The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and MankindWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
At first he thought very little about anything but immediate things. At
first he was busy thinking such things as: “Here is a bear; what shall I
do?” Or “There is a squirrel; how can I get it?” Until language had
developed to some extent there could have been little thinking beyond
the range of actual experience, for language is the instrument of
thought as book-keeping is the instrument of business. It records and
fixes and enables thought to get on to more and more complex ideas. It
is the hand of the mind to hold and keep. Primordial man, before he
could talk, probably saw very vividly, mimicked very cleverly, gestured,
laughed, danced, and lived, without much speculation about whence he
came or why he lived. He feared the dark, no doubt, and thunderstorms
and big animals and queer things and whatever he dreamt about, and no
doubt he did things to propitiate what he feared or to change his luck
and please the imaginary powers in rock and beast and river. He made no
clear distinction between animate and inanimate things; if a stick hurt
him, he kicked it; if the river foamed and flooded, he thought it was
hostile. His thought was probably very much at the level of a bright
little contemporary boy of four or five. He had the same subtle
unreasonableness of transition and the same limitations. But since he
had little or no speech he would do little to pass on the fancies that
came to him, and develop any tradition or concerted acts about them.
The drawings even of Late Palæolithic man do not suggest that he paid
any attention to sun or moon or stars or trees. He was preoccupied only
with animals and men. Probably he took day and night, sun and stars,
trees and mountains, as being in the nature of things--as a child takes
its meal times and its nursery staircase for granted. So far as we can
judge, he drew no fantasies, no ghosts or anything of that sort. The
Reindeer Men’s drawings are fearless familiar things, with no hint about
them of any religious or occult feelings. There is scarcely anything
that we can suppose to be a religious or mystical symbol at all in his
productions. No doubt he had a certain amount of what is called
_fetishism_ in his life; he did things we should now think unreasonable
to produce desired ends, for that is all fetishism amounts to; it is
only incorrect science based on guess-work or false analogy, and
entirely different in its nature from religion. No doubt he was excited
by his dreams, and his dreams mixed up at times in his mind with his
waking impressions and puzzled him. Since he buried his dead, and since
even the later Neanderthal men seem to have buried their dead, and
apparently with food and weapons, it has been argued that he had a
belief in a future life. But it is just as reasonable to suppose that
early men buried their dead with food and weapons because they doubted
if they were dead, which is not the same thing as believing them to
have immortal spirits, and that their belief in their continuing
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