Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other EssaysCarpenter, Edward
Philosophy
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays
Carpenter, Edward
Civilization; Crime; Evolution; Science
Wallace in his _Malay
Archipelago_ vol. ii. p. 460, "with communities in South America and the
East, who have no laws or law courts, but the public opinion of the
village ... yet each man scrupulously respects the rights of his
fellows, and any infraction of those rights rarely takes place. In such
a community all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide
distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and
servant, which are the product of our civilisation." Indeed this
_community_ of life in the early societies, this absence of division
into classes, and of the contrast between rich and poor, is now admitted
on all sides as a marked feature of difference between the conditions of
the primitive and of civilised man.[8]
Lastly, with regard to the mental condition of the Barbarian, probably
no one will be found to dispute the contention that he is more
easy-minded and that his consciousness of Sin is less developed than in
his civilised brother. Our unrest is the penalty we pay for our wider
life. The missionary retires routed from the savage in whom he can awake
no sense of his supreme wickedness. An American lady had a servant, a
negro-woman, who on one occasion asked leave of absence for the next
morning, saying she wished to attend the Holy Communion? "I have no
objection," said the mistress, "to grant you leave; but do you think you
_ought_ to attend Communion? You know you have never said you were sorry
about that goose you stole last week." "Lor' missus," replied the
woman, "do ye think I'd let an old goose stand betwixt me and my Blessed
Lord and Master?" But joking apart, and however necessary for man's
ultimate evolution may be the temporary development of this
consciousness of Sin, we cannot help seeing that the condition of the
mind in which it is absent is the most distinctively _healthy_; nor can
it be concealed that some of the greatest works of Art have been
produced by people like the earlier Greeks, in whom it was absent; and
could not possibly have been produced where it was strongly developed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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