A History of Science, vol 1 | Page 9

of things.
To a person who had no clear conception of the lapse of time and no
preconception as to the limited period of man's life, the infirmities of
age might very naturally be ascribed to the repeated attacks of those

inimical powers which were understood sooner or later to carry off
most members of the race. And coupled with this thought would go the
conception that inasmuch as some people through luck had escaped the
vengeance of all their enemies for long periods, these same individuals
might continue to escape for indefinite periods of the future. There
were no written records to tell primeval man of events of long ago. He
lived in the present, and his sweep of ideas scarcely carried him back
beyond the limits of his individual memory. But memory is observed to
be fallacious. It must early have been noted that some people recalled
events which other participants in them had quite forgotten, and it may
readily enough have been inferred that those members of the tribe who
spoke of events which others could not recall were merely the ones
who were gifted with the best memories. If these reached a period when
their memories became vague, it did not follow that their recollections
had carried them back to the beginnings of their lives. Indeed, it is
contrary to all experience to believe that any man remembers all the
things he has once known, and the observed fallaciousness and
evanescence of memory would thus tend to substantiate rather than to
controvert the idea that various members of a tribe had been alive for
an indefinite period.
Without further elaborating the argument, it seems a justifiable
inference that the first conception primitive man would have of his own
life would not include the thought of natural death, but would,
conversely, connote the vague conception of endless life. Our own
ancestors, a few generations removed, had not got rid of this conception,
as the perpetual quest of the spring of eternal youth amply testifies. A
naturalist of our own day has suggested that perhaps birds never die
except by violence. The thought, then, that man has a term of years
beyond which "in the nature of things," as the saying goes, he may not
live, would have dawned but gradually upon the developing
intelligence of successive generations of men; and we cannot feel sure
that he would fully have grasped the conception of a "natural"
termination of human life until he had shaken himself free from the
idea that disease is always the result of the magic practice of an enemy.
Our observation of historical man in antiquity makes it somewhat
doubtful whether this conception had been attained before the close of

the prehistoric period. If it had, this conception of the mortality of man
was one of the most striking scientific inductions to which prehistoric
man attained. Incidentally, it may be noted that the conception of
eternal life for the human body being a more primitive idea than the
conception of natural death, the idea of the immortality of the spirit
would be the most natural of conceptions. The immortal spirit, indeed,
would be but a correlative of the immortal body, and the idea which we
shall see prevalent among the Egyptians that the soul persists only as
long as the body is intact--the idea upon which the practice of
mummifying the dead depended--finds a ready explanation. But this
phase of the subject carries us somewhat afield. For our present
purpose it suffices to have pointed out that the conception of man's
mortality--a conception which now seems of all others the most natural
and "innate"--was in all probability a relatively late scientific induction
of our primitive ancestors.
5. Turning from the consideration of the body to its mental complement,
we are forced to admit that here, also, our primitive man must have
made certain elementary observations that underlie such sciences as
psychology, mathematics, and political economy. The elementary
emotions associated with hunger and with satiety, with love and with
hatred, must have forced themselves upon the earliest intelligence that
reached the plane of conscious self-observation. The capacity to count,
at least to the number four or five, is within the range of even animal
intelligence. Certain savages have gone scarcely farther than this; but
our primeval ancestor, who was forging on towards civilization, had
learned to count his fingers and toes, and to number objects about him
by fives and tens in consequence, before be passed beyond the plane of
numerous existing barbarians. How much beyond this he had gone we
need not attempt to inquire; but the relatively high development of
mathematics in the early historical period suggests that primeval man
had attained a not inconsiderable knowledge of numbers. The humdrum
vocation of looking after a numerous