“To discourse is nature, to assimilate discourse as it is given, is
culture.” With this statement, Goethe has shown where the deficiencies
in culture begin, and observation verifies the fact that the uncultured
person is unable to accept what is told him as it is told him. This does
not mean that uncultured people are unable to remember statements as
they are made, but that they are unable to assimilate any perception in
its integrity and to reproduce it in its natural simplicity. This is the
alpha and the omega of every thing observable in the examination of
simple people. Various thinkers in different fields have noted this
fact. Mill, e.g., observes that the inability to distinguish between
perception and inference is most obvious in the attempt of some ignorant
person to describe a natural phenomenon. Douglas Stewart notices that
the village apothecary will rarely describe the simplest case without
immediately making use of a terminology in which every word is a theory.
The simple and true presentation of the phenomenon will reveal at once
whether the mind is able to give an accurate interpretation of nature.
This suggests why we are frequently engaged in some much-involved
process of description of a fact, in itself simple. It has been
presented to us in this complicated fashion because our informants did
not know how to speak simply. So Kant: “The testimony of common people
may frequently be intended honestly, but it is not often reliable
because the witnesses have not the habit of prolonged attention, and so
they mistake what they think themselves for what they hear from others.
Hence, even though they take oaths, they can hardly be believed.” Hume,
again, says somewhere in the Essay, that most men are naturally inclined
to differentiate their discourse, inasmuch as they see their object from
one side only, do not think of the objections, and conceive its
corroborative principles with such liveliness that they pay no attention
to those which look another way. Now, whoever sees an object from one
side only does not see it as it comes to him, and whoever refuses to
think of objections, has already subjectively colored his objects and no
longer sees them as they are.
In this regard it is interesting to note the tendency of uneducated
people to define things. They are not interested in the immediate
perception, but in its abstract form. The best example of this is the
famous barrack-room definition of honor: Honor is that thing belonging
to the man who has it. The same fault is committed by anybody who fails
to apprehend the _whole_ as it comes, but perceives only what is most
obvious and nearest. Mittermaier has pointed out that the light-minded,
accidental witness sees only the nearest characteristics. Again, he
says, “It is a well-known fact that uneducated people attend only to the
question that was asked them last.”[299] This fact is important. If a
witness is unskilfully asked in one breath whether he murdered A, robbed
B, and stole a pear from C, he will probably answer with calmness, “No,
I have not stolen a pear,” but he pays no attention to the other two
portions of the question. This characteristic is frequently made use of
by the defense. The lawyers ask some important witness for the
prosecution: “Can you say that you have seen how the accused entered the
room, looked around, approached the closet, and then drew the watch
toward himself?” The uneducated witness then says dryly, “No, I can not
say that,” although he has seen everything except the concealment of the
watch. He denies the whole thing solely because he has been able to
attend to the last portion of the question only. It is very easy to look
out for these characteristics, by simply not permitting a number of
questions in one, by having questions put in the simplest and clearest
possible form. Simple questions are thankfully received, and get better
answers than long, or tricky ones.
For the same reason that prevents uneducated people from ever seeing a
thing as it comes to them, their love of justice depends on their
eagerness to avoid becoming themselves subjects of injustice. Hence,
weak people can never be honest, and most uneducated people understand
by duty that which _others_ are to do. Duty is presented as required of
all men, but it is more comfortable to require it of others, so that it
is understood as only so required. It may be due to the fact that
education develops quiet imperturbability, and that this is conducive to
correcter vision and more adequate objectivity in both events and
obligations.
There is another series of processes which are characteristic of the
point of view of the uneducated. There is, e.g., a peculiar recurring
mental process with regard to the careful use of life preservers, fire
extinguishers, and other means of escape, which are to be used _hastily_
in case of need. They are found always carefully chained up, or hidden
in closets by the ignorant. This is possible only if the idea of
protecting oneself against sudden need does not make itself effective as
such, but is forced out of the mind by the desire to protect oneself
against theft.
Why must the uneducated carefully feel everything that is shown them, or
that they otherwise find to be new? Children even smell such things,
while educated people are satisfied with looking at them. The request in
public places, “Do not touch,” has very good reason. I believe that the
level of culture of an individual may be determined without much
mistake, by his inclination to touch or not to touch some new object
presented him. The reason for this desire can hardly be established but
it is certainly the wish of the uneducated to study the object more
fundamentally and hence, to bring into play other senses than that of
sight. It may be that the educated man sees more because he is better
trained in careful observation, so that the uneducated man is really
compelled to do more than merely to look. On the other hand, it may be
that the uneducated man here again fails to perceive the object as it
is, and when it appears to him as object A, or is indicated as that
object, he is inclined to disbelieve, and must convince himself by
careful feeling that it is really an A.[300] It may be, again, that
“trains of association” can help to explain the matter.
That an understanding of the character of an object is dependent on
training and educated observation has been verified many times,
incidentally, also by the fact that the uneducated find it difficult to
get on with representations. Now this can not be accounted for by only
their defective practice. The old, but instructive story of the
peasant-woman who asked her son what he was reading, the black or the
white, repeats itself whenever uneducated people are shown images,
photographs, etc. For a long time I had not noticed that they see the
background as the thing to be attended to. When, for example, you show
an uneducated man a bust photograph, it may happen that he perceives the
upper surroundings of shoulder and head as the lower contours of the
background which is to indicate some fact, and if these contours happen
to be, e.g., those of a dog, the man sees “a white dog.” This is more
frequent than we think, and hence, we must pay little attention to
failures to recognize people in photographs.[301] One more story by way
of example--that of a photographer who snapped a dozen parading young
dragoons, and had gotten the addresses, but not the street numbers of
their parents. He sent for that reason to the twelve parents, for
inspection, a photograph each with the notice that if some mistake had
occurred he would rectify it. But not a parent complained of the
photographer’s failure to have sent them the pictures of their own
children. Each had received a soldier, and appeared to be quite
satisfied with the correctness of his image. Hence it follows again,
that denials of photographic identity by the uneducated are altogether
without value.
In another direction images have a peculiar significance for children
and ignorant people, because they show ineradicable ideas, particularly
with regard to size. Nobody recalls any book so vividly as his first
picture book and its contents. We remember it even though we are
convinced that the people who made our picture book were quite mistaken.
Now, as it frequently happens that the sizes are incorrectly reproduced,
as when, e.g., a horse and a reindeer occur in the same picture, and the
latter seems bigger than the former, the reindeer appears in imagination
always bigger. It does not matter if we learn later how big a reindeer
is, or how many times we have seen one, we still find the animal
“altogether too small, it must be bigger than a horse.” Educated adults
do not make this mistake, but the uneducated do, and many false
statements depend on ideas derived from pictures. If their derivation is
known we may discover the source of the mistake, but if the mistake
occurred unconsciously, then we have to combine the circumstances and
study further to find the reason.
Finally, the general influence of the failure of ignorant people to see
things as they are, upon their feeling-tone is shown in two
characteristic stories. Bulwer tells of a servant whose master beat him
and who was instigated to seek protection in court. He refused
indignantly inasmuch as his master was too noble a person to be subject
to law. And Gutberlet tells the story of the director of police,
Serafini, in Ravenna, who had heard that a notorious murderer had
threatened to shoot him. Serafini had the assassin brought to him, gave
him a loaded pistol and invited him to shoot. The murderer grew pale and
Serafini boxed his ears and kicked him out.