Although, as before mentioned, Astronomy was cultivated with considerable success both in Egypt and Chaldæa, among the more contemplative Turanians, nothing can be more unsatisfactory than the references to celestial events, either in the Bible or the Koran, both betraying an entire ignorance of even the elements of astronomical science; and we have no proof that the Phœnicians were at all wiser than their neighbours in this respect.
The Semitic races seem always to have been of too poetical a temperament to excel in mathematics or the mechanical sciences. If there is one branch of scientific knowledge which they may be suspected of having cultivated with success, it is the group of natural sciences. A love of nature seems always to have prevailed with them, and they may have known “the trees, from the cedar which is in Lebanon to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall, and the names of all the beasts, and the fowls, and the creeping things, and the fishes;” but beyond this we know of nothing that can be dignified by the name of science among the Semitic races. They more than made up however for their deficient knowledge of the exact sciences by the depth of their insight into the springs of human action, and the sagacity of their proverbial philosophy; and, more than even this, by that wonderful system of Theology before which all the Aryan races of the world and many of the Turanian bow at the present hour, and acknowledge it the basis of their faith and the source of all their religious aspirations.
It is extremely difficult to write anything very precise or very satisfactory regarding the Celtic races, for the simple reason that, within the limits of our historic knowledge, they never lived sufficiently long apart from other races to develop a distinct form of nationality, or to create either a literature or a polity by which they could be certainly recognised. In this respect they form the most marked contrast with the Semitic races. Instead of wrapping themselves up within the bounds of the most narrow exclusiveness, the Celt everywhere mixed freely with the people among whom he settled, and adopted their manners and customs with a carelessness that is startling; while at the same time he retained the principal characteristics of his race through every change of circumstance and clime.
Almost the only thing that can be predicated of them with certainty is, that they were either the last wave of the Turanians, or, if another nomenclature is preferred, the first wave of the Aryans, who, migrating westward from their parent seat in Asia, displaced the original and more purely Turanian tribes who occupied Europe before the dawn of history. But, in doing this, they seem to have mixed themselves so completely with the races they were supplanting, that it is extremely difficult to say now where one begins or where the other ends.
We find their remains in Asia Minor, whence Ethnologists fancy that they can trace a southern migration along the northern coast of Africa, across the Straits of Gibraltar, into Spain, and thence to Ireland. A more certain and more important migration, however, crossed the Bosphorus, and following the valley of the Danube, threw one branch into Italy, where they penetrated as far south as Rome; while the main body settled in and occupied Gaul and Belgium, whence they peopled Britain, and may have met the southern colonists in the Celtic Island of the west. From this they are now migrating, still following the course of the sun, to carry to the New World the same brilliant thoughtlessness which has so thoroughly leavened all those parts of the Old in which they have settled, and which so sorely puzzles the purer but more matter-of-fact Aryan tribes with which they have come in contact.
It may appear like a hard saying, but it seems nevertheless to be true, to assert that no purely Celtic race ever rose to a perfect conception of the unity of the Godhead. It may be that they only borrowed this from the Turanians who preceded them; but whether imitative or innate, their Theology admits of Kings and Queens of Heaven who were mortals on earth. They possess hosts of saints and angels, and a whole hierarchy of heavenly powers of various degrees, to whom the Celt turns with as confiding hope and as earnest prayer as ever Turanian did to the gods of his Pantheon. If he does not reverence the bodies of the departed as the Egyptian or Chinese, he at least adopts the Buddhist veneration for relics, and attaches far more importance to funereal rites than was ever done by any tribe of Aryans.
The Celt is as completely the slave of a casteless priesthood as ever Turanian Buddhist was, and loves to separate it from the rest of mankind, as representing on earth the hierarchy in heaven, to which, according to the Celtic creed, all may hope to succeed by practice of their peculiar virtues.
To this may be added, that his temples are as splendid, his ceremonials as gorgeous, and the formula as unmeaning as any that ever graced the banks of the Nile, or astonished the wanderer in the valleys of Thibet or on the shores of the Eastern Ocean.
It is still more difficult to speak of the Celtic form of government, as no kingdom of this people ever existed by itself for any length of time; and none, indeed, it may be suspected, could long hold together. It may, however, be safely asserted, that no republican forms are possible with a Celtic people, and no municipal institutions ever flourished among them. The only form, therefore, we know of as peculiarly theirs, is despotism; not necessarily personal, but rendered systematic by centralised bureaucratic organisations, and tempered by laws in those States which have reached any degree of stability or civilisation.
Nothing but a strong centralised despotism can long co-exist with a people too impatient to submit to the sacrifices and self-denial inherent in all attempts at self-government, and too excitable to be controlled, except by the will of the strongest, though it may also be the least scrupulous among them.
When in small bodies they are always governed by a chief, generally hereditary, but always absolute; who is looked up to with awe, and obeyed with a reverence that is unintelligible to the more independent races of mankind.
With such institutions, of course a real aristocracy is impossible; and the restraints of caste must always have been felt to be intolerable. “La carrière ouverte aux talens” is their boast; though not to the same extent as with the Turanians; and the selfish gratification of individual ambition is consequently always preferred with them to the more sober benefit of the general advancement of the community.
If the Celts never were either polygamic or polyandric, they certainly always retained very lax ideas with regard to the marriage-vow, and never looked on woman’s mission as anything higher than to minister to their sensual gratification. With them the woman that fulfils this quality best always commands their admiration most. Beauty can do no wrong—but without beauty woman can hardly rise above the level of the common herd.
The ruling passion in the mind of the Celt is war. Not like the exclusive, intolerant Semite, a war of extermination or of proselytism, but war from pure “gaieté de cœur” and love of glory. No Celt fears to die if his death can gain fame or add to the stock of his country’s glory; nor in a private fight does he fear death or feel the pain of a broken head, if he has had a chance of shooting through the heart or cracking the skull of his best friend at the same time. The Celt’s love of excitement leads him frequently into excesses, and to a disregard of truth and the virtues belonging to daily life, which are what really dignify mankind; but his love of glory and of his country often go far to redeem these deficiencies, and spread a halo over even his worst faults, which renders it frequently difficult to blame what we feel in soberness we ought to condemn.
If love and war are the parents of song, the bard and the troubadour ought to have left us a legacy of verse that would have filled the libraries of Europe; and so they probably would had not the original Celt been too illiterate to care to record the expressions of his feelings. As it is, nine-tenths of the lyric literature of Europe is of Celtic origin. The Epos and the Drama may belong to the Aryan; but in the art of wedding music to immortal verse, and pouring forth a passionate utterance in a few but beautiful words, the Celtic is only equalled by the Semitic race.
Their remaining literature is of such modern growth, and was so specially copied from what had preceded it, or so influenced by the contemporary effusions of other people, that it is impossible accurately to discriminate what is due to race and what to circumstances. All that can safely be said is, that Celtic literature is always more epigrammatic, more brilliant, and more daring than that of the sober Aryan; but its coruscations neither light to so great a depth, nor last so long as less dazzling productions might do. They may be the most brilliant, but they certainly do not belong to the highest class of literary effort; nor is their effect on the destiny of man likely to be so permanent.
The true glory of the Celt in Europe is his artistic eminence. It is perhaps not too much to assert that without his intervention we should not have possessed in modern times a church worthy of admiration, or a picture or a statue we could look at without shame.
In their arts, too,—either from their higher status, or from their admixture with Aryans,—we escape the instinctive fixity which makes the arts of the pure Turanian as unprogressive as the works of birds or of beavers. Restless intellectual progress characterises everything they perform; and had their arts not been nipped in the bud by circumstances over which they had no control, we might have seen something that would have shamed even Greece and wholly eclipsed the arts of Rome.
They have not, it is true, that instinctive knowledge of colour which distinguishes the Turanian, nor have they been able to give to music that intellectual culture which has been elaborated by the Aryans: but in the middle path between the two they excel both. They are far better musicians than the former, and far better colourists than the last-named races; but in modern Europe Architecture is practically their own. Where their influence was strongest, there Architecture was most perfect; as they decayed, or as the Aryan influence prevailed, the art first languished, and then died.
Their quasi-Turanian theology required Temples almost as grand as those of the Copts or Tamuls; and, like them, they sought to honour those who had been mortals by splendour which mortals are assumed to be pleased with; and the pomp of their worship always surpassed that with which they honoured their Kings. Even more remarkable than this is the fact that they could and did build Tombs such as a Turanian might have envied, not for their size but for their art, and even now can adorn their cemeteries with monuments which are not ridiculous.
When a people are so mixed up with other races as the Celts are in Europe,—frequently so fused as to be undistinguishable,—it is almost impossible to speak with precision with regard either to their arts or influence. It must in consequence be safer to assert that where no Celtic blood existed there no real art is found; though it is perhaps equally true to assert that not only Architecture, but Painting and Sculpture, have been patronised, and have flourished in the exact ratio in which Celtic blood is found prevailing in any people in Europe; and has died out as Aryan influence prevails, in spite of their methodical efforts to indoctrinate themselves with what must be the spontaneous impulse of genius, if it is to be of any value.
Of their sciences we know nothing till they were so steeped in the civilisation of older races that originality was hopeless. Still, in the stages through which the intellect of Europe has yet passed, they have played their part with brilliancy. But now that knowledge is assuming a higher and more prosaic phase, it is doubtful whether the deductive brilliancy of the Celtic mind can avail anything against the inductive sobriety of the Aryan. So long as metaphysics were science, and science was theory, the peculiar form of the Celtic mind was singularly well adapted to see through sophistry and to guess the direction in which truth might lie. But now that we have only to question Nature, to classify her answers, and patiently to record results, its mission seems to have passed away. Truth in all its majesty, and Nature in all her greatness, must now take the place of speculation, with its cleverness, and man’s ideas of what might or should be, must be supplanted by the knowledge of God’s works as they exist and the contemplation of the eternal grandeur of the universe which we see around us.
Though these are the highest, they are at the same time the most sober functions of the human mind; and while conferring the greatest and most lasting benefit, not only on the individual who practises them, but also on the human race, they are neither calculated to gratify personal vanity, nor to reward individual ambition.
Such pursuits are not, therefore, of a nature to attract or interest the Celtic races, but must be left to those who are content to sink their personality in seeking the advantage of the common weal.
According to their own chronology, it seems to have been about the year 3101 B.C. that the Aryans crossed the Indus and settled themselves in the country between that river and the Jumna, since known among themselves as Arya Varta, or the Country of the Just, for all succeeding ages.
More than a thousand years afterwards we find them, in the age of the Ramayana, occupying all the country north of the Vindya range, and attempting the conquest of the southern country,—then, as now, occupied by Turanians,—and penetrating as far as Ceylon.
Eight hundred years later we see them in the Mahabharata, having lost much of their purity of blood, and adopting many of the customs and much of the faith of the people they were settled amongst; and three centuries before Christ we find they had so far degenerated as to accept, almost without a struggle, the religion of Buddha; which, though no doubt a reform, and an important one, on the Anthropic doctrines of the pure Turanians, was still essentially a faith of a Turanian people; congenial to them, and to them only.
Ten centuries after Christ, when the Moslems came in contact with India, the Aryan was a myth. The religion of the earlier people was everywhere supreme, and with only a nominal thread of Aryanism running through the whole, just sufficient to bear testimony to the prior existence of a purer faith, but not sufficient to leaven the mass to any appreciable extent.
The fate of the western Aryans differed essentially from that of those who wandered eastward. Theoretically we ought to assume, from their less complex language and less pure faith, that they were an earlier offshoot; but it may be that in the forests of Europe they lost for a while the civilised forms which the happier climate of Arya Varta enabled the others to retain; or it may be that the contact with the more nearly equal Celtic races had mixed the language and the faith of the western races, before they had the opportunity or the leisure to record the knowledge they brought with them.
Be this as it may, they first appear prominently in the western world in Greece, where, by a fortunate union with the Pelasgi, a people apparently of Turanian race, they produced a civilisation not purely Aryan, and somewhat evanescent in its character, but more brilliant, while it lasted, than anything the world had seen before, and in certain respects more beautiful than anything that has illumined it since their time.
They next sprang forth in Rome, mixed with the Turanian Etruscans and the powerful Celtic tribes of Italy; and lastly in Northern Europe, where they are now working out their destiny, but to what issue the future only can declare.
The essential difference between the eastern and western migration is this—that in India the Aryans have sunk gradually into the arms of a Turanian people till they have lost their identity, and with it all that ennobled them when they went there, or could enable them now to influence the world again.
In Europe they found the country cleared of Turanians by the earlier Celts; and mingling their blood with these more nearly allied races, they have raised themselves to a position half way between the two. Where they found the country unoccupied they have remained so pure that, as their number multiplies, they may perhaps regain something of the position they had temporarily abandoned, and something of that science which, it may be fancied, mankind only knew in their primeval seats.
What then was the creed of the primitive Aryans? So far as we can now see, it was the belief in one great ineffable God,—so great that no human intellect could measure His greatness,—so wonderful that no human language could express His qualities,—pervading everything that was made,—ruling all created things,—a spirit, around, beyond the universe, and within every individual particle of it. A creed so ethereal could not long remain the faith of the multitude, and we early find fire,—the most ethereal of the elements,—looked to as an emblem of the Deity. The heavens too received a name, and became an entity:—so did our mother earth. To these succeeded the sun, the stars, the elements,—but never among the pure Aryans as gods, or as influencing the destiny of man, but as manifestations of His power, and reverenced because they were visible manifestations of a Being too abstract for an ordinary mind to grasp. Below this the Aryans never seem to have sunk.
With a faith so elevated of course no temple could be wanted; no human ceremonial could be supposed capable of doing honour to a Deity so conceived; nor any sacrifice acceptable to Him to whom all things belonged. With the Aryans worship was a purely domestic institution; prayer the solitary act of each individual man, standing alone in the presence of an omniscient Deity. All that was required was that man should acknowledge the greatness of God, and his own comparative insignificance; should express his absolute trust and faith in the beneficence and justice of his God, and a hope that he might be enabled to live so pure, and so free from sin, as to deserve such happiness as this world can afford, and be enabled to do as much good to others as it is vouchsafed to man to perform.
A few insignificant formulæ served to mark the modes in which these subjects should recur. The recitation of a time-honoured hymn refreshed the attention of the worshipper, and the reading of a few sacred texts recalled the duties it was expected he should perform. With these simple ceremonies the worship of the Aryans seems to have begun and ended.
Even in later times, when their blood has become less pure, and their feelings were influenced by association with those among whom they resided, the religion of the Aryans always retained its intellectual character. No dogma was ever admitted that would not bear the test of reason, and no article of faith was ever assented to which seemed to militate against the supremacy of intellect over all feelings and passions. In all their wanderings they were always prepared to admit the immeasurable greatness of the one incorporeal Deity, and the impossibility of the human intellect approaching or forming any adequate conception of His majesty.
When they abandoned the domestic form of worship, they adopted the congregational, and then not so much with the idea that it was pleasing to God, as in order to remind each other of their duties, to regulate and govern the spiritual wants of the community, and to inculcate piety towards God and charity towards each other.
It need hardly be added that superstition is impossible with minds so constituted, and that science must always be the surest and the best ally of a religion so pure and exalted, which is based on a knowledge of God’s works, a consequent appreciation of their greatness, and an ardent aspiration towards that power and goodness which the finite intellect of man can never hope to reach.
The most marked characteristic of the Aryans is their innate passion for self-government. If not absolutely republican, the tendency of all their institutions, at all times, has been towards that form, and in almost the exact ratio to the purity of the blood do they adopt this form of autocracy. If kingly power was ever introduced among them, it was always in the form of a limited monarchy; never the uncontrolled despotism of the other races; and every conceivable check was devised to prevent encroachments of the crown, even if such were possible among a people so organised as the Aryans always have been.
With them every town was a municipality, every village a little republic, and every trade a separate self-governing guild. Many of these institutions have died out, or else fallen into neglect, in those communities where equal rights and absolute laws have rendered each individual a king in his own person, and every family a republic in itself.
The village system which the Aryans introduced into India is still the most remarkable of its institutions. These little republican organisms have survived the revolutions of fifty centuries. Neither the devastations of war nor the indolence of peace seems to have affected them. Under Brahmin, Buddhist, or Moslem, they remain the same unchanged and unchangeable institutions, and neither despotism nor anarchy has been able to alter them. They alone have saved India from sinking into a state of savage imbecility, under the various hordes of conquerors who have at times overrun her; and they, with the Vedas and the laws afterwards embodied by Menu, alone remain as records of the old Aryan possessors of the Indian peninsula.
Municipalities, which are merely an enlargement of the Indian village system, exist wherever the Romans were settled, or where the Aryan races exist in Europe; and though guilds are fast losing their significance, it was the Teutonic guilds that alone checked and ultimately supplanted the feudal despotisms of the Celts.
Caste is another institution of these races, which has always more or less influenced all their actions. Where their blood has become so impure as it is in India, caste has degenerated into an abuse; but where it is a living institution, it is perhaps as conducive to the proper regulation of society as any with which we are acquainted. The one thing over which no man can have any control is the accident of his birth; but it is an immense gain to him that he should be satisfied with the station in which he finds himself, and content to do his duty in the sphere in which he was born. Caste, properly understood, never interferes with the accumulation of wealth or power within the limits of the class, and only recognises the inevitable accident of birth: while the fear of losing caste is one of the most salutary checks which has been devised to restrain men from acts unworthy of their social position. It is an enormous gain to society that each man should know his station and be prepared to perform the duties belonging to it, without the restless craving of a selfish ambition that would sacrifice everything for the sake of the personal aggrandisement of the individual. It is far better to acknowledge that there is no sphere in life in which man may not become as like unto the gods as in any other sphere; and it is everywhere better to respect the public good rather than to seek to gratify personal ambition.
The populations of modern Europe have become so mixed that neither caste nor any other Aryan institution now exists in its pristine purity; but in the ratio in which a people is Aryan do they possess an aristocracy and municipal institutions; and, what is almost of more importance, in that ratio are the people prepared to respect the gradations of caste in society, and to sacrifice their individual ambition to the less brilliant task of doing all the good that is possible in the spheres in which they have been placed.
It is true, and so has been found, that an uncontrolled despotism is a sharper, a quicker, and a better tool for warlike purposes, or where national vanity is to be gratified by conquest or the display of power; but the complicated, and it may be clumsy, institutions of the Aryans, are far more lasting and more conducive to individual self-respect, and far more likely to add to the sum of human happiness, and tend more clearly to the real greatness and moral elevation of mankind, than any human institution we are yet acquainted with.
So far as our experience now goes, the division of human society into classes or castes is not only the most natural concomitant of the division of labour, but is also the most beneficent of the institutions of man; while the organisation of a nation into self-governing municipalities is not only singularly conducive to individual well-being, but renders it practically indestructible by conquest, and even imperishable through lapse of time. These two are the most essentially characteristic institutions of the Aryans.
In morals the Aryans were always monogamic, and with them alone does woman always assume a perfect equality of position: mistress of her own actions till marriage; when married, in theory at least, the equal sharer in the property and in the duties of the household. Were it possible to carry out these doctrines absolutely in practice, they would probably be more conducive to human happiness than any of those enumerated above; but even a tendency towards them is an enormous gain.
Their institutions for self-government, enumerated above, have probably done more to elevate the Aryan race than can well be appreciated. When every man takes, or may take, his share in governing the commonwealth—when every man must govern himself, and respect the independence of his neighbour—men cease to be tools, and become independent reasoning beings. They are taught self-respect, and with this comes love of truth—of those qualities which command the respect of their fellow-men; and they are likewise taught that control of their passions which renders them averse to war; while the more sober occupations of life prevent the necessity of their seeking, in the wildness of excitement, that relief from monotony which so frequently drives other races into those excesses the world has had so often to deplore. The existence of caste, even in its most modified form, prevents individual ambition from having that unlimited career which among other races has so often sacrificed the public weal to the ambition of an individual.
The Aryan races employed an alphabet at so early a period of their history that we cannot now tell when or how it was introduced among them; and it was, even when we first become acquainted with it, a far more perfect alphabet than that of the Semitic races, though apparently formed on its basis. Nothing in it was dependent on memory. It possessed vowels, and all that was necessary to enunciate sounds with perfect and absolute precision. In consequence of this, and of the perfect structure of their language, they were enabled to indulge in philosophical speculation, to write treatises on grammar and logic, and generally to assume a literary position which other races never attained to.
History with them was not a mere record of dates or collection of genealogical tables, but an essay on the polity of mankind, to which the narrative afforded the illustration; while their poetry had always a tendency to assume more a didactic than a lyric form. It is among the Aryans that the Epos first rose to eminence and the Drama was elevated above a mere spectacle; but even in these the highest merit sought to be attained was that they should represent vividly events which might have taken place, even if they never did happen among men; while the Celts and the Semites delight in wild imaginings which never could have existed except in the brain of the poet. When the blood of the Aryan has been mixed with that of other races, they have produced a literature eminently imaginative and poetic; but in proportion to their purity has been their tendency towards a more prosaic style of composition. The aim of the race has always been the attainment of practical common sense, and the possession of this quality is their pride and boast, and justly so; but it is unfortunately antagonistic to the existence of an imaginative literature, and we must look to them more for eminence in works on history and philosophy than in those which require imagination or creative power.
These remarks apply with more than double force to the Fine Arts than to verbal literature. In the first place a people possessing such a power of phonetic utterance never could look on a picture or statue as more than a mere subsidiary illustration of the written text. A painting may represent vividly one view of what took place at one moment of time, but a written narrative can deal with all the circumstances and link it to its antecedents and effects. A statue of a man cannot tell one-tenth of what a short biography will make plain: and an ideal statue or ideal painting may be a pretty Celtic plaything, but it is not what Aryans hanker after.
With Architecture the case is even worse. Convenience is the first thing which the practical common sense of the Aryan seeks, and then to gain what he desires by the readiest and the easiest means. This done, why should he do more? If, induced by a desire to emulate others, he has to make his building ornamental, he is willing to copy what experience has proved to be successful in former works, willing to spend his money and to submit to some inconvenience; but in his heart he thinks it useless, and he neither will waste his time in thinking on the subject, nor apply those energies of his mind to its elaboration, without which nothing great or good was ever done in Art.
In addition to this, the immaterial nature of their faith has always deprived the Aryan races of the principal incentive to architectural magnificence.[20] The Turanian and Celtic races always have the most implicit faith in ceremonial worship and in the necessity of architectural splendour as its indispensable accompaniment. On the other hand, the more practical Aryan can never be brought to understand that prayer is either more sincere or is more acceptable in one form of house than in any other. He does not feel that virtue can be increased or vice exterminated by the number of bricks or stones that may be heaped on one another, or the form in which they may be placed; nor will his conception of the Deity admit of supposing that He can be propitiated by palaces or halls erected in honour of Him, or that a building in the Middle Pointed Gothic is more acceptable than one in the Classic or any other style.
This want of faith may be reasonable, but it is fatal to poetry in Art, and, it is feared, will prevent the Aryans from attaining more excellence in Architectural Art at the present time than they have done in former ages.
It is also true that the people are singularly deficient in their appreciation of colours. Not that actual colour-blindness is more common with them than with other races, but the harmony of tints is unknown to them. Some may learn, but none feel it; it is a matter of memory and an exercise of intellect, but no more. So, too, with form. Other—even savage—races cannot go wrong in this respect. If the Aryan is successful in art, it is generally in consequence of education, not from feeling; and, like all that is not innate in man, it yields only a secondary gratification, and fails to impress his brother man, or to be a real work of Art.
From these causes the ancient Aryans never erected a single building in India when they were pure, nor in that part of India which they colonised even after their blood became mixed; and we do not now know what their style was or is, though the whole of that part of the peninsula occupied by the Turanians, or to which their influence ever extended, is, and always was, covered by buildings, vast in extent and wonderful from their elaboration. This, probably, also is the true cause of the decline of Architecture and other arts in Europe and in the rest of the modern world. Wherever the Aryans appear Art flies before them, and where their influence extends utilitarian practical common sense is assumed to be all that man should aim at. It may be so, but it is sad to think that beauty cannot be combined with sense.
Music alone, as being the most phonetic of the fine arts, has received among the Aryans a degree of culture denied to the others; but even here the tendency has been rather to develop scientific excellence than to appeal to the responsive chords of the human heart. Notwithstanding this, its power is more felt and greater excellence is attained in this science than in any other. It also has escaped the slovenly process of copying, with which the unartistic mind of the Aryans has been content to fancy it was creating Art in other branches.
If, however, these races have been so deficient in the fine arts, they have been as excellent in all the useful ones. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, ship-building, and road-making, all that tends to accumulate wealth or to advance material prosperity, has been developed to an extent as great as it is unprecedented, and promises to produce results which as yet can only be dimly guessed at. A great, and, so far as we can see, an inevitable revolution, is pervading the whole world through the devotion of the Aryan races to these arts. We have no reason for supposing it will be otherwise than beneficial, however much we may feel inclined to regret that the beautiful could not be allowed to share a little of that worship so lavishly bestowed on the useful.
It follows, as a matter of course, that, with minds so constituted, the Aryans should have cultivated science with earnestness and success. The only beauty they, in fact, appreciated was the beauty of scientific truth; the only harmony they ever really felt was that of the laws of nature; and the only art they ever cared to cultivate was that which grouped these truths and their harmonies into forms which enabled them to be easily grasped and appreciated. Mathematics always had especial charms to the Aryan mind; and, more even than this, astronomy was always captivating. So, also, were the mechanical, and so, too, the natural sciences. It is to the Aryans that Induction owes its birth, and they probably alone have the patience and the sobriety to work it to its legitimate conclusions.
The true mission of the Aryan races appears to be to pervade the world with the useful and industrial arts, and so tend to reproduce that unity which has long been lost, to raise man, not by magnifying his individual cleverness, but by accumulating a knowledge of the works of God, so tending to make him a greater and wiser, and at the same time a humbler and a more religious servant of his Creator.
When Auguste Comte proposed that classification which made the fortune of his philosophy,—when he said that all mankind passed through the theological state in childhood, the metaphysical in youth, and the philosophical or positive in manhood,—and ventured to extend this discovery to nations, he had a glimpse, as others have had before him, of the beauty of the great harmony which pervades all created things. But he had not philosophy enough to see that the one great law is so vast and so remote, that no human intellect can grasp it, and that it is only the little fragments of that great scheme which are found everywhere which man is permitted to understand.
Had he known as much of ethnographical as he did of mathematical science, he would have perceived that there is no warrant for this daring generalisation; but that nations, in the states which he calls the theological, the metaphysical, and the philosophical, exist now and coexisted through all the ages of the world to which our historical knowledge extends.
What the Egyptians were when they first appeared on the scene they were when they perished under the Greek and Roman sway;—what the Chinese always were they now are;—the Jews and Arabs are unchanged to this day;—the Celts are as daringly speculative and as blindly superstitious now as we always found them;—and the Aryans of the Vedas or of Tacitus were very much the same sober, reasoning, unimaginative, and unartistic people as they are at this hour. Progress among men, as among the animals, seems to be achieved not so much by advances made within the limits of the group, as by the supercession of the less finely organised beings by those of a higher class;—and this, so far as our knowledge extends, is accomplished neither by successive creations, nor by the gradual development of one species out of another, but by the successive prominent appearances of previously developed, though partially dormant creations.
Ethnographers have already worked out this problem to a great extent, and arrived at a very considerable degree of certainty, through the researches of patient linguistic investigators. But language is in itself too impalpable ever to give the science that tangible, local reality which is necessary to its success; and it is here that Archæology comes so opportunely to its aid. What men dug or built remains where it was first placed, and probably retains the first impressions it received: and so fixes the era and standing of those who called it into existence; so that even those who cannot appreciate the evidence derived from grammar or from words, may generally see at a glance what the facts of the case really are.
It is even more important that such a science as Ethnology should have two or more methods of investigation at its command. Certainty can hardly ever be attained by only one process, unless checked and elucidated by others, and nothing can therefore be more fortunate than the possession of so important a sister science as that of Archæology to aid in the search after scientific truth.
If Ethnology may thus be so largely indebted to Archæology, the converse is also true; and she may pay back the debt with interest. As Archæology and Architecture have hitherto been studied, they, but more especially the latter, have been little more than a dry record of facts and measurements, interesting to the antiquary, to the professional architect, or to the tourist, who finds it necessary to get up a certain amount of knowledge on the subject; but the utmost that has hitherto been sought to be attained is a certain knowledge of the forms of the art, while the study of it, as that of one of the most important and most instructive of the sciences connected with the history of man, has been as a rule neglected.
Without this the study of Architecture is a mere record of bricks and stones, and of the modes in which they were heaped together for man’s use. Considered in the light of an historical record, it acquires not only the dignity of a science, but especial interest as being one of those sciences which are most closely connected with man’s interests and feelings, and the one which more distinctly expresses and more clearly records what man did and felt in previous ages, than any other study we are acquainted with.
From this point of view, not only every tomb and every temple, but even the rude monoliths and mounds of savages, acquire a dignity and interest to which they have otherwise no title; and man’s works become not only man’s most imperishable record, but one of the best means we possess of studying his history, or of understanding his nature or his aspirations.
Rightly understood, Archæology is as useful as any other branch of science or of art, in enabling us to catch such glimpses as are vouchsafed to man of the great laws that govern all things; and the knowledge that this class of man’s works is guided and governed by those very laws, and not by the chance efforts of unmeaning minds, elevates the study of it to as high a position as that of any other branch of human knowledge.