John Clark Ridpath

thumb| John Clark Ridpath (April 26, 1840 – July 31, 1900) was an American educator, historian, and editor. His mother was a descendant of Samuel Matthews, a colonial governor of Virginia. Among his most notable works is a series of volumes on a history of the world, titled Cyclopedia of Universal History. Quotes Ridpath's History of the World (1897) Vol. I We are now at the beginning of a vast and varied scholarship devoted to an exposition of the human family, and of the various parts into which our race has differentiated. Preface, p. viii Ethnic history is especially rich in the suggestions which it offers for illustration. It seems to call loudly for drawings and type-pictures and charts, to the end of a clearer and more vivid apprehension of the subject under consideration. Preface, p. viii The author...does not flatter himself that he has greatly enlarged the boundaries of human knowledge, but claims rather to have cleared somewhat the horizon in this part and in that, to have visited in thought and reflection some unfrequented parts of the temple of humanity, and to have aided in his limited sphere to put the house in order for his successors. Preface, p. viii Man is a speaking animal. No other characteristic of his nature is more universal or prevailing. Speech is the invariable index of the intellectual and moral condition of the human kind. General Introduction, p. xliv Ethnic history...regards the human being as a maker—a maker of houses first, and of all things afterwards. General Introduction, p. xliv At length...man...emerges into the domain of the higher arts. Here he becomes truly ideal. Here he adorns as well as constructs. Here by the use of color and form he gives outline and substance to the things perceived in vision and dream. General Introduction, p. xliv General history regards architecture, metallurgy, all manner of construction and fabrication, as facts in themselves useful and important, contributing to the strength of nations; but a true study of the human race regards all art products as but an evidence and illustration of the character, the skill and purpose of those by whom they were designed. In like manner government and laws...are objective products of the genius of man. But they are also illustrations of the character, sentiment, hope, and ambitions of the race. General Introduction, p. xlv The religious instinct is found to have been deeply implanted in nearly or quite all the peoples of the world. This was true in the dawn and morning of history, and it is still true at the high noon of nationality, power, and greatness. General Introduction, p. xlv Bk. I. Time and Place of the Beginning Ch. 1. Sources of Information What was the Method — the manner, the process, or processes — by which man came into conscious being on our planet, rising into rationality, asserting his sway as the principal inhabitant of the earth, and discovering in himself the ability to consider his own thoughts and actions as a study in natural history? p. 38 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. p. 40 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? p. 41 Geology takes up the investigation of planet life where astronomy leaves off. The latter deals with worlds in their relation to each other, and incidentally with world constitution. The former investigates the history of our own earth in particular. p. 43 The earth has received the markings and the vestigia of all the orders of life, each in its turn, and has fortunately preserved, as if for the wisdom of after ages, very intelligible fragments of testimony respecting the time and circumstances at which each new order of living beings began to exist, and the successive stages through which the same passed in its differentiation, growth, distribution, and maturity. p. 44 Archaeology rests in turn on geology. Whatever evidences...of vital phenomena have been left in the astronomical and geological records...have been...tracks, traces, impressions, not...remains left behind by the living beings that have inhabited the earth. They are thus considered...as the testimony of the former presence of things unseen....Archaeology confines itself strictly to the works of man. These are considered with respect to their geological surroundings. pp. 44, 45 At many points palaeontological research touches the existence and conditions of man in the geological and archaeological ages. It considers him, indeed, as the culmination of the animal races whose antiquity is in the rocks and whose present activities are displayed on the dry land and in the waters of our globe. p. 46 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. p. 46 The line of division is made on the principle that the remains of what man has done shall fall to archaeology, and the remains of what man was to anthropology. p. 46 Ethnology proceeds confidently by comparison, by hypothesis, by analogy, along the lines of growth and expansion until it reaches the grand discoveries and noble impulses which constitute the ripe fruit of the most recent epochs. p. 47 It has been proposed by modern scholars to separate that part of ethnology which describes the customs, laws, and habits of nations from the principal science, and to name the new division ethnography....The ethnographic inquiry is much more easy and superficial than ethnology, inasmuch as the latter looks more profoundly into the subject-matter of the investigation, and must proceed by wider and more difficult generalizations. p. 49 As in the case of the individual, there comes to pass a time in the progress of kindred and tribe and race when consciousness appears. When this happens in the individual, he at once begins...to consider himself, to remember....In like manner the rise of ethnic consciousness leads at once to that peculiar, reflective, and communicative form of mental activity which we call tradition and history. p. 49 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. pp. 49–50 The historian in the ideal history is as little seen as Shakespeare is seen in the tragedy of Hamlet....The camera is not seen in the sun picture; neither are the easel, the brush, the hand, and the eye of the artist seen on his canvas. pp. 51, 52 Primitive man was rife with conjectures and dim memories of his former state....Doubtless the former experiences of the half-conscious race were transmitted to him with his blood. p. 52 The various peoples differed greatly, some being comparatively taciturn, little disposed to communicate with their fellows, and others having a natural enthusiasm and gift in the commerce of speech. Some of the most intellectual and vigorous of the ancient races were loquacious to a degree that can not now be well appreciated. p. 52 The origin of man was the keynote of the oldtime story. The primitive peoples...were ever busy with the theory of the genesis of the race....All agreed that some explanation must be given of the time, the place, and the circumstances of man's appearance on the earth. All were agreed that in some way he had come. None conjectured that his past existence was an eternity. p. 52 The story was from one point of view as variable as the fancies of the race were vague and their creative powers capricious. But from another point of view there were common features in the traditions which now gained currency, and these common features at length constituted a sort of body of philosophy which was accepted with more or less reservation by the great minds of antiquity. Vol. I, ch. 1, p. 53 It might be said, even at this late day, that the whole intellectual structure of the world rests on the concrete of tradition. p. 53 As it was the first, so also it seems to be the last and greatest of the products of the human mind. As it was the earliest endeavor of the conscious race to express its concepts of itself, so also is it the latest endeavor of that same race to explain, interpret, and elucidate the true course and character of human affairs in the earth. In doing so the science — if science it may be called — draws within its compass all the results which have been reached in all the fields of human inquiry. pp. 53–54 Above all other branches of knowledge, history sits and broods, with wings outspread as though the universe of things were pregnant and must bring forth under the shadow and power of thought. p. 54 True history is the generalized result of all things that have been thought and done by men. p. 54 All historical perspective depends upon the chronological relations of the objects of the human landscape. There is, first of all, a horizon. The remoter facts stand far back against the dim line which divides the known from the unknown. The size, appearance, and relative importance of such facts must be estimated by their distance from the observer. The objects of the nearer landscape, as judged by the senses, seem vast and tall. Without the aid of the chronological perspective the concept of the past would be utterly distorted and ludicrous. p. 55 Ch. 2. Astronomical Argument Respecting the Antiquity of Man He who studies the prehistoric career of mankind...is as the observer who, sitting by the window of the flying car, may see the moving spectra of distant landscapes appearing and disappearing among the shadows of the other side. pp. 55–56 We may not admit that the universe is an absurdity. We may not any longer suppose that our own small earth with its burden of interests, to us so overwhelming, is of any superior consequence in the universal scheme beyond what the size, place, and physical importance of our little globe may reasonably imply. p. 57 Ch. 3. Argument from Geology We may safely assume that the processes of the natural world which we observe around us are the same processes which have been giving form and feature to the surface of our planet through eons of past time. pp. 85–6 Ch. 4. Archaeological and Palaeological Argument 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. p. 102 The great patent fact is that some races have outstripped others in their rate of progress, so that even to the present day a section of world history presents contemporaneously all stages of development. There are still existent in the world many tribes similar in nearly all respects, except with respect to strength and aggressiveness, to those primeval races which passed away during the formation of the tertiary deposits of the earth's crust. p. 102 The native inhabitants of Australia, the Maoris of New Zealand, the aboriginal races of other Polynesian islands, the natives of the Greater and Lesser Antilles — such as they were at the time of the discovery of America — and the Red races distributed through the New World from Patagonia to the lands of the Esquimaux, were all, at least until a recent date — as many of them still are — unacquainted with the use of metals in any form. They therefore belong to the age of stone as much as did the barbarians of prehistoric times. p. 102 The surviving barbarous races do not possess those strongly marked d animal characteristics by which the aggressive barbarians of remote antiquity were characterized. It would appear that the more peaceable, less warlike, less adventurous, less progressive tribes and races of the ancient world have in one sense outlived the stronger and more ferocious of the primitive peoples. The latter seem to have survived in a civilized posterity, while the former have preserved their ancient proclivities with little evolution or change. p. 103 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. p. 104 Ch. 5. The Ethnological Argument The rudimentary breasts of the male...seem to point to a condition still more primitive in the development of our race — to a time when even the sexes had not been differentiated the one from the other! p. 116 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. p. 120 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. pp. 121–2 Some of the West India islands were uninhabited at the close of the fifteenth century. The same circumstance has been noted in Polynesia. But as a general fact the world has all been inhabited, even from antiquity. More than this: the first comers, even thousands of years ago, invariably found the countries into which they made their eruptions already peopled by an earlier race. p. 122 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. p. 122 The process...by which a population was finally contributed to the islands of the Pacific and to the American continents must have been so tedious, so much retarded by the opposing conditions of the natural world, so greatly heightened by the barbaric state of the primitive tribes by which the work was accomplished, so long held back by pauses and retrogressions as to demand for the accomplishment what may well be estimated not at a hundred or a thousand years, but at an eon of time. p. 122 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. p. 123 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. p. 123 With what a sense of impotency must the primitive man have come to the seashore! Even after the age of boats and ships, how did he cling to the shores and inlets of the seemingly infinite deep! p. 123 No science but history — and history not well — is able to estimate at its full value the retarding and paralyzing effect of hereditary beliefs upon even the physical, to say nothing of the intellectual and moral, progress of mankind. Not infrequently we find the forward march utterly impeded and a given people held absolutely to their last camping ground for a thousand years by a single hereditary thought driven down like their tent pins through the belief and practice of that kindred. p. 124 The student of a Semitic language must transpose his very methods of thought and abandon all of his preconceptions and principles of analogy before he can enter the spirit of the strange linguistic structure before him. The student who has mastered Latin and French may take up Spanish and find so much that is common to what he has already learned, so much that is in analogy with all his preconceptions and knowledge, that his task is as easy as to go to the same city by a slightly divergent route; but not so in the acquirement of Hebrew or Arabic. p. 126 The attempt to derive Hebrew and German from a single original is, to say the least, beset with as many difficulties as confronts the ethnologist in his effort to trace an Anglo-American to the same stock with an aboriginal Australian. pp. 126–7 At the daydawn of history human speech had already been deflected into forms even more variant than those at the present existing. At that epoch the inflectional languages were in full efflorescence. The Sanskrit and the Greek presented examples of completeness in structural development for which the student of language must search in vain among the current tongues. Already at that most remote date, on the easternmost shores of the Mediterranean, a Semitic language had perfected itself into that perfect triliteral rigidity which we see in the sacred books of the Hebrews. p. 127 It is as difficult to reach a common original for all existing linguistic forms as it is to find a common ancestry for the cave dwellers of Western Europe, the native Australians, the blubber-eating Esquimaux, and the flint-chipping barbarians of Polynesia. p. 127 Ch. 6. History and Tradition From the Graeco-Italic fountains literature, including history as one of its branches, flowed down and mingled with the intellectual life of all the peoples of Western Europe, and finally with that of the New World. It is only within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the models of the classical ages have been to a certain extent put aside and the scientific type of composition substituted in their stead. p. 129 The annals and chronicles which we find among the literary remains of the East Indian races, the Mesopotamian nations, the Egyptians, and the Hebrews in particular, were not formulated by the ancient seers and scribes with a view to the preservation of an authentic narrative of events, but with the ulterior purpose of furnishing a mold and matrix in which the religious history and polity of the respective peoples should be expressed, established, and perpetuated. p. 130 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. p. 134 Many are the forms and applications of tradition....Almost every tribe and incipient people urged some extravagant claim to a prior possession of the country or place which they occupied....Though we are convinced that the world was peopled by the diffusion of races, nearly all the early peoples disclaimed this method of possession, and asserted immemorial residence in their respective countries. pp. 134–5 There was scarcely an extant tradition of human genesis which did not associate the beginning of man-life and tribe-life with the earth....There was thus established...among each people a sort of claim to the earth by the right of an indisputable priority — a claim which the reader may well perceive to be of great use to sedentary tribes in maintaining themselves against the migratory invasions of others more warlike and adventurous. p. 135 There was in the thought of antiquity a conception of evolution and a conception of creation. The two were blended. Man was made out of clay; but a supernatural being was the maker. p. 135 The legend of childhood impresses itself indelibly upon the memory, and passes down with the current of understanding, mingling therewith and combining with the beliefs and concepts of a later period of development. So with the oral traditions of the primitive world. They were manifestly produced in what may be called the childhood of the race, and were delivered by oral transmission to the conscious race which came afterwards. p. 136 Very little are the primitive races concerned about accuracy as to time and place. Such facts as time and place require investigation, laborious study, travel, mathematical knowledge, and many other conditions which the adolescence of mankind could in no wise supply. Whatever the mind could invent for itself by dream and reverie and fanciful excursion, that was abundantly produced; but the sober and solid materials and structure of real history were too heavy and exact and burdensome to be supplied or borne by the early races of men. p. 138 If the beginnings of history are to be found in wide-apart regions of the earth at a date as remote as twenty centuries before the common era, how great must be the. distance of that childhood of the race and that early youth when the mind, still surrounded with all visions and dreams, looked forth into a landscape and beheld on every side men as trees walking! p. 138 External links Category:1840 births Category:1900 deaths Category:Historians from the United States Category:Editors from the United States