He is pre-Adamite, I said,--and name him thus not as a piece of rhetorical smartness, but in gravest characterization.
The first of human epochs is that when the thoughts, imaginations, beliefs of men become to them _objects_, on which further thought and action are to be adjusted, on which further thought and action may be based. So long as man is merely responding to outward and physical circumstances, so long he is living by bread alone, and has no history. It is when he begins to respond _to himself_--to create necessities and supplies out of his own spirit,--to build architectures on foundations and out of materials that exist only in virtue of his own spiritual activity,--to live by bread which grows, not out of the soil, but out of the soul,--it is then, then only, that history begins. This one may be permitted to name the Adamite epoch.
The Esquimaux belongs to that period, more primitive, when man is simply responding to outward Nature, to physical necessities. He invents, but does not create; he adjusts himself to circumstances, but not to ideas; he works cunningly upon materials which he has _found_, but never on material which owes its existence to the productive force of his own spirit.
In going to look upon the man of this race, you sail, not merely over seas, but over ages, epochs, unknown periods of time,--sail beyond antiquity itself, and issue into the obscure existence that antedates history. Arrived there, you may turn your eye to the historical past of man as to a barely possible future. Palestine and Greece, Moses and Homer, as yet are not. Who shall dare to say that they can be? Surely that were but a wild dream! Expel the impossible fancy from your mind! Go, spear a seal, and be a reasonable being!--Never enthusiast had a dream of the future so unspeakably Utopian as actual history becomes, when seen from the Esquimaux, or pre-Adamite, point of view.
Swiss lakes are raked, Belgian caves spaded and hammered, to find relics of old, pre-historical races. Go to Labrador, and you find the object sought above ground. There he is, preserving all the characters of his extinct congeners,--small in stature, low and smooth in cranium, held utterly in the meshes of Nature, skilled only to meet ingeniously the necessities she imposes, and meeting them rudely, as man ever does till the ideal element comes in: for any fine feeling of even physical wants, any delicacy of taste, any high notion of comfort, is due less to the animal than to the spiritual being of man.