CHAPTER VII: THE PRIMITIVE MAN—INTELLECTUAL.

§ 39. The three measures of mental evolution which, in the last chapter, helped us to delineate the emotional nature of the primitive man, will, in this chapter, help us to delineate his intellectual nature. And further to aid ourselves we must recall, in connexion with these measures, those traits of thought which, in the Principles of Psychology (§§ 484—93), were shown to characterize a lower evolution as compared with a higher.

Conceptions of general facts being derived from experiences of particular facts and coming later, are deficient in the primitive man. Consciousness of a general truth implies more heterogeneous correspondence than does consciousness of any included particular truth; it implies higher representativeness, since it colligates more numerous and varied ideas; and it is more remote from reflex action—will not, indeed, of itself, excite action at all. Having no records, man, in his uncivilized state, cannot recognize long sequences. Hence prevision of distant results, such as is possible in a settled society having measures and written language, is impossible to him: correspondence in time comes within narrow limits. The representations include few successions of phenomena, and these not comprehensive ones. And there is but a moderate departure from the reflex life in which stimulus and act stand in immediate connexion. Ignorant of localities outside his own, the Edition: current; Page: [76] associations of ideas the primitive man forms are little liable to be changed. As experiences (multiplying in number, gathered from a wider area, and added to by those which other men record) become more heterogeneous, the narrow notions first framed are shaken and made more plastic—there comes greater modifiability of belief. In his relative rigidity of belief we see a smaller correspondence with an environment containing adverse facts; less of that representativeness which simultaneously grasps and averages much evidence; and a smaller divergence from those lowest actions in which impressions cause, irresistibly, the appropriate motions. Conditioned as he is, the savage lacks abstract ideas. Drawn from many concrete ideas, an abstract idea becomes detachable from them only as fast as their variety leads to mutual cancellings of differences, and leaves outstanding that which they have in common. This implies growth of the correspondence in range and heterogeneity; wider representation of the concretes whence the idea is abstracted; and greater remoteness from reflex action. Such abstract ideas as those of property and cause, belong to a still higher stage. For only after many special properties and many special causes have been abstracted, can there arise the re-abstracted ideas of property in general and cause in general. The conception of uniformity in the order of phenomena, develops simultaneously. Only along with the use of measures does there grow up the means of ascertaining uniformity; and only after a great accumulation of measured results does the idea of law become possible. Here, again, the indices of mental evolution serve. The conception of natural order presupposes an advanced correspondence; it involves re-representativeness in a high degree; and the implied divergence from reflex action is extreme. Until the notion of uniformity has developed along with the use of measures, thought cannot have much definiteness. In primitive life, there is little to yield the idea of agreement; and so long Edition: current; Page: [77] as there are few experiences of exact equality between objects, or perfect conformity between statements and facts, or complete fulfilment of anticipations by results, the notion of truth cannot become clear. Once more our general tests answer. The conception of truth, being the conception of correspondence between Thoughts and Things, implies advance of that correspondence; it involves representations which are higher, as being better adjusted to realities; and its growth causes a decrease of the primitive credulity allied to reflex action—allied, since it shows us single suggestions producing sudden beliefs which forthwith issue in conduct. Add that only as this conception of truth advances, and therefore the correlative conception of untruth, can scepticism and criticism grow common. Lastly, such imagination as the primitive man has, small in range and heterogeneity, is reminiscent only, not constructive. An imagination which invents, shows extension of the correspondence from the region of the actual into that of the potential; implies a representativeness not limited to combinations which have been, or are, in the environment, but including non-existing combinations thereafter made to exist; and exhibits the greatest remoteness from reflex action, since the stimulus issuing in movement is unlike any that ever before acted.

And now, having enumerated these leading traits of intellectual evolution in its latter stages, as deduced from psychological principles, we are prepared to observe the significance of the facts as described by travellers.

§ 40. Testimonies to the acute senses and quick perceptions of the uncivilized, are given by nearly everyone who describes them.

Lichtenstein says the vision of the Bushman is telescopic; and Barrow speaks of his “keen eye always in motion.” Of Asiatics may be named the Karens, who see as far with naked eyes as we do with opera-glasses; and the inhabitants Edition: current; Page: [78] of the Siberian steppes are celebrated for their “distant and perfect sight.” Of the Brazilians, Herndon writes—“The Indians have very keen senses, and see and hear things that are inaudible and invisible to us;” and the like is remarked of the Tupis. The Abipones, “like apes, are always in motion;” and Dobrizhoffer asserts that they discern things which escape “the most quick-sighted European.” Respecting hearing, too, there is similar, if less abundant, evidence. All have read of the feats of North American Indians in detecting faint sounds; and the acute hearing of the Veddahs is shown by their habit of finding bees’ nests by the hum.

Still more abundant are the testimonies respecting their active and minute observation. “Excellent superficial observers,” is the characterization Palgrave gives of the Bedouins. Burton refers to the “high organization of the perceptive faculties” among them; and Petherick proved, by a test, their marvellous powers of tracking. In South Africa the Hottentots show astonishing quickness “in everything relating to cattle;” and Galton says the Damaras “have a wonderful faculty of recollecting any ox that they have once seen.” It is the same in America. Burton, speaking of the Prairie Indians, comments on the “development of the perceptions which is produced by the constant and minute observations of a limited number of objects.” Instances are given showing what exact topographers the Chippewayans are; and the like is alleged of the Dakotahs. Bates notices the extraordinary “sense of locality” of the Brazilian Indians. Concerning the Arawaks, Hillhouse says—“Where an European can discover no indication whatever, an Indian will point out the footsteps of any number of negroes, and will state the precise day on which they have passed; and if on the same day he will state the hour.” A member of a Guiana tribe “will tell how many men, women, and children have passed, where a stranger could only see faint and confused marks on the path.” Edition: current; Page: [79] “Here passes one who does not belong to our village,” said a native of Guiana searching for tracks; and Schomburgh adds that their power “borders on the magical.”

Along with this acuteness of perception there naturally goes great skill in those actions depending on immediate guidance of perception. The Esquimaux show great dexterity in all manual works. Kolben asserts that the Hottentots are very dexterous in the use of their weapons. Of the Fuegians it is said that “their dexterity with the sling is extraordinary.” The skill of the Andamanese is shown in their unerring shots with arrows at forty or fifty yards. Tongans “are great adepts in managing their canoes.” The accuracy with which an Australian propels a spear with his throwing-stick, is remarkable; while all have heard of his feats with the boomerang. And from the Hill-tribes of India, the Santals may be singled out as so “very expert with the bow and arrow” that they kill birds on the wing, and knock over hares at full speed.

Recognizing some exceptions to this expertness, as among the now-extinct Tasmanians and the Veddahs of Ceylon; and observing that survival of the fittest must ever have tended to establish these traits among men whose lives from hour to hour depended on their keen senses, quick observations, and efficient uses of their weapons; we have here to note this trait as significant in its implications. For in virtue of a general antagonism between the activities of simple faculties and the activities of complex faculties, this dominance of the lower intellectual life hinders the higher intellectual life. In proportion as the mental energies go out in restless perception, they cannot go out in deliberate thought. This truth we will contemplate from another point of view.

§ 41. Not having special senses by which to discriminate, the worm swallows bodily the mould containing vegetal matter partially decayed: leaving its alimentary canal to Edition: current; Page: [80] absorb what nutriment it can, and to eject, in the shape of worm-cast, the 95 per cent. or so that is innutritive. Conversely, the higher annulose creature, with special senses, as the bee, selects from plants concentrated nutritive matters wherewith to feed its larvæ, or, as the spider, sucks the ready-prepared juices from the flies it entraps. The progress from the less intelligent to the more intelligent and the most intelligent among the Vertebrata, is similarly accompanied by increasing ability in the selection of food. By herbivorous mammals the comparatively innutritive parts of plants have to be devoured in great quantities, that the requisite amounts of nutriment may be obtained; while carnivorous animals, which are mostly more sagacious, live on concentrated foods of which small quantities suffice. Though the monkey and the elephant are not carnivorous, yet both have powers which, certainly by the one and probably by the other, are used in choosing the nutritive parts of plants when these are to be had. Coming to mankind, we observe that the diet is of the most concentrated kind obtainable; but that the uncivilized man is less choice in his diet than the civilized. And then among the highly civilized the most nutritive food is carefully separated from the rest: even to the extent that at table fragments of inferior quality are uneaten.

My purpose in naming these seemingly-irrelevant contrasts, is to point out the analogy between progress in bodily nutrition and progress in mental nutrition. The psychically higher, like the physically higher, have greater powers of selecting materials fit for assimilation. Just as by appearance, texture, and odour, the superior animal is guided in choosing food, and swallows only things which contain much organizable matter; so the superior mind, aided by what we may figuratively call intellectual scent, passes by multitudes of unorganizable facts, but quickly detects facts full of significance, and takes them in as materials out of which cardinal truths may be elaborated. The less-developed intelligences, Edition: current; Page: [81] unable to decompose these more complex facts and assimilate their components, and having therefore no appetites for them, devour with avidity facts which are mostly valueless; and out of the vast mass absorb very little that helps to form general conceptions. Concentrated diet furnished by the experiments of the physicist, the investigations of the political economist, the analyses of the psychologist, is intolerable to them, indigestible by them; but instead, they swallow with greediness the trivial details of table-talk, the personalities of fashionable life, the garbage of the police and divorce courts; while their reading, in addition to trashy novels, includes memoirs of mediocrities, volumes of gossiping correspondence, with an occasional history, from which they carry away a few facts about battles and the doings of conspicuous men. By such minds, this kind of intellectual provender is alone available; and to feed them on a higher kind would be as impracticable as to feed a cow on meat.

Suppose this contrast exaggerated—suppose the descent from the higher to the lower intellects among ourselves, to be continued by a second descent of like kind, and we get to the intellect of the primitive man. A still greater attention to meaningless details, and a still smaller ability to select facts from which conclusions may be drawn, characterize the savage. Multitudes of simple observations are incessantly made by him; but such few as have significance, lost in the mass of insignificant ones, pass through his mind without leaving behind any data for thoughts, worthy to be so called. Already in a foregoing section, the extreme perceptive activity of the lowest races has been illustrated; and here may be added a few illustrations showing the reflective inactivity going along with it. Of the Brazilian Indian Mr. Bates remarks—“I believe he thinks of nothing except the matters that immediately concern his daily material wants.” “He observes well, but he can deduce nothing profitable from his perceptions,” says Burton, describing the East Edition: current; Page: [82] African; and he adds that the African’s mind “will not, and apparently cannot, escape from the circle of sense, nor will it occupy itself with aught but the present.” Still more definite testimony is there respecting the Damara, “who never generalizes.” Mr. Galton states that one “who knew the road perfectly from A to B and again from B to C would have no idea of a straight cut from A to C: he has no map of the country in his mind, but an infinity of local details.” Even the Bedouin, as Mr. Palgrave remarks, “judges of things as he sees them present before him, not in their causes or consequences.” Some semi-civilized peoples, as the Tahitians, Sandwich-Islanders, Javans, Sumatrans, Malagasy, do, indeed, manifest “quickness of apprehension, . . . penetration and sagacity.” But it is in respect of simple things that their powers are shown; as witness the assertion of Mr. Ellis concerning the Malagasy, that “facts, anecdotes, occurrences, metaphors, or fables, relating to or derived from sensible and visible objects, appear to form the basis of most of their mental exercises.” And how general is this trait of unreflectiveness among inferior races, is implied by Dr. Pickering’s statement that, in the course of much travel, the Fijians were the only savage people he had met with who could give reasons, and with whom it was possible to hold a connected conversation.

§ 42. “The eccentricity of genius” is a current phrase implying the experience that men of original powers are prone to act in ways unlike ordinary ways. To do what the world does, is to guide behaviour by imitation. Deviating from ordinary usages is declining to imitate. And the noticeable fact is that a smaller tendency to imitate goes along with a greater tendency to evolve new ideas. Under its converse aspect we may trace this relationship back through early stages of civilization. There was but little originality in the middle ages; and there was but little tendency to deviate from the modes of living established for Edition: current; Page: [83] the various ranks. Still more was it so in the extinct societies of the East. Ideas were fixed; and prescription was irresistible.

Among the partially-civilized races, we find imitativeness a marked trait. Everyone has heard of the ways in which Negroes, when they have opportunities, dress and swagger in grotesque mimicry of the whites. A characteristic of the New Zealanders is an aptitude for imitation. The Dyaks, too, show “love of imitation;” and of other Malayo-Polynesians the like is alleged. Mason says that “while the Karens originate nothing they show as great a capability to imitate as the Chinese.” We read that the Kamschadales have a “peculiar talent of mimicking men and animals;” that the Nootka-Sound people “are very ingenious in imitating;” that the Mountain Snake Indians imitate animal sounds “to the utmost perfection.” South America yields like evidence. Herndon was astonished at the mimetic powers of the Brazilian Indians. Wilkes speaks of the Patagonians as “admirable mimics.” And Dobrizhoffer joins with his remark that the Guaranis can imitate exactly, the further remark that they bungle stupidly if you leave anything to their intelligence. But it is among the lowest races that proneness to mimicry is most conspicuous. Several travellers have commented on the “extraordinary tendency to imitate” shown by the Fuegians. They will repeat with perfect correctness each word in any sentence addressed to them—mimicking the manner and attitude of the speaker. So, too, according to Mouat, the Andamanese show high imitative powers; and, like the Fuegians, repeat a question instead of answering it. Sturt gives a kindred account of the South Australians, who, he says, “evinced a strange perversity” “in repeating words” which “they knew were meant as questions.”

In this imitativeness, shown least by the highest members of civilized races and most by the lowest savages, we see again the antagonism between perceptive activity and Edition: current; Page: [84] reflective activity. Among inferior gregarious creatures, as rooks that rise in a flock when one rises, or as sheep that follow a leader in leaping, we see an almost automatic repetition of actions witnessed in others; and this peculiarity, common to the lowest human types—this tendency to “ape” others, as we significantly call it—implies a smaller departure from the brute type of mind. It shows us a mental action which is, from moment to moment, chiefly determined by outer incidents; and is therefore but little determined by causes involving excursiveness of thought, imagination, and original idea.

§ 43. Our conception of the primitive man—intellectual, will grow clearer when, with the above inductions, we join illustrations of his feeble grasp of thought.

Common speech fails to distinguish between mental activities of different grades. A boy is called clever who takes in simple ideas rapidly, though he may prove incapable of taking in complex ideas; and a boy is condemned as stupid because he is slow in rote-learning, though he may apprehend abstract truths more quickly than his teacher. Contrasts of this nature must be recognized, if we would interpret the conflicting evidence respecting the capacities of the uncivilized. Even of the Fuegians we read that they “are not usually deficient in intellect;” even the Andamanese are described as “excessively quick and clever;” and the Australians are said to be as intelligent as our own peasants. But the ability thus referred to as possessed by men of the lowest types, is one for which the simpler faculties suffice; and goes along with inability when any demand is made on the complex faculties. A passage which Sir John Lubbock quotes from Mr. Sproat’s account of the Ahts may be taken as descriptive of the average state:—

Spix and Martius tell us of the Brazilian Indian that “scarcely has one begun to question him about his language, when he grows impatient, complains of headache, and shows that he is unable to bear the exertion;” and according to Mr. Bates, “it is difficult to get at their notions on subjects that require a little abstract thought.” When the Abipones “are unable to comprehend anything at first sight, they soon grow weary of examining it, and cry—‘What is it after all?’ ” It is the same with Negroes. Burton says of the East Africans, “ten minutes sufficed to weary out the most intellectual” when questioned about their system of numbers. And even of so comparatively superior a race as the Malagasy, it is remarked that they “do not seem to possess the qualities of mind requisite for close and continued thought.”

On observing that to frame the idea of a species, say trout, it is needful to think of the characters common to trout of different sizes, and that to conceive of fish as a class, we must imagine various kinds of fish, and see mentally the likenesses which unite them notwithstanding their unlikenesses; we perceive that, rising from the consciousness of individual objects to the consciousness of species, and again to the consciousness of genera, and orders, and classes, each further step implies more power of mentally grouping numerous things with approximate simultaneity. And perceiving this, we may understand why, lacking the needful representativeness, the mind of the savage is soon exhausted with any thought above the simplest. Excluding those referring to individual objects, our most familiar propositions, such even as “Plants are green,” or “Animals grow,” are propositions never definitely framed in his consciousness; because he has no idea of a plant or an animal, apart from kind. And of course until he has become familiar with general Edition: current; Page: [86] ideas and abstract ideas of the lowest grades, those a grade higher in generality and abstractness are inconceivable by him. This will be elucidated by an illustration taken from Mr. Galton’s account of the Damaras, showing how the concrete, made to serve in place of the abstract as far as possible, soon fails, and leaves the mind incapable of higher thought:—

This mental state is, in another direction, exemplified by the statement of Mr. Hodgson concerning the Hill-tribes of India. “Light,” he says, “is a high abstraction which none of my informants can grasp, though they readily give equivalents for sunshine and candle or fire-flame.” And Spix and Martius further exemplify it when they say that it would be vain to seek in the language of the Brazilian Indians “words for the abstract ideas of plant, animal, and the still more abstract notions, colour, tone, sex, species, etc.; such a generalization of ideas is found among them only in the frequently used infinitive of the verbs to walk, to eat, to drink, to dance, to sing, to hear, etc.”

§ 44. Not until there is formed a general idea, by colligating many special ideas which have a common trait amid their differences—not until there follows the possibility of connecting in thought this common trait with some other trait also possessed in common, can there arise the idea of a causal relation; and not until many different causal relations have been observed, can there result the conception of causal relation in the abstract. By the primitive man, therefore, such distinction as we make between natural and Edition: current; Page: [87] unnatural cannot be made. Just as the child, ignorant of the course of things, gives credence to an impossible fiction as readily as to a familiar fact; so the savage, similarly without classified and systematized knowledge, feels no incongruity between any absurd falsehood propounded to him and some general truth which we class as established: there being, for him, no such established general truth.

Hence his credulity. If the young Indian takes as his totem, and thereafter regards as sacred, the first animal he dreams about during a fast—if the Negro, when bent on an important undertaking, chooses for a god to help him the first object he sees on going out, and sacrifices to it and prays to it—if the Veddah, failing in a shot with his arrow, ascribes the failure not to a bad aim but to insufficient propitiation of his deity; we must regard the implied convictions as normal accompaniments of a mental state in which the organization of experiences has not gone far enough to evolve the idea of natural causation.

§ 45. Absence of the idea of natural causation, implies absence of rational surprise.

Until there has been reached the belief that certain connexions in things are constant, there can be no astonishment on meeting with cases seemingly at variance with this belief. The behaviour of the uncultivated among ourselves teaches us this. Show to a rustic a remarkable experiment, such as the rise of liquid in a capillary tube, or the spontaneous boiling of warm water in an exhausted receiver, and instead of the amazement you expected he shows a vacant indifference. That which struck you with wonder when first you saw it, because apparently irreconcilable with your general ideas of physical processes, does not seem wonderful to him, because he is without those general ideas. And now if we suppose the rustic divested of what general ideas he has, and the causes of surprise thus made still fewer, we get the mental state of the primitive man.

Of the lowest races, disregard of novelties is almost uniformly alleged. According to Cook, the Fuegians showed utter indifference in presence of things that were entirely new to them. The same voyager observed in the Australians a like peculiarity; and Dampier says those he had on board “did not notice anything else in the ship” than what they had to eat. So, too, the Tasmanians were characterized by Cook’s surgeon as exhibiting no surprise. Wallis asserts of the Patagonians, that they showed the most “unaccountable indifference” to everything around them on shipboard; even the looking-glass, though it afforded great diversion, excited no astonishment; and Wilkes describes like conduct. I also find it stated of the village Veddahs that two of them “showed no surprise at a looking-glass.” And of the Samoiedes we read that “nothing but the looking-glasses caused any surprise in them for an instant; again a moment and this ceased to draw their attention.”

§ 46. Along with absence of surprise there goes absence of curiosity; and where there is least faculty of thought, even astonishment may be excited without causing inquiry. Illustrating this trait in the Bushmen, Burchell says—“I showed them a looking-glass; at this they laughed, and stared with vacant surprise and wonder to see their own faces; but expressed not the least curiosity about it.” Where curiosity exists we find it among races of not so low a grade. That of the New Caledonians was remarked by Cook; and that of the New Guinea people by Earl and by Jukes. Still more decided is an inquiring nature among the relatively-advanced Malayo-Polynesians. According to Boyle, the Dyaks have an insatiable curiosity. The Samoans, too, “are usually very inquisitive;” and the Tahitians “are remarkably curious and inquisitive.”

Evidently this absence of desire for information about new things, which characterizes the lowest mental state, prevents the growth of that generalized knowledge which makes Edition: current; Page: [89] rational surprise, and consequent rational inquisitiveness, possible. If his “want of curiosity is extreme,” as Mr. Bates says of the Cucáma Indian, the implication is that he “troubles himself very little concerning the causes of the natural phenomena around him.” Lacking ability to think, and the accompanying desire to know, the savage is without tendency to speculate. Even when there is raised such a question as that often put by Park to the Negroes—“What became of the sun during the night, and whether we should see the same sun, or a different one, in the morning,” no reply is forthcoming. “I found that they considered the question as very childish: . . . they had never indulged a conjecture, nor formed any hypothesis, about the matter.”

The general fact thus exemplified is one quite at variance with current ideas respecting the thoughts of the primitive man. He is commonly pictured as theorizing about surrounding appearances; whereas, in fact, the need for explanations of them does not occur to him.

§ 47. One more general trait must be named—I mean the lack of constructive imagination. This lack naturally goes along with a life of simple perception, of imitativeness, of concrete ideas, and of incapacity for abstract ideas.

The collection of implements and weapons arranged by General Pitt-Rivers, to show their relationships to a common original, suggests that primitive men are not to be credited with such inventiveness as even their simple appliances seem to indicate. These have arisen by small modifications; and the natural selection of such modifications has led unobtrusively to various kinds of appliances, without any distinct devising of them.

Evidence of another kind, but of like meaning, is furnished by Sir Samuel Baker’s paper on the “Races of the Nile Basin,” in which he points out that the huts of the respective tribes are as constant in their types as are the nests of birds: each tribe of the one, like each species of the other, Edition: current; Page: [90] having a peculiarity. The like permanent differences he says hold among their head-dresses; and he further asserts of head-dresses, as of huts, that they have diverged from one another in proportion as the languages have diverged. All which facts show us that in these races the thoughts, restrained within narrow established courses, have not the freedom required for entering into new combinations, and so initiating new modes of action and new forms of product.

Where we find ingenuity ascribed, it is to races such as the Tahitians, Javans, etc., who have risen some stages in civilization, who have considerable stocks of abstract words and ideas, who show rational surprise and curiosity, and who thus evince higher intellectual development.

§ 48. Here we come to a general truth allied to those with which, in the two foregoing chapters, I have preluded the summaries of results—the truth that the primitive intellect develops rapidly, and early reaches its limit.

In the Principles of Psychology, § 165, I have shown that the children of Australians, of Negroes in the United States, of Negroes on the Nile, of Andamanese, of New Zealanders, of Sandwich Islanders, are quicker than European children in acquiring simple ideas, but presently stop short from inability to grasp the complex ideas readily grasped by European children, when they arrive at them. To testimonies before quoted I may add the remark of Mr. Reade, that in Equatorial Africa the children are “absurdly precocious;” the statement of Captain Burton, that “the negro child, like the East Indian, is much ‘sharper’ than the European . . . at the age of puberty this precocity . . . disappears;” and the description of the Aleuts of Alaska, who “up to a certain point are readily taught.” This early cessation of development implies both low intellectual nature and a great impediment to intellectual advance; since it makes the larger part of life unmodifiable by further experiences. On reading of the East African, Edition: current; Page: [91] that he “unites the incapacity of infancy with the unpliancy of age,” and of the Australians that “after twenty their mental vigour seems to decline, and at the age of forty seems nearly extinct;” we cannot fail to see how greatly this arrest of mental evolution hinders improvement where improvement is most required.

The intellectual traits of the uncivilized, thus made specially difficult to change, may now be recapitulated while observing that they are traits recurring in the children of the civilized.

Infancy shows us an absorption in sensations and perceptions akin to that which characterizes the savage. In pulling to pieces its toys, in making mud-pies, in gazing at each new thing or person, the child exhibits great tendency to observe with little tendency to reflect. There is, again, an obvious parallelism in the mimetic propensity. Children are ever dramatizing the lives of adults; and savages, along with their other mimicries, similarly dramatize the actions of their civilized visitors. Want of power to discriminate between useless and useful facts, characterizes the juvenile mind, as it does the mind of the primitive man. This inability to select nutritive facts necessarily accompanies low development; since, until generalization has made some progress, and the habit of generalizing has become established, there cannot be reached the conception that a fact has a remote value apart from any immediate value it may have. Again, we see in the young of our own race a similar inability to concentrate the attention on anything complex or abstract. The mind of the child, as well as that of the savage, soon wanders from sheer exhaustion when generalities and involved propositions have to be dealt with. From feebleness of the higher intellectual faculties comes, in both cases, an absence, or a paucity, of ideas grasped by those faculties. The child, like the savage, has few words of even a low grade of abstractedness, and none of a higher grade. For a long Edition: current; Page: [92] time it is familiar with cat, dog, horse, cow, but has no conception of animal apart from kind; and years elapse before words ending in ion and ity occur in its vocabulary. Thus, in both cases, the very implements of developed thought are wanting. Unsupplied as its mind is with general truths, and with the conception of natural order, the civilized child when quite young, like the savage throughout life, shows but little rational surprise or rational curiosity. Something startling to the senses makes it stare vacantly, or perhaps cry; but let it see a chemical experiment, or draw its attention to the behaviour of a gyroscope, and its interest is like that shown in a common-place new toy. After a time, indeed, when the higher intellectual powers it inherits are beginning to act, and when its stage of mental development represents that of such semi-civilized races as the Malayo-Polynesians, rational surprise and rational curiosity about causes, begin to show themselves. But even then its extreme credulity, like that of the savage, shows us the result of undeveloped ideas of causation and law. Any story, however monstrous, is believed; and any explanation, however absurd, is accepted.

And here, in final elucidation of these intellectual traits of the primitive man, let me point out that, like the emotional traits, they could not be other than they are in the absence of the conditions brought about by social evolution. In the Principles of Psychology, §§ 484—493, it was shown in various ways that only as societies grow, become organized, and gain stability, do there arise those experiences by assimilating which the powers of thought develop. It needs but to ask what would happen to ourselves were the whole mass of existing knowledge obliterated, and were children with nothing beyond their nursery-language left to grow up without guidance or instruction from adults, to perceive that even now the higher intellectual faculties would be almost inoperative, from lack of the materials and aids accumulated by past civilization. And seeing this, we Edition: current; Page: [93] cannot fail to see that development of the higher intellectual faculties has gone on pari passu with social advance, alike as cause and consequence; that the primitive man could not evolve these higher intellectual faculties in the absence of a fit environment; and that in this, as in other respects, his progress was retarded by the absence of capacities which only progress could bring.