From essays on “Physics and Politics.”

WE catch a first glimpse of patriarchal man, not with any industrial relics of a primitive civilization, but with some gradually learned knowledge of the simpler arts, with some tamed animals and some little knowledge of the course of nature, as far as it tells upon the seasons and affects the condition of simple tribes. This is what, according to ethnology, we should expect the first historic man to be, and this in fact is what we find him. But what was his mind; how are we to describe that?

  I believe the general description in which Sir John Lubbock sums up his estimate of the savage mind suits the patriarchal mind. “Savages,” he says, “unite the character of childhood with the passions and strength of men.” And if we open the first record of the pagan world,—the poems of Homer,—how much do we find that suits this description better than any other. Civilization has indeed already gone forward ages beyond the time at which any such description is complete. Man, in Homer, is as good at oratory, Mr. Gladstone seems to say, as he has ever been, and, much as that means, other and better things might be added to it. But after all, how much of the “splendid savage” there is in Achilles, and how much of the “spoiled child sulking in his tent.” Impressibility and excitability are the main characteristics of the oldest Greek history, and if we turn to the East, the “simple and violent” world, as Mr. Kinglake calls it, of the first times meets us every moment.

  And this is precisely what we should expect. An “inherited drill,” science says, “makes modern nations what they are; their born structure bears the trace of the laws of their father”; but the ancient nations came into no such inheritance; they were the descendants of people who did what was right in their own eyes; they were born to no tutored habits, no preservative bonds, and therefore they were at the mercy of every impulse, and blown by every passion.

  The condition of the primitive man, if we conceive of him rightly, is, in several respects, different from any we know. We unconsciously assume around us the existence of a great miscellaneous social machine working to our hands, and not only supplying our wants, but even telling and deciding when those wants shall come. No one can now without difficulty conceive how people got on before there were clocks and watches; as Sir G. Lewis said, “it takes a vigorous effort of the imagination” to realize a period when it was a serious difficulty to know the hour of day. And much more is it difficult to fancy the unstable minds of such men as neither knew nature, which is the clockwork of material civilization, nor possessed a polity, which is a kind of clockwork to moral civilization. They never could have known what to expect; the whole habit of steady but varied anticipation, which makes our minds what they are, must have been wholly foreign to theirs.

  Again, I at least cannot call up to myself the loose conceptions (as they must have been) of morals which then existed. If we set aside all the element derived from law and polity which runs through our current moral notions, I hardly know what we shall have left. The residuum was somehow and in some vague way intelligible to the antepolitical man, but it must have been uncertain, wavering, and unfit to be depended upon. In the best cases it existed much as the vague feeling of beauty now exists in minds sensitive but untaught: a still small voice of uncertain meaning—an unknown something modifying everything else, and higher than anything else, yet in form so indistinct that when you looked for it, it was gone; or if this be thought the delicate fiction of a later fancy, then morality was at least to be found in the wild spasms of “wild justice,” half punishment, half outrage; but anyhow, being unfixed by steady law, it was intermittent, vague, and hard for us to imagine. Everybody who has studied mathematics knows how many shadowy difficulties he seemed to have before he understood the problem, and how impossible it was, when once the demonstration had flashed upon him, ever to comprehend those indistinct difficulties again, or to call up the mental confusion that admitted them. So in these days, when we cannot by any effort drive out of our minds the notion of law, we cannot imagine the mind of one who had never known it, and who could not by any effort have conceived it.

  Again, the primitive man could not have imagined what we mean by a nation. We, on the other hand, cannot imagine those to whom it is a difficulty; “we know what it is when you do not ask us,” but we cannot very quickly explain or define it. But so much as this is plain, a nation means a like body of men, because of that likeness capable of acting together, and because of that likeness inclined to obey similar rules; and even this Homer’s Cyclops—used only to sparse human beings—could not have conceived.

  To sum up: law—rigid, definite, concise law—is the primary want of early mankind; that which they need above anything else, that which is requisite before they can gain anything else. But it is their greatest difficulty, as well as their first requisite; the thing most out of their reach, as well as that most beneficial to them if they reach it. In later ages many races have gained much of this discipline quickly, though painfully; a loose set of scattered clans has been often and often forced to substantial settlement by a rigid conqueror; the Romans did half the work for above half Europe. But where could the first ages find Romans or a conqueror? Men conquer by the power of government, and it was exactly government which then was not. The first ascent of civilization was at a steep gradient, though when now we look down upon it, it seems almost nothing.