What Does History Teach - 1886 Author:John Stuart Blackie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: wise Greeks expressed them both by one word, Xoyo?—so long must it be ridiculous to think of them shaping their career according to an inborn type of progressive... more » excellence. To do so is exclusively human. Hence our poems, our high art, our churches, our legislations, our apostleships, our philosophies, our social arrangements and devices, our speculations and schemes of all kinds, which, though they are sometimes foolish, and always more or less inadequate, deliver the strongest possible proof that man is an animal who will rather die and embrace martyrdom than be content to live as the brutes do, neither spurred with the hope of progress nor borne aloft on the wings of the ideal. Of the very earliest state of human society, as we have already said, history teaches nothing ; but, as man is a progressive animal, and the plan of Providence with regard to him seems plain to let him shift for itself and learn to do right by blundering, as children learn to walk by tumbling, we may safely say that the easier,more obvious, and more rude forms of living together must have preceded the more difficult, the more complex, and the more polished. And in perfect consistency with this presumption, we find three social platforms rising one above the other in human value, duly accredited either by monuments, by popular tradition, or by the evidence of comparative philology. These three are — (i) The prehistoric or stone period, from which such a rich store of monuments has been set up in the Copenhagen Museum, and the existence of which is indicated in Gen. iv. 22 as antecedent to Tubal Cain, the instructor of every artificer in brass and iron. (2) The shepherd or pastoral stage, represented by Abel (Gen. iv. 2), in which men subsisted from the easy dominance which they asserted over wild anima...« less