The Martyrdom of Man - Winwood Reade (golden son ebook txt) 📗
- Author: Winwood Reade
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education been more severe: had the earliest inclinations been
checked by the fear of ruin and disgrace, he would not have
acquired the most dangerous of all habits. That men should be
subjected to the same discipline as women is therefore to be
wished for: and although the day is far distant, there can be
no doubt that it will come: and the future historian of morals
will record with surprise that in the nineteenth century
society countenanced vices in men which it punished in women
with banishment for life.
Since men are in a transitional condition; since Nature
ordains that the existence of the race can only be preserved
by means of gross appetites inherited from our ancestors,
the animals, it is obvious that men should refine them so
far as they are able. Thus the brute business of
eating and drinking is made in civilised life the opportunity
of social intercourse; the family, divided by the duties of the
day, then assemble and converse: men of talent are drawn
together and interchange ideas. Many a poem, many an invention,
many a great enterprise, has been born at the table; loves and
friendships have originated there. In the same manner the
passions are sanctified by marriage. Blended with the pure
affections their coarseness disappears: their violence is
appeased: they become the ministers of conjugal and parental
love.
If we place exceptions aside, and look at men in the mass, we
find that, like the animals, they are actively employed from
morning to night in obtaining food for themselves and for their
families. But when they have satisfied their actual wants, they
do not, like the animals, rest at their ease: they continue
their labour. Let us take the life of an ordinary man. He
adopts an occupation at first in order to get his bread; and
then that he may marry and have children; and these also he has
to feed. But that is not all. He soon desires to rise in his
profession, or to acquire such skill in his craft that he may
he praised by his superiors and by his companions. He desires
to make money that he may improve his social position. And
lastly, he begins to love his occupation for itself, whatever
it may be: the poor labourer has this feeling as well as the
poet or the artist. When the pleasures of money and fame have
been exhausted: when nothing remains on earth that can bribe
the mind to turn from its accustomed path, it is labour itself
that is the joy; and aged men who have neither desires, nor
illusions, who are separated from the world, and who are
drawing near to the grave, who believe that with life all is
ended, and that for them there is no hereafter, yet continue to
work with indefatigable zeal. This noble condition of the mind
which thus makes for itself a heaven upon earth can be attained
by those who have courage and resolution. It is merely the
effect of habit: labour is painful to all at first; but if the
student perseveres he will find it more and more easy, until at
last he will find it necessary, to his life. The toils which
once were so hard to endure are now sought and cherished for
themselves: the mind becomes uneasy when its chains are taken
off.
The love of esteem is the second stimulant of labour; it
follows the period of necessity; it precedes the period of
habit. It is founded on that feeling of sympathy which unites
the primeval herd, and which is necessary to its life. The man
who distinguishes himself in battle; the man who brings home a
deer, or a fish, or a store of honey, or a bundle of roots is
praised by his comrades; so he is encouraged to fresh
exertions, and so the emulation of others is excited. The
actions of savages are entirely directed by the desire to
exist, and by the desire to obtain the praises of their
fellows. All African travellers have suffered from the rapacity
of chiefs, and yet those same chiefs are the most open-handed
of men. They plunder and beg from the white man his cloth, in
order to give it away; and they give it away in order to obtain
praise. A savage gentleman is always surrounded by a host of
clients, who come every morning to give him the salutation, who
chant his praises and devour him alive. The art of song had its
origin in flattery. Mendicant minstrels wander from town to
town, and from chief to chief, singing the praises of their
patrons and satirising those who have not been generous towards
them. In Africa the accusation of parsimony is a more bitter
taunt than the accusation of cowardice. Commerce first
commenced in necessity. The inland people required salt; the
coast people required vegetables to eat with their fish. But
soon the desire of esteem induced men to contrive, and labour,
and imperil their lives in order to obtain ornaments or
articles of clothing which came from abroad. In Central Africa
it is more fashionable to wear a dirty rag of Manchester cloth,
such as we use for a duster, than their own beautiful aprons of
woven grass. An African chief will often commission a trader to
buy him a handsome saddle, or some curious article of
furniture, on condition that he will not supply it to any one
else, just as connoisseurs will pay a higher price for a work
of art when the mould has been broken.
Both in civilised and in savage life the selfish desires of man
are few, and are quickly satisfied. Enormous sums are lavished upon
cookery and wines, but more from ostentation than from true
gourmanderie. The love of display, or the more noble desire to give
pleasure to their friends, has much to do with the enthusiasm of those
who spend fortunes on works of art and objects of virtue; and
there are few amusements which can be enjoyed alone. Nihil est
homini amicum sine homine amico. All the actions of men may
therefore be traced first to the desire of preserving life and
continuing their species; secondly to the desire of esteem; and
thirdly to the effects of habit. In the religious conduct of
man there is nothing which cannot be thus explained. First, men
sacrifice and pray in order to escape sickness and death; or if
they are a little more advanced, that they may not be punished
in a future state. Secondly, they desire to win the esteem and
affections of the gods; they are ambitious of obtaining a
heavenly reputation. And lastly, prayer and praise, discipline
and self-denial, become habits, and give pleasure to the mind.
The rough hair shirt, the hard bed, the cold cell, the meagre
food, the long vigil, the midnight prayer, are delights to the
mind that is inured to suffer; and as other men rejoice that
they have found something which can yield them pleasure, so the
ascetic rejoices that he has found something which can yield
him pain.
In the preceding sketch, which is taken from the writings of
others, I have told how a hot cloud vibrating in space, cooled
into a sun rotating on its axis, and revolving round a point,
to us unknown; and how this sun cast off a piece, which went
out like a coal that leaps from the fire, and sailed round the
sun a cinder wrapped in smoke; and how, as it cooled, strange
forces worked within it, varied phenomena appeared upon its
surface; it was covered with a salt sea; the smoke cleared off;
the sunlight played upon the water; gelatinous plants and
animals appeared at first simple in their forms, becoming more
complex as the forces which acted on them increased in
complexity; the earth wrinkled up; the mountains and continents
appeared; rain-water ascended from the sea, and descended from
the sky; lakes and rivers were created; the land was covered
with ferns, and gigantic mosses, and grasses tall as trees;
enormous reptiles crawled upon the earth, frogs as large as
elephants, which croaked like thunder; and the air, which was
still poisonous and cloudy, was cleared by the plants feeding
on the coaly gas; the sun shone brightly; sex was invented;
love was born; flowers bloomed forth, and birds sang; mammoths
and mastodons revelled upon the infinity of pastures the world
became populous; the struggle for life became severe; animals
congregated together; male struggled against male for spouses,
herd struggled against herd for subsistence; a nation of apes,
possessing peculiar intelligence and sociability, were exposed
to peculiar dangers; as a means of resistance, they combined
more closely; as they combined more closely, their language was
improved; as a means of resistance, they threw missiles with
their hands; thus using their hands, they walked chiefly with
their feet; the apes became almost man, half walking, half
crawling through the grim forests, jabbering and gesticulating
in an imitative manner, fighting furiously for their females at
the rutting season, their matted hair begrimed with dirt and
blood, fighting with all nature, even with their own kind, but
remaining true to their own herd; using the hand more and more
as a weapon and a tool, becoming more and more erect;
expressing objects by conventional sounds or words; delighting
more and more to interchange ideas; sharpening stones and
pointing sticks, heading javelins with bone and horn, inventing
snares and traps; then fire was discovered, and, by a series of
accidents, its various uses were revealed; the arts of
agriculture, domestication, and river navigation were acquired:
the tribes migrating from the forests were scattered over the
world; their canoes of hollow trees skimmed the tepid waters of
the Indian Ocean; their coracles of skin dashed through the icy
waves of the Arctic seas; in valleys between mountains, or in
fertile river plains, they nurtured seed-bearing grasses into
grain; over pastoral mountains, or sandy deserts, or broad
grassy steppes, they wandered with their flocks and herds;
these shepherd tribes poured down on the plains, subdued the
inhabitants and reduced them to serfdom; thus the nation was
established, and consisted at first of two great classes — the
rulers and the ruled.
The period thus rapidly described, which begins with the animal
globules preying on the plant globules in the primeval sea, and
which ends with the conquest by the carnivorous shepherds of
the vegetable eaters in the river plains, may be termed the
Period of War. Throughout that period mind was developed by
necessity. The lower animals merely strive to live, to procure
females, and to rear their young. It is so ordered by Nature,
that by so striving to live they develop their physical
structure; they obtain faint glimmerings of reason; they think
and deliberate, they sympathise and love; they become Man. In
the same way the primeval men have no other object than to keep
the clan alive. It is so ordered by Nature, that, in striving
to preserve the existence of the clan, they not only acquire
the arts of agriculture, domestication, and navigation; they
not only discover fire, and its uses in cooking, in war, and in
metallurgy; they not only detect the hidden properties of
plants, and apply them to save their own lives from disease,
and to destroy their enemies in battle; they not only learn to
manipulate Nature, and to distribute water by machinery; but
they also, by means of the long life-battle, are developed into
moral beings: they live according to the Golden Rule, in order
that they may exist, or, in other words, they do exist because
they live according to the Golden Rule. They have within them
innate affections, which are as truly weapons as the tiger’s
teeth and the serpent’s fang; which belong, therefore, to the
Period of War.
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