According to the theory of evolution, the ancestor of the most primitive type of man was the most developed type of animal. If we compare primitive man with the most developed animal, we find that there is an essential and inseparable difference. On one side, we see a flock of animals searching for food and struggling to survive; on the other side, we see primitive man, frightened and confused by his strange taboos and beliefs, or absorbed in his abstruse mysteries and symbols. The difference between these two beings cannot be only in their different stages of development.
We say man has developed, but that is true only for his mortal, outer history. Man was also created. At once, he has become aware that not only is he not animal, but that the meaning of his life is to be found in the negation of the animal inside himself. If man is a child of nature, how is it possible that he started to appose it? If we imagine developing man’s intelligence to the highest degree, we find that his needs will only increase in number as well as in kind; none of this will disappear – only the way he satisfies them will become more intelligent and better organized. The idea to sacrifice himself for the sake of others or to reject any of his wishes or to reduce the intensity of his own physical pleasure will never come from his brain.
The principle of animal existence is utility and efficiency. This is not the case with man, at least with his specific human quality. Animal instincts are the best examples of the principle of efficiency and usefulness. Animals have a good sense of time – better than man’s. For example, starlings stop eating an hour before sunset. Bees organize their workday with a surprising degree of exactness. Most flowers give their nectar only a few hours daily and only at exact times. Bees collect the nectar at the most favorable time and from the best places. For their direction, bees use different signs on the ground and the position of the sun. When it is cloudy, they orient themselves with the help of polarized lights, and so forth. These abilities are of this world. They help and enable the species to survive.
On the contrary, moral principles – both in primitive and in civilized society – reduce man’s efficiency. Given two species with the same intelligence, the one with moral principles would soon be exterminated. Man has compensated for this deficiency of power which is a result of his ethics with his superior intelligence and other parallel abilities.
Intelligence, however, has a zoological and not a human origin. “Let us open a collection of anecdotes about the animal intelligence. Beside many behaviors which could be explained as imitation or as automatic association of picture, we can see as well many which we will not hesitate to admit as intelligent. In this, we may especially take into consideration, all those in which a certain manufacturing idea is manifested, whether the animal makes a rough tool or uses an object made by man…”[i]
A chimpanzee will use a stick to reach a banana, a bear a stone to get at its prey, and so forth. Much material has been collected on how bees, geese, and apes receive and transmit different information through conversation or pantomime. Dr. Bler, director of the New York Zoo, has collected many interesting observations on the intelligence of animals and their ability to use objects near them. His general conclusion was that all animals are capable of thinking.
Language also belongs to the natural and zoological rather than the spiritual side of man. We find a rudimentary form of language with animals. Linguistics – contrary to art – can be analyzed scientifically and even by strict mathematical methods. This given it the characteristics of science, and the subjects of science can be something external only.[ii]
There is an analogy between intelligence and nature and between intelligence and language. As intelligence and matter helped to “create each other” so, in a similar way, did intelligence and language. Language is “the hand of the brain” and, as Bergson states, “the function of the brain is in limiting out spiritual life to what is useful for us in practice.”[iii]
Generally speaking, there is nothing in man that does not also exist in higher stages of animals, vertebrates, and insects. There is consciousness, intelligence, one or more means of communication, the desire to satisfy needs and join in societies, and some form of economy. Looking from this side, man may appear to have something in common with the animal world. However, there is nothing in the animal kingdom which resembles – even in a rudimentary form – religion, magic, drama, taboo, art, moral prohibitions, and so forth, with which the life of prehistoric as well as civilized man is surrounded. The evolution of animals may appear to be logical, gradual, and easily understood, compared to the evolution of primitive man, who is possessed by strange taboos and beliefs. When an animal goes hunting, it behaves very logically and rationally. No animal will let an opportunity pass. There is no superstition or the like here. Bees treat their useless members in a most cruel way: they are simply thrown out of the beehive. Bees are the best example of a well-organized social life which completely lacks what we usually call humanism: protection of the weak and disabled, the right to life, appreciation, recognition, and so forth.
For animals, things are what they seem to be. For man, things have also an imaginary meaning which is sometimes more important for him than the real one. It is easy to understand the logic of an animal struggling to survive. What about primitive man? Before they went hunting, the primitive hunters and often their families too had to submit themselves to different taboos, fastings, prayers; to perform special dances; to have certain kinds of dreams; to observe special signs. When the game was within sight, other rituals had to be performed. Even the women at home were subject to many taboos. If they broke them, the hunting expedition might not be successful and the lives of their husbands endangered…” We know that primitive men depicted the animals they hoped to kill before they set out hunting. They were convinced that this would have a decisive influence on their hunting success (so-called “hunting magic”). Young men were accepted among the hunters after complicated ceremonies. Hubert and Mauss describe these ceremonies as consisting of three phases: the ritual of acceptance. While man painted or prayed, animals went about their task “logically”; they explored the ground, listened carefully, and followed their prey from behind.
As such, the animal was an excellent hunter. Primitive man was the same, but he was at the same time the tireless creator and “producer” of cults, myths, superstitions, dances, and idols. Man always looked for another word – authentic or imaginary. This is not a difference in developmental stages but in essence.
One of the strongest things in development of human society is that the idea of sowing was associated with the idea of human sacrifice. H.G. Wells writes in his Short History of the World: “ It was entanglement, we must remember, in the childish, dreaming mythmaking primitive mind; no reasoned process will explain it. But in the world of 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, it would seem that whenever seedtime came around to the Neolithic peoples, there was a human sacrifice. And it was not the sacrifice of any mean or outcast person; it was usually of a chosen youth or maiden, a youth more often, who was treated with profound deference and even worship…” “These communities displayed a great development of human sacrifice about the process of seed-time and harvest…” or a little further in the same book: “The Mexican (Aztec) civilization in particular ran in blood: it offered thousands of human victims yearly. The cutting open of living victims, the tearing out of the still-beating heart, was an act that dominated the minds and lives of these strange priesthoods. Public life, national festivities – all turned on this horrible act.”[iv]
In his book, Salammbo, Gustava Flaubert describes how the Carthaginians, when they prayed for rain, threw their own children into the glowing mouth of their god Moloch. On the basis of these horrible examples, it would be wrong to conclude that men were beasts. We find nothing similar among animals. It may sound like a paradox, but the given examples are typically human behavior. It has to do with man’s suffering and wandering, both of which are repeating themselves even today in a drama of mankind where nations and individuals act unreasonably, led not by their instincts but by authentic human prejudices and errors.
Sacrifice has existed in all religions without exception. The nature of sacrifice has remained unexplained and even absurd. Sacrifice is a fact of another order, of another world. In primitive religions, sacrifice sometimes assumes terrible forms. As such, sacrifice represents a powerful, tangible, and painfully visible borderline between the alleged zoological, and the human era. It represents the appearance of a principle that is contrary to the principle of interest, benefits, and needs. Interest is zoological; sacrifice is human. Interest is one of the basic concepts in politics or political economy; sacrifice is one of the basic principles of religion and ethics.
Primitive man’s irrational way of thinking sometimes took on unbelievable forms: “One of the strange things that appeared in the later Paleolithic and Neolithic ages was the self-mangling of the body. People began to mutilate their own bodies, cutting off noses, ears, fingers and the like, and giving to theses acts different superstitious meanings. … No animal does the like,” concludes Wells. Compare this with the fox which, when caught in a fox trap, bites off his leg. This is an act of reason. The irrational self-mutilation of primitive man is completely extraneous to animals.[v]
From this, we might wrongly conclude that this is an anomaly in evolution. It seems that evolution has regressed and that appearance of an animal with idealistic prejudices prevents further development.
This phenomenon of vacillation at the very top of evolution which makes animal look more advanced than humans, we call “the primitive man’s complex.” Even if this may sound strange, this complex is the expression of that new quality which is typically human and which is the source of all religions, poetry, and art. The phenomenon is important because it points out, in its own way, the originality of man’s appearance and many of the paradoxes which are connected with it.
These facts could easily lead us to conclude that animals have hade more favorable changes in their ascent up the evolutionary ladder while primitive man, starting at the sky and entangled in moral obligations, had all the preconditions needed to be trampled underfoot. This is almost unavoidable impression of the superiority of the zoological over the human during the dawn of the human era will be repeated later in the call to destroy idealism for the sake of progress.
During this long period of man’s emancipation from the animal world, it is alleged that the external differences (walking erect and the development of speech, and intelligence) were for a long time very small and hardly noticeable. It is not clear whether a being who resembled a man as well as an ape and used a stick to prolong his arm to reach food, or uttered inarticulate sounds to communicate with his fellows, was a man or an ape. The presence of any kind of cult or taboo will, however, disperse any doubts. Animals waited to become humans until the point in time where they began to pray. Whatever the merits of such a view, the decisive difference between man and animal is neither a physical nor an intellectual one. It is above all a spiritual one, manifesting itself in the presence of some religious, ethical, and aesthetical conscience. From this standpoint, the appearance of man should not be acknowledged as the time when he started to walk upright or from the development of his hands, speech, or intelligence, as science teaches us, but from the appearance of the first taboo cult. Ironically, primitive man, who 15,000 years ago enjoyed looking at flowers and the profiles of animals and then painted them on the walls of his cave, was – from this point of view – nearer to true man than the modern epicure who lives only to satisfy his physical pleasure and daily thinks of new ones, or the average modern town dweller who lives isolated in his concrete cage deprived of all elementary aesthetical feelings and sensations.
In his book The First Law, Atkinson writes that different kinds of prohibitions existed among primitive people everywhere in the world. The constant need for “purification from evil” and the constant dwelling on things forbidden to the touch or even to the sight, is found everywhere and this has enabled us to acquire some knowledge about the existence of primitive being. The other universal idea which dominated the minds of primitive men was the idea of banishment.
In this way, a whole system of prohibitions was created which covered different aspects of primitive life. These were later called taboos. The taboo was originally a prohibition of ethical character among early mankind.
Man does not behave as a child of nature but rather as a stranger in it. His basic feeling is fear but not the biological fear that animals feel. It is spiritual, cosmic, and primeval fear bound to the secrets and riddles of human existence. Markin Heidegger called it the “eternal and timeless determinant of human existence.” This is a fear mingled with curiosity, astonishment, admiration, disaffection – the feelings that perhaps lie at the basis of all our culture and art.
Only this position of primitive man in the world could explain the appearance of different prohibitions and concepts of “impurity,” “sublimity,” “damnation,” “holiness,” and so forth. If we were children of this world, nothing would seem either impure or holy to us. These concepts are contradictory to the world we know. They are evidence of our other origin, of which we cannot have any memory. Our inadequate reaction to this world, as expressed by religion and art, is the negation of the scientific concept of man. Why did he always express his fear and disappointments through religion? Why and from what did he seek salvation? This side of man we are talking about (good, evil, the feeling of wretchedness, the permanent dilemma between interest and conscience, the question of our existence, and so forth) remains without a rational explanation. Obviously, man did not react to the world around him in Darwinian way.
Not even in the most developed species of animals can we find any traces of cults or prohibitions. Wherever man has appeared, religion and art have followed. Science, on the other hand, is relatively new. Man, religion, and art were always bound together. Not enough attention has been devoted to this phenomenon which might contain the answer to some decisive questions of human existence.
[i] Henry Bergson: Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: The Modern Library, 1944).
[ii] An indication of this might be the fact that in some religions abstention from speech has the meaning of fasting, for example, the “vow of silence” known in some Christian orders.
[iii] Bergson: Creative Evolution.
[iv] H. G. Wells: Short History of the World, Rev. ed. (New York, Pelican Books, 1946) p. 56.
[v] The following differences are of a similar instance: an animal is dangerous when it is hungry or in danger. Man is dangerous when fed and powerful. Much more crimes have been committed out of satiety and wantonness than out of poverty.
