II

The great law of apperception, teaching that we observe according

to our inherited capacities and our acquired experience, that we

in a very real sense create the world in which we live, explains

the difficulty of realizing modes of thought strikingly different

from our own, either as more primitive, or more complex, or as based

upon other perspectives of the social, intellectual, and ethical

rules that guide thought and conduct. To the supremely civilized

citizen of the nineteenth century, the mental life of one who has

hardly a firm hold on the first round of the ladder of civilization

is naturally somewhat incomprehensible. An illustration of the

conspicuous contrast, though doubtless amidst an inherent community,

of the thought-habits of untutored and of cultured man, may suggest

the direction and the nature of the evolutionary development that

separates, yet binds, the one and the other. Prominent among such

contrasts is the different standing assumed by the facts and

reasonings of science in primitive and in highly civilized life; and

an important part of this difference may be viewed as the shifting

of the position occupied by the argument by analogy. Deeper than the

language of words, and underlying their use and formation, is the

habit of comparing object with object, of tracing resemblances and

noting contrasts. It would seem that in the primitive use of this

process there is lacking the distinction between the resemblances

more strictly inherent in the objects and those originating in the

mode of viewing them; subject and object are still merged in a

vaguer realm of perception where myth and science, poetical fiction

and evident fact, are as yet undifferentiated and mingle without

let or hindrance. The savage frames his world by the realization

of simple fancies suggested by slight analogies, where the man

of culture examines the objective causes of phenomena under the

guidance of scientifically established principles and accurate logic.

Fortunately, however, for our power of realizing bygone mental

traits, these forms of belief still find currency as survivals, in

Mr. Tylor's apt words, "of the lower culture which they are of to

the higher culture which they are in." We thus can understand the

belief we no longer share; we can appreciate as suggestive myth or

far-fetched analogy what to our ancestors may have been a plausible

belief or a satisfactory explanation.

The prominence of analogy among undeveloped peoples supplies

unlimited illustrations of the rôle which it plays in primitive

circles, the essential influence which it exerts over thoughts

and customs in the early history of mankind. Consider first that

widespread class of customs and observances by which the savage

regards himself as influencing for good or ill the fate of friend or

foe. The Zulu chewing a bit of wood to soften the heart of the man

he wishes to buy oxen from, or of the woman he is wooing (Tylor);

the Illinois Indians making figures of those whose days they desire

to shorten, and stabbing these images to the heart, or by performing

incantations upon a stone trying to form a stone in the hearts of

their enemies (Dorman); the Peruvian sorcerer, making rag dolls and

piercing them with cactus-thorns, and hiding them about the beds

to cripple people; or the native of Borneo, making a wax figure of

his enemy in the belief that as the image melts, the enemy's body

will waste away (Tylor); the Zulu sorcerer who secures a portion

of a desired victim's dress and buries it secretly, so that, as it

rots away, his life may decay (Clodd); the confession recorded in

a seventeenth-century trial for witchcraft, that the accused had

"buried a glove of the said Lord Henry in the ground, so that as

the glove did rot and waste, the liver of the said lord might rot

and waste" (Brand); the New Britain sorcerer of to-day who burns a

castaway banana skin, so that he who carelessly left it unburied

may die a tormenting death (Clodd); bewitching by operating upon a

lock of hair or the parings of the finger-nails, and the consequent

widespread custom of religiously preventing such personal scraps from

falling into others' possession;--all these varied forms of primitive

witchcraft rest upon the notion that one kind of connection, one

link of resemblance, will bring with it others. The argument, if

explicitly stated, as can hardly be done without doing violence to

its instinctive force, may be put thus: this bit of wood or stone

or lock of hair or scrap of clothing resembles this man or woman in

that the one represents the other or that the one had a personal

connection with the other; therefore they will further resemble one

another in that whatever will make the one soft and yielding or the

other hard and unfeeling will have the same effect on the other, or

in that whatever is done to the one will happen to the other. Other

considerations combine with this underlying analogical factor to

impart cogency and plausibility to a belief or custom; but the type

of the logic, crooked though it be, is recognizable throughout.

Another significant group of primitive beliefs, involving a similarly

indirect argument by analogy, relates to the partaking of an animal

for the sake of thus absorbing its typical qualities. The Malays eat

tiger to acquire the sagacity as well as the cunning of that animal;

the Dyaks refuse to eat deer for fear of becoming faint-hearted; the

Caribs eschew pigs and tortoises for fear of having their eyes grow

small (Lubbock); even cannibalism may be indulged in, in the hopes

of absorbing the courage of a brave man, as in the case of Captain

Wells, who was killed near Chicago in 1812, and whose body was cut

up and distributed among the Indians, "so that all might have the

opportunity of getting a taste of the courageous soldier" (Clodd);

and in an ancient Mexican rite, called the eating of the god, there

occurs an elaborated and symbolical form of the same belief.

The use of omens, the interpretation of signs and coincidences, forms

another rich field for illustration of arguments by analogy. "Magical

arts," says Mr. Tylor, "in which the connection is that of mere

analogy or symbolism, are endlessly numerous throughout the course of

civilization. Their common theory may be readily made out from a few

typical cases, and thence applied confidently to the general mass.

The Australian will observe the track of an insect near a grave to

ascertain the direction where the sorcerer is to be found by whose

craft the man died.... The Khondi sets up the iron arrow of the war

god in a basket of rice, and judges from its standing upright that

war must be kept up also, or from its falling that the quarrel may

be let fall too; and when he tortures human victims sacrificed to

the earth goddess he rejoices to see them shed plentiful tears,

which betoken copious showers to fall upon his land." "In the burial

ceremonies of the natives of Alaska, if too many tears were shed

they said that the road of the dead would be muddy, but a few tears

just laid the dust" (Dorman). "The Zapotecs had a very curious

manner of selecting a manitou for a child at its birth. When a woman

was about to be delivered, the relatives assembled in the hut and

commenced to draw on the floor figures of different animals, rubbing

out each one as fast as completed. The one that remained at the time

of the birth was called the child's second self, and as soon as grown

up he procured the animal, and believed his health and existence

bound up with it" (Dorman). The taking of omens by the flight of

birds or the tracks of animals, by the sky, by the inspection of

sacrifices, by the trivial happenings of daily life, abound in savage

ceremonials, and in a fair proportion of cases carry with them the

rationale of their origin, that saves them from being mere caprice.

And in all those endless appeals to chance or lot for the detection

of crime, the unfoldment of the future, the prediction of the issue

of disease or of important tribal events, there is always some

underlying link of connection between the kind of omen or the nature

of its interpretation and the issue it signifies; and this connection

it is, however slight or fanciful, that maintains the belief in the

further bond of omen and issue.