of the past and which is peculiarly modern, has its source, it is not difficult to show, in the influence of the gospel of Christ on the social relations of man. Certain it is that man came on the scene of earth in the plenitude of his powers. His primitive condition was not one of low, brute-like savagery. Mechanical evolution cannot account for or explain his civilization.