Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/626

610 faculties of the civilized man as inferior to those of the savage. Experience has not confirmed this. What certain organs have lost in one direction, they have got back in another. If our senses have a narrow range, they have gained in firmness of perception. The senses of touch and of taste are in the civilized man extremely subtile. Our power of vision has not a very great range, but we can peruse for many hours together the printed page, a thing which the eye of the savage could never do. If our ear cannot detect the stealthy approach of a wild beast, it can appreciate the nicest shades of difference in musical notes. We cannot climb trees, but a clerk seated at his desk does more work with his hand in one day than a savage in a twelvemonth. Finally, the muscular force of certain Indian tribes has been proved by the dynamometer to be very considerably less than that of English and French sailors.

There are faculties which appear to arise full grown, so to speak, when civilization has reached a certain stage, and which do not exist, even in germ, among savages. Such are the faculties of literary and artistic taste. The savage has no leisure for the pleasures of the imagination. A Molière, a Rembrandt, or a Mozart, would have to expend all his energy under such circumstances in procuring the bare necessaries of life. The fine arts are subordinated to the development of the other elements of civilization, but they may also be regarded as the best expression and the most exact measure of the state of a society. A few examples will explain our meaning:

How has architecture advanced? Men at first dwelt in hollow trees, in caves, or beneath any chance shelter. Next, they constructed rude houses of stones, branches, or sods. It was only at a later period that they could think of symmetry or regularity. Then came all kinds of ornamentation. At last they came to erect structures without direct utility, for aesthetic purposes merely, such as columns, porticoes, and the like. And so each increase of wealth in a society is followed by a corresponding progress in arts which are rather pleasing than useful. The same holds with respect to literature. At first, men would interchange only thoughts of immediate utility. Next they came imperceptibly to adorn their speech, and then arose history, religion, morality, philosophy, adorned with all the charms of versification, music, and poesy. It was only at a later period that poetry appeared in its own individual character, on the stage, or in the story, as the form in which pure fiction was to be cast, having as its aim to please the imagination, without reference to history, religion, or utility. In a word, art and poetry spring from a superabundance of intellectual energy, and from an exuberance of ideal force.

The culture of science, as viewed with reference to civilization, is the same thing as the development of the understanding. At first view, we might suppose that scientific truths, when once discovered, constitute a sort of capital, which may be stored up. But this is not