Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/112

102 the proportions are outrageously violated. This is not an exception, for the examination of all the drawings of this kind shows that skillful as were the men of those times in their drawings of animals, particularly of those which were important to them, they were bad delineators of the human figure. "I do not know," says Broca, "what prevented them from reaching perfection on this point, but the fact is indisputable and is certainly characteristic." Another no less characteristic point is the entire absence of designs representing plants. No design of a tree has been found, or of a bush or a flower, unless we regard as a flower the "three little rosettes" engraved on a handle of reindeer-horn, which some authors actually regard as a composite flower. This exclusive taste of the artists of the caves is evidently not accidental, for chance explains nothing; and we can not assume, with Carl Vogt, that primitive drawing originated in a general tendency of man toward imitation of living Nature. "We believe that the object of these artistic productions was of a different character, and that they were intended, not for ornamentation of objects or for imitation pure and simple of Nature, but for the production of an instrument to be used in the struggle against Nature. We shall endeavor to substantiate this proposition in what follows, and shall have occasion to say something on the origin of painting in general.

We remark, first, that there is nothing to prove that the man of that time was intellectually superior to existing savages; and, if we observe these, we shall find that their drawings have usually a totally different significance from that which art has among civilized peoples; and that they have nothing in common with ornamentation and æsthetics in general. Indeed, numerous facts go to show that human thought, in the lower degrees of its development, distinguishes but poorly between subjective representations and objective reality, and that both give rise to the same ideas. For example, a savage seeing one of his family in a dream, can not imagine that the image is independent of the organic substance of the person in question; and he will see the same relation between the two as between a body and its image reflected by a surface of water. Thus the Basutos believe that if the shadow of a man is projected upon the water, the crocodiles will be able to seize the man himself. A like identification may be pushed to the point that tribes are known which use the same word for the soul, the image, and the shadow.

It is necessary to take this fact into consideration in order to appreciate the real sense of the primitive design, and to re-establish the conditions under which it originated. If we suppose a material relation between the image and the object as well as between the shadow and the object, it becomes evident that the