Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/613

Rh to the notion I am trying to present, that society has been the preserver of man in the enjoyment of his higher nature, and not the creator of the higher nature. In other words, that when he first exists he is not a degraded savage or transmuted ape, and unquestionably we do not find him to be ape or savage in any remains in writing or building that show his presence in the dawn of history.

Hesiod's lamenting his birth in the Age of Iron and describing in terms of deep enthusiasm the golden, offers two points for consideration. The evil time he lived in was one of economic difficulty; the other age was the tradition of a period free from social problems. The fact of a tradition is evidence for all it carries or for a greater or less amount of it according to the value of the subject and the care taken in the delivery of it from generation to generation. Going up to the Golden Age from that of Iron we enter the penumbral Heroic Age which, as has been suggested, was a partial revival of the virtues of the golden one. We pass through the luminous darkness of that time into the Bronze Age, a period of fierce, strong men who remind one of the "mighty hunter" who first established military despotism. But before this dark Age of Bronze, when chiefs and rulers fought and robbed like mediaeval barons twenty-five centuries later, there was the Age of Silver when men lived happily and enjoyed length of days, but this age, toward its close, was setting in the spirit of impiety and war in which the Bronze Age opened. The Golden Age he describes as one when men lived as the gods, with no sickness or sorrow or decay until death came like sleep. This evidence of a high moral, social and physical nature cannot be obscured. It is there, it speaks with no uncertain sound, it is not like the footprint of a savage in a river bed, the finding of an arrowhead on the gravel beneath a bog, of a stone hatchet in a cave, or of the bones of some extinct species of deer mingled with those of some long-forgotten hunter.

What Hesiod's notion was concerning the virtues of the