Civilisation : its cause and cure and other essays / by Edward Carpenter.

  • Carpenter, Edward, 1844-1929.
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Civilisation : its cause and cure and other essays / by Edward Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    26/312 (page 22)
    good reason. Without committing ourselves to the unlikely theory that the “ noble savage ” was an ideal human being physically or in any other respect, and while certain that in many points he was decidedly inferior to the civilised man, I think we must allow him the superiority in some directions; and one of these was his comparative freedom, from disease. Lewis Morgan, who grew* up among the Iroquois Indians, and who probably knew the North American natives as well as any white man has ever done, says (in his Ancient Society, p. 45)3 “ Barbarism ends with the production of grand Barbarians.” And though there are no native races on the earth to-day who are actually in the latest and most advanced stage of Barbarism ; 1 yet, if we take the most advanced tribes that we know of—such as the said Iroquois Indians of twenty or thirty years ago, some of the Kaffir tribes round Lake Nyassa in Africa, now (and possibly for a few years more) comparatively untouched by civilisation, or the tribes along the river Uaupes, thirty or forty years back, of Wallace’s Travels on the Amazon—all tribes in what Morgan would call the middle stage of Barbarism—we undoubtedly in each case discover a fine and (which is our point here) healthy people. Captain Cook in his first Voyage says of the natives of Otaheite, “ We saw no critical disease during our stay upon the island, and but few instances of sickness, which were accidental fits of the colic ; ” and, later on, 2 Say like the Homeric Greeks, or the Spartans of the Lycurgus period.