By way of conclusion it may be helpful to consider certain general
truths in the field of anthropology and mental evolution, upon
which the illustrations we have been considering have a bearing.
We have seen what a widely extended genus the analogical argument
compasses; and yet, if we were to include under this head certain
closely allied and yet distinguishable forms of thought, it would
be much wider still. I refer particularly to the use of metaphor
and symbolism, which, like the children's make-believe with their
dolls or fairies, is none the less on the boundary line between
the real and the fictitious. Myth equally readily passes from the
unconscious to the conscious stage, and much of what is plausibly
interpreted as an argument by analogy, seems equally well an
intentional use of symbolism and myth. That savages, at least in
all but the lower stages, appreciate the use of myth is beyond all
doubt. Primitive ceremonials, as also primitive explanations of the
changes of nature, are full of symbolisms, which involve the same
mental habit, whose products in the domain of analogy have been
portrayed. This mythological instinct, Mr. Tylor well says, "belongs
to that great doctrine of analogy from which we have gained so much
of our apprehension of the world around us. Distrusted as it now
is by severer science for its misleading results, analogy is to us
still a chief means of discovery and illustration, while in earlier
grades of education its influence was all but paramount. Analogies
which are but fancies to us were to men of past ages reality. They
could see the flame licking its yet undevoured prey with tongues of
fire, or the serpent gliding along the sword from hilt to point; they
could see a live creature gnawing within their bodies in the pangs
of hunger; they heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs answering in the
echo, and the chariot of the heaven god rattling in thunder over the
solid firmament. Men to whom these were living thoughts had no need
of the schoolmaster and his rules of composition, his injunctions
to use metaphor cautiously and to take care to make all similes
consistent."
The principle that what was once the serious occupation of men
becomes in more advanced stages of culture the play of children, or
is reduced from seriousness to mere amusement, finds illustrations
in the mental as in the material world. The drum, once the serious
terrifying instrument of the savage warrior, and the rattle, once the
powerful emblem of the medicine man, have become the common toys of
children. The bow and arrow are used for skill and sport only. In a
similar way the formidable and trusted argument by analogy finds its
proper field in riddles and puns. When we put the question, "Why is
this object like the other?" we understand that some out-of-the-way
and accidental resemblance is asked for, some not very close analogy,
that provokes amusement but not belief; in many cases the resemblance
is in the name only and degenerates into a pun. In such exercises of
fancy we are employing the same faculties that our ancestors used in
arriving at the customs and beliefs that we have been considering.
The laws governing the progress of industrial arts, of mechanical
inventions and social institutions seem thus to find equally ready
application to the evolution of habits and customs in the mental
world.
From another, and that also a comparative anthropological point of
view, the natural history of analogy illustrates, though imperfectly,
the evolutionary bond that unites the development of the race from
primitive culture to civilization, from infantile helplessness to
adult power, and again the dissolution of these processes in disease
or their atavistic retention in less progressive strata of society.
Significant, even though sporadic, parallelisms have been pointed
out in the use of analogy by savages and by children; and far more
completely can it be shown that superstitions and pseudo-sciences,
folk-lore traditions and popular beliefs show the survival of these
same analogical habits of mind, which may be viewed in part as
reversions to outgrown conditions of thought, in part as the cropping
out, in pathological form, of retarding tendencies which the course
of evolution may have repressed but not wholly destroyed. For there
is hardly a form of modern superstition, there is hardly a custom
sanctioned by the unwritten tradition of the people, but what can be
closely duplicated among the customs and beliefs of the untutored
savage.
All this impresses us with the enduring qualities of man's barbaric
past, the permanent though latent effect of his complete adaptation
for thousands of years to a low intellectual environment. "The
intrusion of the scientific method," Mr. Clodd aptly comments, "in
its application to man's whole nature, disturbed that equilibrium.
But this, as yet, only within the narrow area of the highest
culture." The earlier and more fundamental psychological factor
of humanity is feeling and not thought, or more accurately an
incipient rationality, thoroughly suffused with emotional motives;
and primitive analogies proceed by a feeling of analogical fitness,
and not by an intellectual justification. "The exercise of feeling
has been active from the beginning of his history, while thought,
speaking comparatively, has but recently had free play.... Man
wondered long chiliads before he reasoned, because feeling travels
along the line of least resistance, while thought, or the challenge
by inquiry, with its assumption that there may be two sides to a
question, must pursue a path obstructed by the dominance of taboo and
custom, by the force of imitation, and by the strength of prejudice,
passion, and fear."
The survey of the argument by analogy brings home the conviction
that there are forms of mental action, psychological tendencies
or thought-habits, characteristic of undeveloped stages of human
mentality; that these appear in versatile and instructive variety;
and, more important still, that they furnish glimpses of the workings
of a great progressive law, visible in the shifting of importance
attached to the argument by analogy, and in its gradual subordination
to, and ultimate retirement in favor of the sturdy principles of
inductive logic. We are thus led to appreciate the means by which
error is converted into truth, the slow and painful steps by which
the logic of the sciences is unfolded and mastered. When Lord
Chesterfield relates that the people expected a fatal issue of the
king's illness, because the oldest lion in the tower, of about the
same age as the king, had just died, he cannot help commenting
upon the wildness and caprice of the human mind; but Mr. Tylor
more judiciously remarks, "Indeed the thought was neither wild nor
capricious; it was simply such an argument by analogy as the educated
world has at length painfully learned to be worthless, but which
it is not too much to declare would to this day carry considerable
weight to the minds of four-fifths of the human race." Analogy
has doubtless lost the prestige of olden time; but the remains of
effete and misleading forms of thought, upheld by a feeling of their
analogical plausibility, continue to survive, and may at any time,
when cloaked in a modern garb, regain their former efficiency,
and feed the contagion of some new fad or pseudo-science; while
superstition, like poverty, we shall always have with us, so long
as there are social and intellectual distinctions amongst men. In
the light of the natural history survey of analogy, these phenomena
appear in their true significance, testifying at once to the inherent
progress, despite reversions, and to the underlying unity of
constitution and purpose, through which these phenomena acquire their
deeper and more human interest.