CHAPTER VIII: PRIMITIVE IDEAS.

§ 49. Yet a further preparation for interpreting social phenomena is needed. It is not enough that we should acquaint ourselves, first with the external factors, and then with those internal factors treated of in the foregoing three chapters. The behaviour of the social unit as exposed to environing conditions—inorganic, organic, and super-organic—depends in part on certain additional traits. Beyond those visible specialities of organization which the body displays, and beyond those hidden specialities of organization implied by the mental type, there are those specialities, still less traceable, implied by the acquired beliefs. As accumulated ancestral experiences, moulding the nervous structures, produce the mental powers; so personal experiences, daily elaborated into thoughts, cause small modifications of these structures and powers. A complete account of the original social unit must include these modifications—or rather, must include the correlative ideas implying them. For, manifestly, the ideas he forms of himself of other beings and of the surrounding world, greatly affect his conduct.

A description of these final modifications, or of the corresponding ideas, is difficult to give. Obstacles stand in the way alike of inductive interpretation and deductive interpretation. We must first glance at these.

§ 50. To determine what conceptions are truly primitive would be easy if we had accounts of truly primitive men. But there are reasons for suspecting that men of the lowest types now known, forming social groups of the simplest kinds, do not exemplify men as they originally were. Probably most of them had ancestors in higher states; and among their beliefs remain some which were evolved during those higher states. While the current degradation theory is untenable, the theory of progression, in its ordinary form, seems to me untenable also. If, on the one hand, the notion that savagery is caused by lapse from civilization, is irreconcilable with the evidence; there is, on the other hand, inadequate warrant for the notion that the lowest savagery has never been any higher than it is now. It is possible, and, I believe, probable, that retrogression has been as frequent as progression.

Evolution is commonly conceived to imply in everything an intrinsic tendency to become something higher. This is an erroneous conception of it. In all cases it is determined by the co-operation of inner and outer factors. This co-operation works changes until there is reached an equilibrium between the environing actions and the actions which the aggregate opposes to them—a complete equilibrium if the aggregate is without life, and a moving equilibrium if the aggregate is living. Thereupon evolution, continuing to show itself only in the progressing integration that ends in rigidity, practically ceases. If, in the case of the living aggregates forming a species, the environing actions remain constant, the species remains constant. If the environing actions change, the species changes until it re-equilibriates itself with them. But it by no means follows that this change constitutes a step in evolution. Usually neither advance nor recession results; and often, certain previously-acquired structures being rendered superfluous, there results a simpler form. Only now and then does the environing change initiate in the organism a new complication, Edition: current; Page: [96] and so produce a somewhat higher structure. Hence the truth that while for immeasurable periods some types have not sensibly altered, and while in other types there has been further evolution, there are many types in which retrogression has happened. I do not refer merely to such facts as that the highest orders of reptiles, the Pterosauria and Dinosauria which once had many genera superior in structure and gigantic in size, have become extinct, while lower orders of reptiles have survived; or to such facts as that in many genera of mammals there once existed species larger than any of their allies existing now; but I refer more especially to the fact that of parasitic creatures innumerable kinds are degraded modifications of higher creatures. Of all existing species of animals, if we include parasites, the greater number have retrograded from structures to which their ancestors had once advanced. Indeed, progression in some types often involves retrogression in others. For the more evolved type, conquering by the aid of its acquired superiority, habitually drives competing types into inferior habitats and less profitable modes of life: usually implying disuse and decay of their higher powers.

As with organic evolution, so with super-organic evolution. Though, taking the entire assemblage of societies, evolution may be held inevitable as an ultimate effect of the co-operating factors, intrinsic and extrinsic, acting on them all through indefinite periods; yet it cannot be held inevitable in each particular society, or even probable. A social organism, like an individual organism, undergoes modifications until it comes into equilibrium with environing conditions; and thereupon continues without further change of structure. When the conditions are changed meteorologically, or geologically, or by alterations in the Flora and Fauna, or by migration consequent on pressure of population, or by flight before usurping races, some change of social structure results. But this change does not necessarily imply advance. Often it is towards neither Edition: current; Page: [97] a higher nor a lower structure. When the habitat entails modes of life that are inferior, degradation follows. Only occasionally does the new combination of factors produce a change constituting a step in social evolution, and initiating a social type which spreads and supplants inferior social types. And with these super-organic aggregates, as with the organic aggregates, progression in some causes retrogression in others. The more-evolved societies drive the less-evolved societies into unfavourable habitats; and so entail on them decrease of size, or decay of structure, or both.

Direct evidence forces this conclusion upon us. Lapse from higher civilization to lower civilization, made familiar during school-days, is further exemplified as our knowledge widens. Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Persians, Jews, Greeks, Romans—it needs but to name these to be reminded that many large and highly-evolved societies have either disappeared, or have dwindled to barbarous hordes, or have been long passing through slow decay. Ruins show us that in Java there existed in the past a more-developed society than exists now; and the like is shown by ruins in Cambodia. Peru and Mexico were once the seats of societies large and elaborately organized, which have been disorganized by conquest; and where the cities of Central America once contained great populations carrying on various industries and arts, there are now but scattered tribes of savages. Unquestionably, causes like those which produced these retrogressions, have been at work during the whole period of human existence. Always there have been cosmical and terrestrial changes going on, which, bettering some habitats, have made others worse; always there have been over-populations, spreadings of tribes, conflicts with other tribes, and escape of the defeated into localities unfit for such advanced social life as they had reached; always, where evolution has been uninterfered with externally, there have been those decays and dissolutions which complete the cycles of social changes. And Edition: current; Page: [98] the implication is that remnants of inferior races, taking refuge in inclement, barren, or otherwise unfit regions, have retrograded.

Probably, then, most of the tribes known as lowest, exhibit some social phenomena which are due, not to causes now operating, but to causes that operated during past social states higher than the present. This a priori conclusion harmonizes with the facts; and, indeed, is suggested by facts otherwise inexplicable. Take, for example, some furnished by the Australians. Divided into tribes wandering over a wide area, these savages have, notwithstanding their antagonisms, a complex system of relationships, and consequent interdicts on marriage, which could not possibly have been framed by any agreement among them as they now exist; but which are comprehensible as having survived from a state in which there was closer union, and subordination to some common rule. Such, also, is the implication of the circumcision, and the knocking-out of teeth, which we find among them. For when we come hereafter to deal with bodily mutilations, we shall see that they all imply a subordination, political, or ecclesiastical, or both, such as these races do not now exhibit.

Hence, then, a difficulty in ascertaining inductively what are primitive ideas. Of the ideas current among men now forming the rudest societies, there are most likely some which have descended by tradition from higher states. These have to be discriminated from truly primitive ideas; so that simple induction does not suffice.

§ 51. To the deductive method there are obstacles of another kind but equally great. Comprehension of the thoughts generated in the primitive man by converse with the surrounding world, can be had only by looking at the surrounding world from his stand-point. The accumulated knowledge acquired during education, must be suppressed; and we must divest ourselves of conceptions which, partly Edition: current; Page: [99] by inheritance and partly by individual culture, have been firmly established. None can do this completely, and few can do it even partially.

It needs but to observe what unfit methods are used by teachers, to be convinced that even among the disciplined the power to frame thoughts which are widely unlike their own, is very small. When we see the juvenile mind plied with generalities before it has any of the concrete facts to which they refer—when we see mathematics introduced under the purely rational form, instead of under that empirical form with which it should be commenced by the child, as it was commenced by the race—when we see a subject so abstract as grammar put among the first instead of among the last, and see it taught analytically instead of synthetically; we have ample evidence of the prevailing inability to conceive the ideas of undeveloped minds. And if, though lately children themselves, men find it hard to re-think the thoughts of the child; still harder must they find it to rethink the thoughts of the savage. To keep out automorphic interpretations is beyond our power. To look at things with the eyes of absolute ignorance, and observe how their attributes and actions originally grouped themselves in the mind, implies a self-suppression that is impracticable.

Nevertheless, we must here do our best to conceive the surrounding world as it appeared to the primitive man; that we may be able the better to interpret deductively the evidence available for induction. And though we are incapable of reaching the conception by a direct process, we may approach to it by an indirect process. The doctrine of evolution will help us to delineate primitive ideas in some of their leading traits. Having inferred, a priori, the characters of those ideas, we shall be as far as possible prepared to realize them in imagination, and then to discern them as actually existing.

§ 52. Our postulate must be that primitive ideas are natural, and, under the conditions in which they occur, Edition: current; Page: [100] rational. In early life we have been taught that human nature is everywhere the same. Led thus to contemplate the beliefs of savages as beliefs entertained by minds like our own, we marvel at their strangeness, and ascribe perversity to those who hold them. This error we must replace by the truth that the laws of thought are everywhere the same; and that, given the data as known to him, the primitive man’s inference is the reasonable inference.

From its lowest to its highest grades intelligence proceeds by the classing of objects and the classing of relations; which are, in fact, different aspects of the same process. (Principles of Psychology, §§ 309—316, § 381.) On the one hand, perception of an object implies that its attributes are severally classed with like before-known attributes, and the relations in which they stand to one another with like before-known relations; while the object itself, in being known, is classed with its like as such or such. On the other hand, every step in reasoning implies that the object of which anything is predicated, is classed with objects previously known of like kind; implies that the attribute, power, or act, predicated, is classed as like other previously-known attributes, powers, or acts; and implies that the relation between the object and this predicated attribute, power, or act, is classed with previously-known like relations. This assimilation of states of consciousness of all orders with their likes in past experience, which is the universal intellectual process, animal and human, leads to results that are correct in proportion to the power of appreciating likenesses and unlikenesses. Where simple terms stand in relations that are simple, direct, and close, the classing can be rightly carried on by simple minds; but in proportion as the terms are complex and the relations between them involved, indirect, remote, the classing can be rightly carried on only by minds developed to a corresponding complexity. In the absence of this corresponding complexity, the terms of relations are grouped with those which they conspicuously resemble, and Edition: current; Page: [101] the relations themselves are grouped in like manner. But this leads to error; since the most obvious traits are not always those by which things are really allied to one another, and the most obvious characters of relations are not always their essential characters.

Let us observe a few of the common mistakes thus caused. In old works on natural history, whales are called fishes: living in the water, and fish-like in shape, what else should they be? Nine out of ten cabin-passengers, and ninety-nine out of a hundred of those in the steerage, would be amazed were you to tell them that the porpoises playing about the steamer’s bow, are nearer akin to dogs than to cod. Take, again, the name shell-fish, as popularly used. In the first place, there is supposed to be some alliance between shell-fish and fish-proper, because both are aquatic. In the second place, the fishmonger includes under shell-fish both oysters and crabs: these, though far more remote in type than an eel is from a man, having in common the character that their softer parts are inclosed in hard cases. After reminding ourselves of these mistakes to which classing by obvious characters leads our own people, we shall see how natural are the mistakes into which uncivilized men are similarly led. Hayes could not make the Esquimaux understand that woollen cloth was not a skin. “Glass” they “took for ice, and biscuit for the dried flesh of the musk-ox.” Having so small an acquaintance with things, these were the most rational groupings they could make—quite as rational as those above instanced. If his erroneous classing led the Esquimaux to the erroneous inference that glass would melt in his mouth, this was not more erroneous than that of the ship-passenger who, instead of what he looked for, would find in the porpoise hot blood, and lungs to breathe air with. So, too, remembering that they had no experiences of metals, we shall see nothing irrational in the question put to Jackson by the Fijians—“how we could get axes hard enough in a natural country, to cut Edition: current; Page: [102] down the trees which the barrels of muskets were made of.” For were not tubular canes the only objects to which musket barrels bore any resemblance? When, again, certain Hill-people with whom Dr. Hooker came in contact, saw thrown on the ground a spring-box measuring-tape, that had just been extended for use, and when, seeing the coils of tape disappearing into the box they ran away shrieking, it is manifest that the tape was considered in virtue of its spontaneous movement as something alive, and in virtue of its shape and behaviour as some kind of snake. Without knowledge of mechanical contrivances, and seeing nothing of the internal spring, this belief was perfectly natural—any other would have been irrational. Turn, now, from the classing of objects to the classing of relations. We may again aid ourselves by analyzing some errors current in our own society. It is a common recommendation of some remedy for a burn, that it “draws the fire out:” the implication being that between the thing applied and the heat supposed to be lodged in the tissues, there is a connection like that between some object and another which it pulls. Again, after a long frost, when air highly charged with water comes in contact with a cold smooth surface, such as that of a painted wall, the water condensed on it collects in drops and trickles down; whereupon may be heard the remark that “the wall sweats.” Because the water, not visibly brought from elsewhere, makes its appearance on the wall as perspiration does on the skin, it is assumed to come out of the wall as perspiration does out of the skin. Here, as before, we see a relation classed with another which it superficially resembles, but from which it is entirely alien. If, now, we consider what must happen where ignorance is still greater, we shall no longer be astonished at primitive interpretations. The Orinoco Indians think that dew is “the spittle of the stars.” Observe the genesis of this belief. Dew is a clear liquid to which saliva has some resemblance. It is a liquid which, lying on leaves, etc., seems Edition: current; Page: [103] to have descended from above, as saliva descends from the mouth of one who spits. Having descended during a cloudless night, it must have come from the only things then visible above; namely, the stars. Thus the product itself, dew, and the relation between it and its supposed source, are respectively assimilated with those like them in obvious characters; and we need but recall our own common expression “it spits with rain,” to see how natural is the interpretation.

Another trait of savage conceptions is explicable in a kindred way. Only as knowledge advances and observation becomes critical, does there grow up the idea that the power of any agent to produce its peculiar effect, may depend on some one property to the exclusion of the rest, or on some one part to the exclusion of the rest, or not on one or more of the properties or parts but on the arrangement of them. What character it is in a complex whole which determines its efficiency, can be known only after analysis has advanced somewhat; and until then, the efficiency is necessarily conceived as belonging to the whole indiscriminately. Further, this unanalyzed whole is conceived as standing towards some unanalyzed effect, in some relation that is unanalyzed. This trait of primitive thought is so pregnant of results, that we must consider it more closely. Let us symbolize the several attributes of an object, say a sea-shell, by A, B, C, D, E, and the relations among them by w, x, y, z. The ability of this object to concentrate sound on the ear, is due in part to the smoothness of its internal surface (which we will express by C), and in part to those relations among the portions of this surface constituting its shape (which we will symbolize by y). Now, that the ability of the shell to produce a hissing murmur when held to the ear, may be understood as thus resulting, it is needful that C and y should be separated in thought from the rest. Until this can be done, the sound-multiplying power of the shell cannot be known not to depend on its colour, or hardness, or roughness (supposing Edition: current; Page: [104] these to be separately thinkable as attributes). Evidently, before attributes are distinguished, this power of the shell can be thought of only as belonging to it generally—residing in it as a whole. But, as we have seen (§ 40), attributes or properties, as we understand them, are not recognizable by the savage—are abstractions which neither his faculties can grasp nor his language express. Thus, of necessity, he associates this strange murmuring with the shell bodily—regards it as related to the shell as weight is related to a stone. Hence certain beliefs, everywhere conspicuous among the uncivilized. A special potency which some object or part of an object displays, belongs to it in such wise that it may be acquired by consuming or possessing this object or part. The powers of a conquered antagonist are supposed to be gained by devouring him. The Dakotah eats the heart of a slain foe to increase his own courage; the New Zealander swallows his dead enemy’s eyes that he may see the further; the Abipone consumes tiger’s flesh, thinking so to gain the tiger’s strength and ferocity: cases which recall the legend about Zeus devouring Metis that he might become possessed of her wisdom. The like trait is seen in such beliefs as that of the Guaranis, whose “pregnant women abstained from eating the flesh of the Anta, lest the child should have a large nose; and from small birds, lest it should prove diminutive;” or again, in such beliefs as that which led the Caribs to sprinkle a male infant with his father’s blood to give him his father’s courage; or again, in such beliefs as that of the Bulloms, who hold that possessing part of a successful person’s body, gives them “a portion of his good fortune.” Clearly the implied mode of thought, shown even in the medical prescriptions of past ages, and continuing down to recent days in the notion that character is absorbed with mother’s milk, is a mode of thought necessarily persisting until analysis has disclosed the complexities of causal relations.

While physical conceptions are few and vague, any antecedent Edition: current; Page: [105] serves to account for any consequent. Ask a quarryman what he thinks of the fossils his pick-axe is exposing, and he will tell you they are “sports of nature:” the tendency of his thought to pass from the existence of the fossils as an effect, to some agent as cause, is satisfied, and his curiosity ceases. The plumber, cross-examined about the working of the pump he is repairing, says that the water rises in it by suction. Having classed the process with one which he can perform by the muscular actions of his mouth applied to a tube, he thinks he understands it—never asks what force makes the water rise towards his mouth when he performs these muscular actions. Similarly with an explanation of some unfamiliar fact which you may often hear in cultivated society—“it is caused by electricity.” The mental tension is sufficiently relieved when, to the observed result, there is joined in thought this something with a name; though there is no notion what the something really is, nor the remotest idea how the result can be wrought by it. Having such illustrations furnished by those around us, we shall have no difficulty in seeing how the savage, with fewer experiences more vaguely grouped, adopts, as quite adequate, the first explanation which familiar associations suggest. If Siberian tribes, finding mammoths imbedded in ice and the bones of mammoths in the ground, ascribe earthquakes to the burrowing of these huge beasts; or if savages living near volcanoes, think of them as fires lighted by some of their ancestors to cook by; they do but illustrate in a more marked way, the common readiness to fill up the missing term of a causal relation by the first agency which occurs to the mind. Further, it is observable that proximate interpretations suffice—there is no tendency to ask for anything beyond them. The Africans who denied the alleged obligations to God, by saying that “the earth, and not God, gave them gold, which was dug out of its bowels; that the earth yielded them maize and rice; . . . that for fruits they were obliged to the Portuguese, who had planted the Edition: current; Page: [106] trees;” and so on; show us that a relation between the last consequent and its immediate antecedent having been established, nothing further happens. There is not enough mental excursiveness to raise a question respecting any remoter antecedent.

One other trait, consequent on the foregoing traits, should be added. There result conceptions that are inconsistent and confused. Certain fundamental ideas as found among the Iroquois, are described by Morgan as “vague and diversified;” as found among the Creeks, are characterized by Schoolcraft as “confused and irregular;” as found among the Karens, are said by Mason to be “confused, indefinite, and contradictory.” Everywhere occur gross inconsistencies which arise from leaving propositions uncompared; as when, in almost the same breath, a Malagasy “will express his belief that when he dies he ceases altogether to exist, . . . and yet confess the fact that he is in the habit of praying to his ancestors”—a special inconsistency occurring among many peoples. How illogicalities so extreme are possible, we shall the more easily see on recalling certain of our own illogicalities. Instance the popular notion that killing a mad dog preserves from harm a person just bitten by it; or instance that familiar absurdity fallen into by believers in ghosts, who, admitting that ghosts are seen clothed, admit, by implication, that coats have ghosts—an implication they had not perceived. Among men of low type, then, far more ignorant and with less capacity for thought, we must expect to find a chaos of notions, and a ready acceptance of doctrines which are ludicrously incongruous.

And now we have prepared ourselves, so far as may be, for understanding primitive ideas. We have seen that a true interpretation of these must be one which recognizes their naturalness under the conditions. The mind of the savage, like the mind of the civilized, proceeds by classing objects and relations with their likes in past experience. In Edition: current; Page: [107] the absence of adequate mental power, there result simple and vague classings of objects by conspicuous likenesses, and of actions by conspicuous likenesses; and hence come crude notions, too simple and too few in their kinds, to represent the facts. Further, these crude notions are inevitably inconsistent to an extreme degree. Let us now glance at the sets of ideas thus formed and thus charcterized.

§ 53. In the sky, clear a few moments ago, the savage sees a fragment of cloud which grows while he gazes. At another time, watching one of these moving masses, he observes shreds of it drift away and vanish; and presently the whole disappears. What thought results in him? He knows nothing about precipitation of vapour and dissolution of vapour; nor has there been any one to stop his inquiry by the reply—“It is only a cloud.” Something he could not before see has become visible; and something just now visible has vanished. The whence, and the where, and the why, he cannot tell; but there is the fact.

In this same space above him occur other changes. As day declines bright points here and there show themselves, becoming clearer and more numerous as darkness increases; and then at dawn they fade gradually, until not one is left. Differing from clouds utterly in size, form, colour, etc.; differing also as continually re-appearing in something like the same places, in the same relative positions, and in moving but very slowly always in the same way; they are yet like them in becoming now visible and now invisible. That feeble lights may be wholly obscured by a bright light, and that the stars are shining during the day though he does not see them, are facts beyond the imagination of the savage. The truth, as he perceives it, is that these existences now show themselves and now are hidden.

Utterly unlike clouds and stars in their aspects as Sun and Moon are, they show, in common with them, this same Edition: current; Page: [108] alternation of visibility with invisibility. The Sun rises on the other side of the mountains; from time to time covered by a cloud presently comes out again; and at length hides below the level of the sea. The Moon, besides doing the like, first increases slowly night after night, and then wanes: by and by re-appearing as a thin bright streak, with the rest of her disc so faintly perceptible as to seem only half existing.

Added to these commonest and most regular occultations and manifestations, are various others, even more striking—comets, meteors, and the aurora with its arch and pulsating streams; flashes of lightning, rainbows, halos. Differing from the rest and from one another as these do, they similarly appear and disappear. So that by a being absolutely ignorant but able to remember, and to group the things he remembers, the heavens must be regarded as a scene of arrivals and departures of many kinds of existences; some gradual, some sudden, but alike in this, that it is impossible to say whence the existences come or whither they go.

Not the sky only, but also the Earth’s surface, supplies various instances of these disappearances of things which have unaccountably appeared. Now the savage sees little pools of water formed by the rain drops coming from a source he cannot reach; and now, in a few hours, the gathered liquid has made itself invisible. Here, again, is a fog—perhaps lying isolated in a hollow, perhaps enwrapping everything—which came a while since, and presently goes without leaving a trace of its whereabouts. Afar off is perceived water—obviously a great lake; but on approaching it the seeming lake recedes, and cannot be found. In the desert, what we know as sand-whirlwinds, and on the sea what we know as water-spouts, are to the primitive man moving things which come out of nothing and then vanish into nothing. Looking over the ocean he recognizes an island known to be a long way off, and commonly invisible, but which has now risen from the water; and to-morrow, he observes, unsupported in space, an inverted figure of a boat, perhaps Edition: current; Page: [109] by itself, or perhaps joined to an erect figure above. In one place he sometimes perceives land-objects on the surface of the sea, or in the air over it—a fata morgana; and in another, opposite to him on the mist, there occasionally comes into view a gigantic duplicate of himself—“a Brocken spectre.” These occurrences, some familiar and some unfamiliar, repeat the same experience—show transitions between the visible and the invisible.

Once more, let us ask what must be the original conception of wind. Nothing in early experiences yields the idea of air, as we are now familiar with it; and, indeed, most can recall the difficulty they once had in thinking of the surrounding medium as a material substance. The primitive man cannot regard it as a something which acts as do the things he sees and handles. Into this seemingly-empty space on all sides, there from time to time comes an invisible agent which bends the trees, drives along the leaves, disturbs the water; and which he feels moving his hair, fanning his cheek, and now and then pushing his body with a force he has some difficulty in overcoming. What may be the nature of this agent there is nothing to tell him; but one thing is irresistibly thrust on his consciousness—that sounds are made, things about him are moved, and he himself is buffeted, by an existence he can neither grasp nor see.

What primitive ideas arise out of these experiences derived from the inorganic world? In the absence of hypothesis (which is foreign to thought in its earliest stages), what mental association do these occurrences, some at long intervals, some daily, some hourly, some from minute to minute, tend to establish? They present, under many forms, the relation between a perceptible and an imperceptible mode of existence. In what way does the savage think of this relation? He cannot think of it in terms of dissipation into vapour and condensation from it, nor in terms of optical relations producing illusions, nor in any terms of physical Edition: current; Page: [110] science. How, then, does he formulate it? A clue to the answer will be furnished by recalling certain remarks of young children. When an image from the magic lantern thrown on a screen, suddenly disappears on withdrawal of the slide, or when the reflection from a looking-glass, cast for a child’s amusement on the wall or ceiling, is made to vanish by changing the attitude of the glass, the child asks—“Where is it gone to?” The notion arising in its mind is, not that this something no longer seen has become non-existent, but that it has become non-apparent; and it is led to think this by daily observing persons disappear behind adjacent objects, by watching while things are put out of sight, and by now and again finding a toy that had been hidden or lost. Similarly, the primitive idea is, that these various entities now manifest themselves and now conceal themselves. As the animal which he has wounded hides itself in the brushwood, and, if it cannot be found, is supposed by the savage to have escaped in some incomprehensible way, but to be still existing; so, in the absence of accumulated and organized knowledge, the implication of all these experiences is, that many of the things above and around pass often from visibility to invisibility, and conversely. Bearing in mind how the actions of wind prove that there is an invisible form of existence which possesses power, we shall see this belief to be plausible.

It remains only to point out that along with this conception of a visible condition and an invisible condition, which each of these many things has, there comes the conception of duality. Each of them is in a sense double; since it has these two complementary modes of being.

§ 54. Significant facts of another order may next be noted—facts impressing the primitive man with the belief that things are transmutable from one kind of substance into another. I refer to the facts forced on his attention by imbedded remains of animals and plants.

While gathering food on the sea-shore, he finds, protruding from a rock, a shell, which, if not of the same shape as the shells he picks up, is so similar that he naturally classes it with them. But instead of being loose, it is part of a solid block; and on breaking it off, he finds its inside as hard as its matrix. Here, then, are two kindred forms, one of which consists of shell and flesh, and the other of shell and stone. Near at hand, in the mass of clay débris detached from an adjacent cliff, he picks up a fossil ammonite. Perhaps, like the Gryphœa just examined, it has a shelly coating with a stony inside. Perhaps, as happens with some liassic ammonites of which the shell has been dissolved away, leaving the masses of indurated clay that filled its chambers locked loosely together, it suggests a series of articulated vertebræ coiled up; or, as with other liassic ammonites of which the shell has been replaced by iron pyrites, it has a glistening appearance like that of a snake’s skin. As such fossils are sometimes called “snake-stones,” and are, in Ireland, supposed to be the serpents St. Patrick banished, we cannot wonder if the uncritical savage, classing this object with those it most resembles, thinks it a transmuted snake—once flesh and now stone. In another place, where a gully has been cut through sandstone by a stream, he observes on the surface of a slab the outline of a fish, and, looking closely, sees scales and the traces of fins; and elsewhere, similarly imbedded in rock, he finds bones not unlike those of the animals he kills for food: some of them, indeed, not unlike those of men.

Still more suggestive are the fossil plants occasionally discovered. I do not refer so much to the prints of leaves in shale, and the stony stems found in strata accompanying coal. I refer, more especially, to the silicified trees here and there met with. Retaining, not their general forms only but their minute structures, so that the annual growths are marked by rings of colour such as mark them in living stems, these yield the savage clear evidence of transmutation. With Edition: current; Page: [112] all our knowledge it remains difficult to understand how silica can so replace the components of the wood as to preserve the appearance thus perfectly; and for the primitive man, knowing nothing of molecular action and unable to conceive a process of substitution, there is no possible thought but that the wood is changed into stone.*

Thus, if we ignore those conceptions of physical causation which have arisen only as experiences have been slowly organized during civilization, we shall see that in their absence there would be nothing to prevent us from putting on these facts the interpretations which the primitive man puts on them. Looking at the evidence through his eyes, we find his belief that things change from one kind of substance to another, to be the inevitable belief.

And here let us not omit to note that along with the notion of transmutation is involved the notion of duality. These things have obviously two states of existence.

§ 55. Did we not thoughtlessly assume that truths made obvious by culture are naturally obvious, we should see that an unlimited belief in change of shape, as well as in change of substance, is one which the savage cannot avoid. From early childhood we hear remarks implying that certain transformations which living things undergo are matters of course, while other transformations are impossible. This distinction we suppose to have been manifest at the outset. But at the outset, the observed metamorphoses suggest that any metamorphosis may occur.

Consider the immense contrast in form as in texture between the seed and the plant. Look at this nut with hard brown shell and white kernel, and ask what basis there is for the expectation that from it will presently come a soft shoot and green leaves. When young we are told that the one grows into the other; and the blank form of explanation being thus filled up, we cease to wonder and inquire. Yet it needs but to consider what thought would have arisen had there been no one to give this mere verbal solution, to see that the thought would have been—transformation. Apart from hypothesis, the bare fact is that a thing having one size, shape, and colour, becomes a thing having an utterly different size, shape, and colour.

Similarly with the eggs of birds. A few days since this nest contained five rounded, smooth, speckled bodies; and now in place of them are as many chicks gaping for food. We are brought up to the idea that the eggs have been hatched; and with this semblance of interpretation we are content. This extreme change in visible and tangible characters being recognized as one constantly occurring in the order of nature, is therefore regarded as not remarkable. But to a mind occupied by no generalized experiences of its own or of others, there would seem nothing more strange in the production of chicks from nuts than in the production of chicks from eggs: a metamorphosis of the kind we think impossible, would stand on the same footing as one which familiarity has made us think natural. Indeed, on remembering that there still survives, or till lately survived, the belief that barnacle-geese arise from barnacles—on learning that in the early Transactions of the Royal Society, there is a paper describing a barnacle as showing traces of the young bird it is about to produce; it will be seen that only by advanced science has there been discriminated the natural organic transformations, from transformations which to ignorance seem just as likely.

The insect-world yields instances of metamorphoses even Edition: current; Page: [114] more misleading. To a branch above his wigwam, the savage saw a few days ago, a caterpillar hanging with its head downwards. Now in the same place hangs a differently formed and coloured thing—a chrysalis. A fortnight after there comes out a butterfly: leaving a thin empty case. These insect-metamorphoses, as we call them, which we now interpret as processes of evolution presenting certain definitely-marked stages, are in the eyes of the primitive man, metamorphoses in the original sense. He accepts them as actual changes of one thing into another thing utterly unlike it.

How readily the savage confounds these metamorphoses which really occur, with metamorphoses which seem to occur but are impossible, we shall perceive on noting a few cases of mimicry by insects, and the conclusions they lead to. Many caterpillars, beetles, moths, butterflies, simulate the objects by which they are commonly surrounded. The Onychocerus scorpio is so exactly like, “in colour and rugosity,” to a piece of the bark of the particular tree it frequents, “that until it moves it is absolutely invisible:” thus raising the idea that a piece of the bark itself has become alive. Another beetle, Onthophilus sulcatus is “like the seed of an umbelliferous plant;” another is “undistinguishable by the eye from the dung of caterpillars;” some of the Cassidæ “resemble glittering dew-drops upon the leaves;” and there is a weevil so coloured and formed that, on rolling itself up, it “becomes a mere oval brownish lump, which it is hopeless to look for among the similarly-coloured little stones and earth pellets among which it lies motionless,” and out of which it emerges after its fright, as though a pebble had become animated. To these examples given by Mr. Wallace, may be added that of the “walking-stick insects,” so called “from their singular resemblance to twigs and branches.”

What wonderful resemblances exist, and what illusions they may lead to, will be fully perceived by those who have seen, in Mr. Wallace’s collection, butterflies of the Indian genus Kallima, placed amid the objects they simulate. Settling on branches bearing dead leaves, and closing its wings, one of these then resembles a dead leaf, not only in general shape, colour, markings, but in so seating itself that the processes of the lower wings unite to form the representation of a foot-stalk. When it takes flight, the impression produced is that one of the leaves has changed into a butterfly. This impression is greatly strengthened when the creature is caught. On the under-side of the closed wings, is clearly marked the mid-rib, running right across them both from foot-stalk to apex; and here, too, are lateral veins. Nay, this is not all. Mr. Wallace says—

On recalling the fact that, a few generations ago, civilized people believed, as many civilized people believe still, that decaying meat is itself transformed into maggots—on being reminded that our peasantry at the present time, think the thread-like aquatic worm Gordius, is a horsehair that has fallen into the water and become living; we shall see that these extreme resemblances inevitably raise a suspicion of actual metamorphoses. That this suspicion, so suggested, becomes a belief, is a proved fact. In Java and neighbouring regions inhabited by it, that marvellous insect, “the Edition: current; Page: [116] walking leaf,” is positively asserted to be a leaf that has become animated. What else should it be? In the absence of that explanation of mimicry so happily hit upon by Mr. Bates, no other origin for such wonderful likenesses between things wholly unallied can be imagined.

Once established, the belief in transformation easily extends itself to other classes of things. Between an egg and a young bird, there is a far greater contrast in appearance and structure than between one mammal and another. The tadpole, with a tail and no limbs, differs from the young frog with four limbs and no tail, more than a man differs from a hyæna; for both of these have four limbs, and both laugh. Hence there seems ample justification for the belief that any kind of creature may be transformed into any other; and so there results the theory of metamorphosis in general, which rises into an explanation everywhere employed without check.

Here, again, we have to note that while initiating and fostering the notion that things of all kinds may suddenly change their forms, the experiences of transformations confirm the notion of duality. Each object is not only what it seems, but is potentially something else.

§ 56. What are shadows? Familiar as has become the interpretation of them in terms of physical causation, we do not ask how they look to the absolutely ignorant.

Those from whose minds the thoughts of childhood have not wholly vanished, will remember the interest they once felt in watching their shadows—moving legs and arms and fingers, and observing how corresponding parts of the shadows moved. By a child a shadow is thought of as an entity. I do not assert this without evidence. A memorandum made in 1858-9, in elucidation of the ideas described in the book of Williams on the Fijians, then recently published, concerns a little girl seven years old, who did not know what a shadow was, and to whom I could give no conception Edition: current; Page: [117] of its true nature. On ignoring acquired knowledge, we shall see this difficulty to be quite natural. A thing having outlines, and differing from surrounding things in colour, and especially a thing which moves, is, in other cases, a reality. Why is not this a reality? The conception of it as merely a negation of light, cannot be framed until after the behaviour of light is in some degree understood. Doubtless the uncultured among ourselves, without formulating the truth that light, proceeding in straight lines, necessarily leaves unlighted spaces behind opaque objects, nevertheless regard a shadow as naturally attending an object exposed to light, and as not being anything real. But this is one of the countless cases in which inquiry is set at rest by a verbal explanation. “It’s only a shadow,” is the answer given in early days; and this answer, repeatedly given, deadens wonder and stops further thought.

The primitive man, left to himself, necessarily concludes a shadow to be an actual existence, which belongs to the person casting it. He simply accepts the facts. Whenever the sun or moon is visible, he sees this attendant thing which rudely resembles him in shape, which moves when he moves, which now goes before him, now keeps by his side, now follows him, which lengthens and shortens as the ground inclines this way or that, and which distorts itself in strange ways as he passes by irregular surfaces. True, he cannot see it in cloudy weather; but, in the absence of a physical interpretation, this simply proves that his attendant comes out only on bright days and bright nights. It is true, also, that such resemblance as his shadow bears to him, and its approximate separateness from him, are shown only when he stands up: on lying down it seems to disappear and partially merge into him. But this observation confirms his impression of its reality. The greater or less separateness of his own shadow, reminds him of cases where a shadow is quite separate. When watching a fish in the water on a fine day, he sees a dark, fish-shaped patch on the bottom at a considerable Edition: current; Page: [118] distance from the fish, but nevertheless following it hither and thither. Lifting up his eyes, he observes dark tracts moving along the mountain sides—tracts which, whether traced or not to the clouds that cast them, are seen to be widely disconnected from objects. Hence it is clear that shadows, often so closely joined with their objects as to be hardly distinguishable from them, may become distinct and remote.

Thus, by minds beginning to generalize, shadows must be conceived as existences appended to, but capable of separation from, material things. And that they are so conceived is abundantly proved. The Benin-negroes regard men’s shadows as their souls; and the Wanika are afraid of their own shadows: possibly thinking, as some other negroes do, that their shadows watch all their actions, and bear witness against them. The Greenlanders say a man’s shadow is one of his two souls—the one which goes away from his body at night. Among the Fijians, too, the shadow is called “the dark spirit,” as distinguished from another which each man possesses. And the community of meaning, hereafter to be noted more fully, which various unallied languages betray between shade and spirit, shows us the same thing.

These illustrations suggest more than I here wish to show. The ideas of the uncivilized as we now find them, have developed from their first vague forms into forms having more coherence and definiteness. We must neglect the special characters of these ideas, and consider only that most general character with which they began. This proves to be the character inferred above. Shadows are realities which, always intangible and often invisible, nevertheless severally belong to their visible and tangible correlatives; and the facts they present, furnish further materials for developing both the notion of apparent and unapparent states of being, and the notion of a duality in things.

§ 57. Other phenomena, in some respects allied, yield to these notions still more materials. I refer to reflections.

If the rude resemblance which a shadow bears to the person casting it, raises the idea of a second entity, much more must the exact resemblance of a reflection do this. Repeating all the details of form, of light and shade, of colour, and mimicking even the grimaces of the original, this image cannot at first be interpreted otherwise than as an existence. Only by experiment is it ascertained that to the visual impressions there are not, in this case, those corresponding tactual impressions yielded by most other things. What results? Simply the notion of an existence which can be seen but not felt. Optical interpretation is impossible. That the image is formed by reflected rays, cannot be conceived while physical knowledge does not exist; and in the absence of authoritative statement that the reflection is a mere appearance, it is inevitably taken for a reality—a reality in some way belonging to the person whose traits it simulates and whose actions it mocks. Moreover, these duplicates seen in the water, yield to the primitive man verifications of certain other beliefs. Deep down in the clear pool, are there not clouds like those he sees above? The clouds above appear and disappear. Has not the existence of these clouds below something to do with it? At night, again, seeming as though far underneath the surface of the water, are stars as bright as those overhead. Are there, then, two places for the stars? and did those which disappeared during the day go below where the rest are? Once more, overhanging the pool is the dead tree from which he breaks off branches for firewood. Is there not an image of it too? and the branch which he burns and which vanishes while burning—is there not some connexion between its invisible state and that image of it in the water which he could not touch, any more than he can now touch the consumed branch?

That reflections thus generate a belief that each person has a duplicate, usually unseen, but which may be seen on Edition: current; Page: [120] going to the water-side and looking in, is not an a priori inference only: there are facts verifying it. Besides “the dark spirit,” identified with the shadow, which the Fijians say goes to Hades, they say each man has another—“his likeness reflected in water or a looking-glass,” which “is supposed to stay near the place in which a man dies.” This belief in two spirits, is, indeed, the most consistent one. For are not a man’s shadow and his reflection separate? and are they not co-existent with one another and with himself? Can he not, standing at the water-side, observe that the reflection in the water and the shadow on the shore, simultaneously move as he moves? Clearly, while both belong to him, the two are independent of him and one another; for both may be absent together, and either may be present in the absence of the other.

Early theories about the nature of this duplicate are now beside the question. We are concerned only with the fact that it is thought of as real. Here is revealed another class of facts confirming the notion that existences have their visible and invisible states, and strengthening the implication of a duality in each existence.

§ 58. Let any one ask himself what would be his thought if, in a state of child-like ignorance, he were to hear repeated a shout which he uttered. Would he not inevitably conclude that the answering shout came from another person? Succeeding shouts severally responded to in tones like his own, yet without visible source, would rouse the idea that this person was mocking him, and at the same time concealing himself. A futile search in the wood or under the cliff, would end in the conviction that the hiding person was very cunning: especially when joined to the fact that here, in the spot whence the answer before came, no answer was now given—obviously because it would disclose the mocker’s whereabouts. If at this same place on subsequent occasions, a responsive shout always came to any passer-by who called Edition: current; Page: [121] out, the resulting thought would be that in this place there dwelt one of these invisible forms—a man who had passed into an invisible state, or who could become invisible when sought.

No physical explanation of an echo can be framed by the uncivilized man. What does he know about the reflection of sound-waves?—what, indeed, is known about the reflection of sound-waves by the mass of our own people? Were it not that the spread of knowledge has modified the mode of thought throughout all classes, producing everywhere a readiness to accept what we call natural interpretations, and to assume that there are natural interpretations to occurrences not comprehended; there would even now be an explanation of echoes as caused by unseen beings.

That to the primitive mind they thus present themselves, is shown by facts. Of the Abipones, we read that “what became of the Lokal [spirit of the dead] they knew not, but they fear it, and believe that the echo was its voice.” The Indians of Cumana (Central America) “believed the soul to be immortal, that it did eat and drink in a plain where it resided, and that the echo was its answer to him that spoke or called.” Narrating his voyage down the Niger, Lander says that from time to time, as they came to a turn in the creek, the captain of the canoe halloed “to the fetish, and where an echo was returned, half-a-glass of rum, and a piece of yam and fish, were thrown into the water . . . on asking Boy the reason why he was throwing away the provisions thus, he asked: ‘Did you not hear the fetish?’ ”

Here, as before, I must ask the reader to ignore these special interpretations, acceptance of which forestalls the argument. Attention is now drawn to this evidence simply as confirming the inference that, in the absence of physical explanation, an echo is conceived as the voice of some one who avoids being seen. So that once more we have duality implied—an invisible state as well as a visible state.

§ 59. To a mind unfurnished with any ideas save those of its own gathering, surrounding nature thus presents multitudinous cases of seemingly-arbitrary change. In the sky and on the earth, things make their appearance and disappear; and there is nothing to show why they do so. Here on the surface and there imbedded in the ground, are things that have been transmuted in substance—changed from flesh to stone, from wood to flint. Living bodies on all sides exemplify metamorphosis in ways marvellous enough to the instructed, and to the primitive man quite incomprehensible. And the conception of two or more inter-changeable states of existence, impressed on him by such phenomena, is again impressed on him by shadows, reflections, and echoes.

Did we not thoughtlessly accept as self-evident the truths elaborated during civilization and acquired insensibly during our early days, we should at once see that these ideas which the primitive man forms, are inevitably formed. The laws of mental association necessitate these primitive notions of transmutation, of metamorphosis, of duality; and, until experiences have been systematized, no restraints are put on them. With the eyes of developed knowledge we look at snow as a particular form of crystallized water, and at hail as drops of rain which congealed as they fell. When these become fluid we say they have thawed—thinking of the change as a physical effect of heat; and, similarly, when the hoar frost fringing the sprays turns into hanging drops, or when the surface of the pool solidifies and again liquefies. But looked at with the eyes of absolute ignorance, these changes are transmutations of substance—passings from one kind of existence into another kind of existence. And in like ways are conceived all the changes above enumerated.

Let us now ask what happens in the primitive mind when there has been accumulated this chaotic assemblage of crude ideas, having, amid their differences, certain resemblances. In conformity with the law of evolution, every aggregate Edition: current; Page: [123] tends to integrate, and to differentiate while it integrates. The aggregate of primitive ideas must do this. After what manner will it do it? These multitudinous vague notions form a loose mass without order. They slowly segregate, like cohering with like, and so forming indefinitely-marked groups. When these groups begin to form a consolidated whole, constituting a general conception of the way in which things at large go on, they must do it in the same way: such coherence of the groups as arises, must be due to some likeness among the members of all the groups. We have seen that there is such a likeness—this common trait of duality joined with this aptitude for passing from one mode of existence to another. Integration must be set up by the recognition of some conspicuous typical case. When, into a heap of detached observations, is introduced an observation akin to them in which a causal relation is discernible, it forthwith commences assimilating to itself from this heap of observations, those which are congruous; and tends even to coerce into union those of which the congruity is not manifest. One may say that as the protoplasm forming an unfertilized germ, remains inert until the matter of a sperm-cell is joined with it, but begins to organize when this addition is made; so a loose mass of observations continues unsystematized in the absence of an hypothesis, but under the stimulus of an hypothesis undergoes changes bringing about a coherent systematic doctrine. What particular example, then, of this prevalent duality, plays the part of an organizing principle to the aggregate of primitive ideas? We must not look for an hypothesis properly so called: an hypothesis is an implement of inquiry not to be framed by the primitive mind. We must look for some experience in which this duality is forcibly thrust on the attention. As a consciously-held hypothesis is based on some obtrusive instance of a relation, which other instances are suspected to be like; so the particular primitive notion which is to serve as an unconscious hypothesis, setting up organization Edition: current; Page: [124] in this aggregate of primitive notions, must be one conspicuously exemplifying their common trait.

First identifying this typical notion, we must afterwards enter on a survey of the conceptions which result. It will be needful to pursue various lines of inquiry and exposition not manifestly relevant to our subject; and it will also be needful to contemplate much evidence furnished by men who have advanced beyond the savage state. But this discursive treatment is unavoidable. Until we can figure to ourselves with approximate truth the primitive system of thought, we cannot understand primitive conduct; and rightly to conceive the primitive system of thought, we must compare the systems found in many societies: helping ourselves by observing its developed forms, to verify our conclusions respecting its undeveloped form.*