Who is the primitive man? Where is he to be found? What are his characteristics? These are the important questions which here at once confront us. But they are questions to which, strangely enough, the answer has, up to very recent times, been sought, not in the facts of experience, history, or ethnology, but purely by the path of speculation. At the outset the search was not, for the most part, based on investigations of primitive culture itself, but took as its starting-point contemporary culture and present-day man. It was primarily by means of an abstract opposition of culture to nature that philosophy, and even anthropology, constructed natural man. The endeavour was not to find or to observe, but to _invent_ him. It was simply by antithesis to cultural man that the image of natural man took shape; the latter is one who lacks all the attainments of culture. This is the negative criterion by means of which the philosophy of the Enlightenment, with its conceited estimate of cultural achievements, formed its idea of primitive man. Primitive man is the savage; the savage, however, is essentially an animal equipped with a few human qualities, with language and a fragment of reason just sufficient to enable him to advance beyond his deplorable condition. Man in his natural state, says Thomas Hobbes, is toward man as a wolf. He lives with his fellow-beings as an animal among animals, in a struggle for survival. It is the contrast of wild nature with peaceful culture, of ordered State with unorganized herd or horde, that underlies this conception.
But this antithesis between the concepts of culture and of nature, as objectively considered, is not the only factor here operative; even more influential is the contrast between the subjective moods aroused by the actual world and by the realm disclosed by imagination or reason. Hence it is that the repelling picture of primitive man is modified as soon as the mood changes. To an age that is satiated with culture and feels the traditional forms of life to be a burdensome constraint, the state of nature becomes an ideal once realized in a bygone world. In contrast to the wild creature of Thomas Hobbes and his contemporaries, we have the natural man of Jean Jacques Rousseau. The state of nature is a state of peace, where men, united in love, lead a life that is unfettered and free from want.