English sanitary institutions : reviewed in their course of development, and in some of their political and social relations / by Sir John Simon.

  • Simon, John, Sir, 1816-1904.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English sanitary institutions : reviewed in their course of development, and in some of their political and social relations / by Sir John Simon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    spirit of tribuary life ; and, inasmuch as the tribuary spirit included and expressed all which was highest in pre-historic man, the significance of that spirit in its most general sense deserves extremely careful consideration. It needs hardly be noted that, over such parts of the earth's surface as were known to ancient history, the tribes then historical have now long since, under the conquests of war or otherwise, passed indistinguishably out of sight into the miscellaneous composition of modern nations; but explorations of other regions during the last four centuries, and especially within the last hundred and fifty years, have brought to light in their stead innumerable previously unknown tribes still existing in virgin savageness, with immemorial traditions of common descent and common custom ; and study of these new-found tribes is not less instructive than that of ancient history, to illustrate what have been the universal governing principles in tribuary aggregations of mankind. The point which clearly must stand first in any such consideration has already been indicated in an early passage of the present paper—the point, namely, that tribe in its historical sense is but the enlarged equivalent of family, and that the sentiment of special family-tie, binding together the units of the tribe in submission as it were to one household-law, and indi- vidualising the tribe as against other tribes in the struggle for means of sub- sistence, was the main determining influence for the sympathies and antipathies of early man, and for the particular channels and forms in which his egotism and his altruism respectively tended to express themselves. This, which ancient history told of such early savage tribes as had become known to it, has been generalised without limit by analogous knowledge accumulated since then, in proportion as new explorations of the earth's surface have brought under ethnographical study the customs and traditions of previously unknown tribes still subsisting in primfeval savageness. Everywhere the characteristic of the tribuary spirit has been to potentiate and sanctify as against individual egotism the (so to speak) joint-stock egotism of the tribe. Its tendency has been so to merge each merely personal ipseity in the collective self, that the man has had no apartness from his tribe ; that within the tribe, struggle between man and man, except as by accident, has had no place ; and that mutual help has been the general law.* Thus, while inter-tribuary wars, expressing the respective tribuary egotisms and hatreds, were causing enormous waste of human life probably there may have reigned within the limits of each separate tribe as perfect a peace as the world has ever known. It of course is not to be supposed that under tribuary law or custom the rights and immunities of individual life were the same as those which modern society concedes; for though, no doubt, the tribuary law or custom may have purported (like modern police-law) to safeguard individual life against inflictions of individual wrong, the individual life in the tribe would have been but an item of tribe-property, for the tribe at any time to expend as it judged best for the good of the tribe; and it is among the best known facts in history that, under the application of this system, very large quantities of human life were habitually sacrificed to the tribuary theories of common good. The demands which were of all the most peremptory, and which have always stood first in ethnological interest, were those for sacrifices to the gods in every chief case of * See the series of papers, by Prince Kropotkin, mentioned in the first footnote above; especially the paper, April 1891, entitled Mutual Aid among Savages.