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John Clark Ridpath

62 quotes

“As we look steadily, patiently, in the direction from which we have come, we see that the nearer landscape of our life is flooded in every part by the broad light of consciousness. Further down the converging lines the light is less abundant, the objects less distinct. Here and there already in the second decade of our life memory begins to fail; the clue is lost, and we discover many patches of obscuration, many parts in which the light rests only on the rim of the hills or on one side of the forest. The valleys and depths and remoter fields fade into twilight, indistinctness, and thick mist. Further on, and near the beginning of the first decade, only a few luminous points are discoverable. The father's face, the brother's pudgy hand, the mother's blessed bosom are still seen; but beyond that the obscuration is complete....No genius, not even the powerful soul of Plato or Shakespeare or Goethe, has been able by the backward look to pierce the impenetrable shadows of his own infancy; to know by experience what manner of creature he was at the beginning; to declare by direct knowledge through what stages and moods of evolution and tentative flight his own infant spirit first raised the wing and sought to journey through the boundless air....We were observed in that stage of our existence by our parents and kinsfolk....Tradition was rife in the family and neighborhood relative to ourselves....Tales were told about us, having their origin in truth and their ornaments in loving fiction. Presently, with the dawn of consciousness, this nursery history of our lives was recited in our hearing, and we imbibed it as the true narrative of our previous career — but by no means sufficiently wonderful to meet the demands of fancy. Therefore must we ourselves expand and exaggerate the story. We became interested in our past, and carefully stored the vivid memory of childhood with the poetic and half-fanciful stories of our former state. Thus around the life of every youth are thrown the traditions and legends of his own unconscious existence in infancy; and these forms of half-knowledge he is constrained in after years to accept and to use as the best attainable evidences of his progress by growth and evolution through the first epoch of his being.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If, then, the human race may be looked upon as an individual entity or being, having an unconscious infancy, a half-conscious childhood, a wholly conscious but erratic and visionary youth, and a rational and reflective maturity, what facts or circumstances, what...evidence and information may be drawn concerning the earliest stages of human existence — that unconscious and infantile condition beyond the reach of all ethnic memory — beyond the horizon of light and vision? Are there any sources of thought and reflection, sufficiently matured to take the name of knowledge, from which, as if by a mirror, light and intelligence may be thrown into that remote region below the dawn of our race-consciousness?”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anthropology...considers the race of man as a fact in natural history. It looks at the race, first of all, from the physical, or material, point of view. It considers the form and structure, the adaptations and relations of the beings called men, as though they were a genus of animals. Anatomy and physiology thus become subordinate branches of a higher anthropological study. But the new science also brings into view the intellectual and moral nature of mankind. It considers the evolution of mind and all of those important facts and principles which in their scientific expression go by the name of psychology.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything is at the first local and peculiar. The myth-making power is busy in the production of the narrative. Fact and fiction are equally present in the concept and the work. The historian of the dawn is at once a sage and a bard, an annalist and a rhapsodist, a story-teller and a singer. What he produces blends henceforth with the memory of his race. It is imbibed as a verity, and is used by future chroniclers and poets as the subject-matter of their work. The volume of tradition expands rapidly, and is to a certain extent rectified by the improving judgment and critical skill of after times. But ages go by ere the elements of myth and tradition are eliminated from the narrative. Mankind advance to the possession and civilization of the great continents. Other branches of knowledge spring from the mental fecundity of the race. Nations reäct upon nations. A vast civil and political life appears. The mind improves by culture and discipline; and yet the fictitious part of the early history of mankind continues to flow in the mighty stream of history and to color all its waters.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature led the way as to the substance and design of primeval implements. Stone was chosen first, with little modification in the natural or accidental form. At length the evidences of selection of materials appear. The better qualities of stone are chosen. Obsidian and flint become favorable articles of primeval factory. Bone also is used, and the horns of animals in the making of utensils and weapons. At length, with the increase of intelligence and the gift of experience, the metals begin to be taken and employed in the primitive arts. Copper and bronze more and more take the place of the stone utensils and tools which had hitherto been employed. Bronze is succeeded by iron, and the age of war and nationality — the daydawn of the historical epoch — is ushered in.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The lion, the tiger, the hyena, et id omne genus, can not coëxist in the same country with civilization. Not indeed, as is generally supposed, on account of the climate, but specifically because when the man and the tiger are in the same arena the one or the other must go to the wall....At the present time the Indian tiger, where the wall of civilization is not around him, breaks freely from his jungle, pursuing the antelope and the deer up the slopes of the Himalayas to the line of perpetual snow; while the leopard, the panther, and the cheetah stop not even for the snow, but follow their prey into the fastnesses of Siberia.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Several theories...account for the differentiation of the races. The first of these is that the races of men, as they come into view in the early dawn of history, had descended through a remote prehistoric past from a common origin, and that in the long processes of that descent the ethnic characteristics of each race and people had been developed and established. Another supposition possible in the case is that men began from various parts of the earth, under various conditions, and from different originals. From these the descending lines of ethnic life were drawn under the influences of environment, until at length, in the morning of tradition, the various peoples emerged into view with their respective characteristics fixed as we find them at the present day. A third view is that which presupposes phenomenal departures from a common type at some period in the prehistoric ages. This hypothesis includes a supposed anomalous divergence; as, for instance, in a common family in which the sons, though born of one father and one mother, should come into the world with different ethnic traits upon them, thus establishing, or rather opening, the fountain heads of races and peoples.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Negro physiognomy as depicted in the Egyptian sculptures is almost identical with that of to-day; but the Copt of modern Egypt, affected as he has been by so many historical influences, has diverged not a little from the parent Egyptian type. The modern Greek and the modern Italian are discriminable by many ethnic marks from the great Greek of the ancient world and the Roman original; but the wild men of the Asiatic steppes, and no doubt the aborigines of the American continent, have changed but little in form and feature during several milleniums. This law of the more rapid change of ethnic characteristics under the civilized life tends to lengthen, rather than abbreviate, the duration of that prehistoric period in which the ethnic peculiarities of the various peoples were evolved and fixed.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the whole, the distribution of mankind over the earth has not been effected by migration, but by diffusion. The race has diffused itself, like the slow growth of a vine creeping over the surface at a rate so small that it can not be detected by the senses. Only after a lapse of time are we able to see that the vine has taken a new and advanced position. In like manner the first men spread over the surface of the earth by gradual diffusion. Whenever a really favorable situation was reached by the outlying members of the tribe, then there would be a movement somewhat more rapid in that direction, until the better place so discovered was peopled and dispossessed of its native treasures.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is almost impossible for men under the civilized life to realize the difficulty which a primeval people, a real aboriginal tribe, would experience in attempting so simple a feat as crossing a river....The transportation of children across a broad and rapid stream must have been...an almost impossible task. No doubt the introduction of boats and rafts was an event belonging to a very early age in the human evolution. Nevertheless, there was a time when primeval savages worked their way up slowly, cautiously, distrustfully to the concept of a canoe with as much difficulty, aye, much greater difficulty, than the modern man has experienced in the idea and construction of the ocean steamer.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In all the primeval world there was not a single highway. Nature builds no roads, constructs no bridges. We must remember in this connection that in all that vast and warlike world revealed to us in the history of Egypt and India and Greece and Carthage and Rome there was not a single tunnel. The aqueduct, the viaduct, the sewer, even the Cloaca Maxima, were known at a very early age; and the building abilities of the people were able to have produced a tunnel in the proper sense; but it remained not for the age of Alexander or Caesar or the Antonies, not for the epoch of Justinian or the era of Charlemagne, not for the Renaissance or the times of Napoleon, but for the nineteenth century to construct the first underground passageway for the movements of civilization — the quick transit of men and merchandise.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In almost every nation, among almost every people, a body of traditional lore has been produced in the earlier and half-conscious epoch, and handed down to subsequent times, including the belief of that particular branch of mankind with respect to its own origin. Such traditions in the prehistoric ages became a part of the national faith, was interwoven with the folklore of the people, and afterwards with the whole system of philosophical belief. The myth reached forward out of the past and grasped the present. The poetical fiction mingled with the rudimentary forms of history, and became a wellnigh inseparable part thereof. The dream of the primitive man became a penumbra around the life of the conscious man, and thus the earlier ages of reflection and truth were shadowed and haunted with the fancies and fictions which had arisen in the childhood of the race.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source