The cover of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. A more extensive [transcriber’s note] can be found at the end of this book.

THE ORIGIN OF MAN AND OF
HIS SUPERSTITIONS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
C. F. CLAY, Manager
LONDON: FETTER LANE, E.C. 4

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.

TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN CO.
OF CANADA, Ltd.
TOKYO: MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THE ORIGIN OF MAN
AND OF HIS SUPERSTITIONS

BY
CARVETH READ, M.A.

LECTURER ON COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY (FORMERLY GROTE PROFESSOR
OF PHILOSOPHY) IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON

CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1920

Printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E. 1,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

PREFACE

The volume now published explains in its first part an hypothesis that the human race has descended from some ape-like stock by a series of changes which began and, until recently, were maintained by the practice of hunting in pack for animal food, instead of being content with the fruits and other nutritious products of the tropical forest. The hypothesis occurred to me many years ago, and was first published (in brief) in The Metaphysics of Nature (1805), Chap. XIII., and again in Natural and Social Morals (1909); but all it implied did not become clear until, in lecturing on Comparative Psychology, there was forced upon me the necessity of effecting an intelligible transition from the animal to the human mind, and of not being satisfied to say year after year that hands and brains were plainly so useful that they must have been developed by Natural Selection. Then one day the requisite ideas came to light; and an outline of the hypothesis was read at the Meeting of the British Association (Section H) at Birmingham in 1913, and printed in Man, November 1914. The Council of the Anthropological Institute has kindly consented to my using the substance of that article in the first chapter here following.

The article in Man dealt chiefly with the physical changes which our race has undergone. The correlative mental changes were explained in the British Journal of Psychology in an article which supplies the basis of the second chapter of this book.

The hunting-pack, then, was the first form of human society; and in lecturing on Ethnopsychology two questions especially interested me: (1) Under what mental conditions did the change take place from the organisation of the hunting-pack (when this weakened) to the settled life of the tribe or group? and (2) Why is the human mind everywhere befogged with ideas of Magic and Animism? They seemed at last to have the same answer: these superstitions were useful and (apparently) even necessary in giving to elders enough prestige to preserve tradition and custom when the leader of the hunt was no longer conspicuous in authority. A magic-working gerontocracy was the second form of society; and the third form was governed by a wizard-king or a priest-king, or by a king supported by wizards or priests. One must, therefore, understand the possibility of these beliefs in Magic and Animism, and how they arose and obtained a hold upon all tribes and nations; and hence the second part of this volume—on Superstition.

Some results of inquiry into these matters were also published in the British Journal of Psychology (namely, much of the substance of Chaps. III., IV., V., VI., and VIII.) and are here reproduced, with the editor’s consent, enlarged and, for the most part, rewritten: the least altered are Chaps. VI. and VIII. Chaps. VII., IX. and X. have not hitherto been printed; but part of Chap. X. was read at the Meeting of the British Association at Bournemouth last year.

Messrs. Williams and Norgate have given permission to use the diagram in the footnote to p. 3, based on one of Prof. Keith’s in his Antiquity of Man.

Extensive use has, of course, been made of the works of Darwin, Herbert Spencer and E. B. Tylor, and (among living authors) of the volumes of Sir J. G. Frazer and Prof. Ed. Westermarck. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues, Prof. Spearman, Prof. J. P. Hill and Prof. Arthur Keith for assistance in various ways. Mr. Pycraft, too, of the Natural History Museum has given me important information; and my old friend, Mr. Thomas Whittaker, has helped me, as usual, when my need was greatest.

Carveth Read.

University College, London.
July 1920

CONTENTS

THE ORIGIN OF MAN AND OF HIS SUPERSTITIONS

CHAPTER I
ON THE DIFFERENTIATION OF MAN FROM THE ANTHROPOIDS

§ 1. The Hypothesis

That the human species as we now see it, with its several races, Mongolian, Negro, Mediterranean, etc., represents a Family of the Primates is generally agreed; and there is evidence that the Family formerly comprised other species that have become extinct. Our nearest surviving zoological relatives are the Gorilla, Chimpanzee and Orang, and (at a further remove) the Siamang and Gibbons; and in spite of the fundamental anatomical resemblance between those apes and ourselves, the difference is so great that some explanation of how it came about is very desirable.

The differences between Man and his nearest relatives are innumerable; but taking the chief of them, and assuming that the minor details are correlated with these, it is the hypothesis of this essay that they may all be traced to the influence of one variation operating amongst the original anthropoid conditions. That variation was the adoption of a flesh-diet and the habits of a hunter in order to obtain it. Without the adoption of a flesh-diet there could have been no hunting; but a flesh-diet obtained without hunting (supposing it possible) could have done nothing for the evolution of our stock. The adoption of the hunting-life, therefore, is the essential variation upon which everything else depends. We need not suppose that a whole ancestral species varied in this way: it is enough that a few, or even one, of the common anthropoid stock should have done so, and that the variation was advantageous and was inherited.

Such a variation must have occurred at some time, since Man is everywhere more or less carnivorous; the earliest known men were hunters; weapons are among the earliest known artefacts. And it is not improbable that the change began at the anthropoid level; because although extant anthropoids are mainly frugivorous, yet they occasionally eat birds’-eggs and young birds; the gorilla has been said to eat small mammals; and other Primates (cebidæ, macaques and baboons) eat insects, arachnids, crabs, worms, frogs, lizards, birds; and the crab-eating macaque collects a large portion of its food on the Malay littoral. Why, then, should not one ape have betaken itself to hunting?

We need not suppose that our ancestors were ever exclusively carnivorous: that is very unlikely. A mixed diet is the rule even amongst hunting tribes, and everywhere the women collect and consume fruits and roots. But if at first nearly omnivorous, our ancestor (it is assumed) soon preferred to attack mammals, and advanced at a remote date to the killing of the biggest game found in his habitat. Everywhere savage hunters do so now: the little Semang kills the tiger, rhinoceros, elephant and buffalo; and many thousands of years ago, in Europe men slew the reindeer and the mammoth, the horse and the bison, the hyæna and the cave-bear. It is true they had weapons and snares, whilst the first hunter had only hands and teeth.

The change from a fruit-eating to a hunting life subserved the great utility of opening fresh supplies of food; and, possibly, a failure of the normal supply of the old customary food was the direct cause of the new habit. If our ape lived near the northern limits of the tropical forest, and a fall of temperature there took place, such as to reduce (especially in winter) the yield of fruit and other nutritious vegetation on which he had subsisted, famine may have driven him to attack other animals;[1] whilst more southerly anthropoids, not suffering from the change of climate, continued in their ancient manner of life. A large anthropoid (Dryopithecus) inhabited Central Europe in the Miocene, for his bones have been found; there may have been others; and during that period the climate altered from sub-tropical to temperate, with corresponding changes in fauna and flora. Hence it formerly occurred to me that perhaps the decisive change in the life of our Family happened there and then. It seems, however, that good judges put the probable date of the great differentiation much earlier, in the Oligocene;[2] and since I cannot find that any extensive alteration of climate is known to have happened during that period, it seems necessary to fall back upon “spontaneous” variation (as one must in many other cases); that is to say, from causes which are at present beyond our vision, the fateful ape did, in fact, prefer animal food so decidedly as to begin a-hunting for it. That being granted, the rest of the history was inevitable. The new pursuit was of a nature to engross the animal’s whole attention and co-ordinate all his faculties; and to maintain and reinforce it, his structure in body and mind may reasonably be supposed to have undergone rapid modification by natural selection; because those individuals that were in any organ or faculty best adapted to the new life had an advantage, which was inherited and gradually intensified.[3]

§ 2. What the Hypothesis Explains

Let me run rapidly through the chief differences between Man and his nearest congeners: some of them are obvious and can be stated very briefly; others I shall return to in the next chapter. We shall see that they all follow naturally from the above hypothesis.

(1) The anthropoids are never found out of the tropical forests of Africa and Malaya (including Borneo and Sumatra). They feed chiefly on the fruits and other highly nutritious vegetable products that, all the year round, are only there obtainable. Although often coming to the ground, especially the chimpanzee and gorilla, they are adapted to living in the trees: that is their home. In contrast with their habits, Man is at home on the ground, with unlimited range over the whole planet from beyond the Arctic Circle to Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego; because on the ground (chiefly) he everywhere finds his food in the other animals whom he hunts and slays. This, then, is the condition of his emancipation from the tropical forest. It is, indeed, conceivable that a frugivorous animal, originally of the forest, should obtain a wider range by taking to a coarser diet of roots and herbage, such as suffices the Ungulates, browsing or grazing or digging with their snouts; but this would not have led to the upright gait, or the big brain, or any of the marks that distinguish Man. Not advance but retrogression must have followed such a change.

(2) That the earliest men of whose condition of life we have any knowledge were hunters agrees with the hypothesis. Any other view of Man’s origin must explain how and when he became a hunter. There seems to be no reason to put the change of habits (which certainly occurred at some time) anywhere nearer than the beginning of our differentiation. The further we put it back the better it explains other modifications.

(3) The erect attitude was reached by the apes in the course of adaptation to arboreal life;[4] but the erect gait as the normal mode of progression is (if we neglect the gibbons’ imperfect performance) peculiar to ourselves; and such a gait was attained because the most successful hunters followed their prey afoot upon the ground. The feeble ineffective shuffle of the anthropoids upon the ground, supporting themselves with their arms where there are no overhanging boughs to swing by and help themselves along, could not have served the hunter, especially if he was to leave the forest. We may, indeed, suppose that at first prey was sometimes attacked by leaping upon it from the branch of a tree, as leopards sometimes do; but the less our ancestor in his new career trusted to trees the better for him. Such simple strategy could not make him a dominant animal throughout the world; nothing could do this but the gradual attainment of erect gait adapted to running down his prey. Hence the numerous modifications of structure necessary to it, whenever from time to time they occurred, were preserved and accumulated by natural selection: namely, the curving of the vertebral column, the balancing of the head upon a relatively slender neck, changes in the joints, bones and muscles of the legs, the lengthening of the leg and the specialisation of the foot (in which the heel is developed more than in the gorilla, and the great toe is lengthened and lies parallel with the other toes).

(4) The specialisation of the legs and feet, as it proceeded, made possible the specialisation of the hands: being gradually rid of the task of assisting locomotion, whether in trees or on the ground, they were used in grappling with prey, seconded by massive jaws and powerful canine teeth. In course of time they brought cudgels and stones to the encounter, and after many ages began to alter such means of offence into weapons that might be called artefacts. These simple beginnings probably occupied an immense time, perhaps more than half of the total period down to the present. The utility and consequent selection of hands had been great throughout; but their final development may be referred to the making and using of weapons fashioned according to a mental pattern. Those who had the best hands were selected because they made the best weapons and used them best; but we know from remains of several palæolithic stages of the art of manufacturing implements how very slowly the art improved.

(5) Along with specialisation of the hands went a reduction in the length and massiveness of the arms; and this must have been disadvantageous in directly grappling with prey. But it was necessary to the runner in order to lessen the weight and cumbersomeness of the upper part of the body and to improve his balance and agility. The change may also have been beneficial by affording physiological compensation for the lengthening and strengthening of the legs. And as soon as unwrought stones and clubs came into use there was mechanical compensation for the shortening of the arms. The result is an adaptive co-ordination of the total structure to the life of a two-footed hunter.

(6) Darwin says: “The early male forefathers of Man were, as previously stated, probably furnished with great canine teeth; but as they gradually acquired the habit of using stones, clubs, or other weapons, for fighting with their enemies or rivals, they would use their jaws and teeth less and less. In this case the jaws, together with the teeth, would become reduced in size, as we may feel almost sure from numerous analogous cases.”

(7) Hence the profile began to approach the orthognathous type; and it progressed further in that direction on account of accompanying changes in the skull. The skull became less thick and rough, (a) because, as the hands (using weapons) superseded the teeth in fighting, jaws and neck grew less massive, and their muscles no longer needed such solid attachments; (b) because the head was less liable to injury when no longer used as the chief organ in combat. At the same time the skull slowly increased in capacity and became vaulted to make room for the brains of an animal, which (as we shall see) acquired much knowledge (parietal association area) and lived by the application of its knowledge to the co-ordination of increasingly complex and continuous activities (anterior association area).[5]

(8) Monkeys of most species, whether in the New World or in the Old, are social, living in bands of from ten to fifty or more, and may co-operate occasionally in mutual defence or in keeping watch. Baboons, indeed, are seen in herds of several hundreds; and they are credibly reported to co-operate in raiding plantations, and in defending themselves against leopards, other baboons and even human hunters.[6] Gibbons, again, are social, going in bands to the number of fifty. But the large anthropoids live only in families—the male orang being even of a somewhat solitary habit; three or four families of chimpanzees may for a time associate together. Man, however, is everywhere—with a few doubtful exceptions, probably degenerate—both social and co-operative; and the purpose of his co-operation at the level of the Australian or the Semang is instructive. It is not, as we might suppose, in industry, but in hunting, war, or tribal ceremonies that tribesmen work together—the last no doubt of comparatively recent origin: so that a few thousand years ago there was no co-operation except hunting and war (which come to the same thing).

That the large anthropoids are neither gregarious nor co-operative follows from their having no task in which co-operation would be useful, no common purpose: they are able alone to defend themselves and their families; and when families range apart through the woods their food is in better supply. But the ancestor of Man found an object for association and co-operation in the chase. Spencer, indeed, says that a large carnivore, capable of killing its own prey, profits by being solitary; and this may be true where game is scarce: in the Oligocene and Miocene periods game was not scarce. Moreover, when our ape first pursued game, especially big game (not being by ancient adaptation in structure and instinct a carnivore), he may have been, and probably was, incapable of killing enough prey single-handed; and, if so, he will have profited by becoming both social and co-operative as a hunter, like the wolves and dogs—in short, a sort of wolf-ape (Lycopithecus). The pack was a means of increasing the supply of food per unit; and gregariousness increased by natural selection up to the limit set by utility. Hence (as will be shown at length in the next chapter) Man is in character more like a dog or a wolf than he is like any other animal.

(9) Some development of the rudiments of speech may be confidently traced to social co-operation. The gibbon, most social, is also the most vocal of anthropoids; but having no common task in which united action is necessary, he uses his remarkable power of voice (apparently) merely to express his feelings and to keep the troop together. The chimpanzee and the gorilla enjoy probably a close and affectionate family life, but one that makes little or no demand for concerted effort. Hence their vocalisation is very rudimentary. According to R. L. Garner, it is true speech: a chimpanzee (he says) knows the meaning of the sounds he makes, and intends to convey it to some definite individual at whom he looks. But he has at command very few sounds, and those mainly expressive of natural wants.[7] If it be urged that anthropoids do not talk because their lower jaw and tongue have not the special adaptation to speech that is found in Man, it should be considered (a) that if such structure had been useful to them it would have been acquired, as at some time it must have been by Man himself; and (b) that even without any change they might have jabbered well enough to convey a good many discriminated, objective meanings if they had needed to do so: for Man must have begun in that way; he cannot have waited for the development of physical structure before trying to talk. Sufficient intelligence is not wanting to chimpanzees; for in captivity they learn to understand a good deal that is said to them. What they wanted was a sufficient motive for persistently trying to communicate, such that those who made any progress in the art had a living advantage over others. Man had such a motive; because co-operation was necessary to him, not (as we have seen) in industry, but in hunting. In hunting, in planning and directing the hunt, speech is plainly useful; and it is better than gesture, which probably preceded, and generally accompanied it; because, as speech became independent of gesture, it could go on whilst the hands and body were otherwise employed, or where comrades could not see one another—transferring, by a very profitable division of labour, the whole business of expression to organs not otherwise needed. It may not be much more than very simple beginnings of articulate speech that can be traced to early co-operative hunting; but in the beginning lies the whole difficulty. And the situation was particularly favourable to the beginning of language by onomatopœia, imitating the characteristic noises of different animals and of the weapons and actions employed in pursuing and slaying them.

(10) The intelligence and extensive knowledge (compared with anthropoids) that distinguish Man in his lowest known condition are clearly accounted for by his adoption of the hunting life. Already (as we may assume) the most intelligent of living animals, with great knowledge of the forest, he had everything to learn about the world beyond the forest as soon as he ventured into it, and everything to learn about the art of hunting. Depending chiefly upon sight and hearing, he had to learn by observation, and to remember, and to apply all and more than all that the carnivore knows and does instinctively, or learns by following its mother. He must have learned to discriminate all sorts of animals, many of them new in a strange country; their reactions to himself, manner of flight, or of attack, or defence; the spoor of each and its noises; its habits and haunts, where it reposed or went to drink, where to set snares or lie in wait for it. Advancing to the use of weapons, he must have adapted them to his prey; he must have discovered the best materials—wood, or stone, or bone—for making weapons, the best materials for snares, and where to find such things. He must have fixed in his mind this series: game, weapons, the making of them, materials, where found; and must have learned to attend to the items of the series in the necessary order without impatience or confusion: a task far beyond the power of any other animal.

Further, the hunting life supplied a stimulus that had formerly been wanting to our ape. There is some difficulty in comprehending why the anthropoid should be as intelligent as he is; and, similarly, it seemed to Wallace that the savage has intelligence above his needs—“in his large and well-developed brain he possesses an organ quite disproportionate to his actual requirements.”[8] This illusion results from our not reflecting that the first task of increasing intelligence is to deal appropriately with details in greater and greater number and variety, and that the details of their life, with both savage and anthropoid, are just what we cannot appreciate. Still, the anthropoid seems to have a rather lazy time of it: especially, he seems to have hardly any occasion for following out a purpose needing some time for its accomplishment. This powerful stimulus the hunting life applies to carnivores, above all to dogs and wolves; and in the same way it affected our ape: compelling him to combine many activities for a considerable period of time, along with his fellows, and direct them to one end in the actual hunting, and (later) to prosecute still other activities for a longer period in preparing weapons and snares to make the hunting more effective. Add to these considerations the development of gesture and rudiments of speech, exacting intelligence for their acquisition and increasing intelligence by their attainment, and the superiority of the lowest savage to an anthropoid is sufficiently explained. Severe must have been the selection of those that were capable of such progress, and correspondingly rapid the advance and differentiation of the species.

(11) Using stones as weapons, and finding that broken stones do most damage, and breaking them for that purpose, the progressive hunter necessarily makes some sparks fly; and if these fall amongst dry leaves or grass, he may light a fire. “In making flint implements sparks would be produced; in polishing them it would not fail to be observed that they became hot; and in this way it is easy to see how the two methods of making fire may have originated.”[9] But if the production of fire by friction had been suggested by the polishing of flints, it could hardly have been discovered before the neolithic stage; whereas hearths are known of much earlier date. And it may have happened earlier whilst some one was polishing an arrow or a spear with another piece of wood: a supposition which dispenses with the long inference from a warm flint to a flaming stick. It is a curious fact that to this day in Australia fire is sometimes made by rubbing a spear-thrower upon a shield;[10] but I lay no stress upon this, as if such a practice must be traditionary from the earliest discovery of the method. Either in the chipping of flints or in the polishing of spears it is far easier, and a more probable way, to learn the art of making fire than by observing that dried boughs or bamboos driven together by the wind sometimes catch fire; because those processes include the very actions which the art employs: imitation of nature is not called for. It is true that the natives of Nukufetan in the South Seas explain the discovery of fire by their having seen smoke arise from two crossed branches of a tree shaken in the wind;[11] but this, probably, is merely the speculation of some Polynesian philosopher. Volcanoes, too, have been pointed out as a possible source of fire; and, in the myth, Demeter is said to have lit her torches at the crater of Ætna—an action fit for a goddess. But were such an origin of fire conceivable with savages, it would not show how they came to make it themselves. Fire at first must have excited terror. Until uses were known for fire no one could have ventured to fetch it from a volcano, nor to make it by imitating the friction of boughs in the wind. Fires were accidentally lit by man again and again, and much damage done, before he could learn (a) the connection of events, (b) the uses of fire, (c) purposely to produce it, (d) how to control it. The second and fourth of these lessons are much more difficult than the mere making of fire; they are essential, yet generally overlooked. It seems necessary to suppose a series of accidents at each step, in order to show the effects of fire in hardening wood, hollowing wood, cooking game, baking and (later) glazing clay, and so forth. Perhaps a prairie-fire disclosed the advantages of cooking game, and many a prairie was afterwards burnt to that end before a more economical plan was discovered. As to the effect of fire on clay, Lord Avebury observes that clay-vessels may have been invented by (1) plastering gourds or coco-nuts with clay to resist the fire when boiling water in them; (2) observing the effect of fire on the clay; (3) leaving out the vegetable part.[12] This must have been a comparatively recent discovery; though there is some evidence of pottery having been made by palæolithic man. It is impossible to say when fire was discovered; but it was certainly known to the Mousterian culture—say, 50,000 years ago: probably very much earlier; and it was made by hunters.

§ 3. Minor and Secondary Consequences

(1) The extensive adoption by Man of a flesh-diet many hundreds of thousands of years ago might be expected to have shortened his alimentary canal in comparison with that of the anthropoids; but not much evidence of it is obtainable. Topinard, giving a proportionate estimate, says that in Man it is about six times the length of the body, in the gibbon about eight times. Dr. Arthur Keith, in a private communication with which he has favoured me, says that the adult chimpanzee’s intestine is slightly longer than the adult man’s, but that the measurements are for certain reasons unsatisfactory, and that there have not been enough measurements of adult chimpanzees. We must remember that, on the one hand, the chimpanzee is not exclusively frugivorous, and that, on the other hand, it is not likely that Man has been at any time exclusively carnivorous; though the return of large populations to a vegetarian diet by means of agriculture is recent.

(2) Man has lost the restraint of seasonal marriage, common to the anthropoids with other animals, as determined by food-supply and other conditions of infantile welfare; though, according to Prof. Westermarck, traces of it may still be found in a few tribes.[13] That our domestic carnivores have also lost this wholesome restraint on passion and population points, probably, to some condition of a steadier food-supply as determining or permitting the change amongst ourselves. No growth of prudence, however, or habit of laying up stores can explain the steadier supply of food; since the lower savages have no prudence and no stores. On the whole, the change may be attributed (a) to an omnivorous habit being more steadily gratified than one entirely frugivorous or carnivorous; (b) to our ancestors having wandered in quest of game from country to country in which the seasons varied, so that the original correspondence of birth-time with favourable conditions of welfare was thrown out. There may also have been causes that kept down the normal numbers of the pack, so as to be equivalent, in scarce seasons, to more abundant food: the hunter’s life, whilst securing a richer normal diet, involved many destructive incidents. And this (by the way) was favourable to rapid selection and adaptation; though if the destruction had been great enough to counterbalance the advantages of animal food, it must have frustrated the whole experiment.

(3) There is one characteristic difference of Man from the anthropoids which his hunting habits do not clearly explain—his relatively naked skin. Darwin attributed this condition to sexual selection.[14] He argued that, on the one hand, so far as Man has had the power of choice, women have been chosen for their beauty; and that, on the other hand, women have had more power of selection, even in the savage state, than is usually supposed, and “would generally choose not merely the handsomest men, according to their standard of taste, but those who were at the same time best able to defend and support them.” Hence, if a partial loss of hair was esteemed ornamental by our ape-like progenitors, sexual selection, operating age after age, might result in relative nakedness. “The faces of several species of monkey and large surfaces at the posterior end of the body have been denuded of hair; and this we may safely attribute to sexual selection.” The beard of the male, and the great length of the hair of the head in some races, especially seem due to this cause. The greater hairiness of Europeans, compared with other races, may be a case of reversion to remote ancestral conditions. But as all races are nearly naked, the common character was probably acquired before the several races had diverged from the common stock.

The species of monkey that have lost the hair on various parts of their bodies, and the beard of males (together with the longer head-hair of women) of our own race are cases that strongly support the ascription of such secondary sexual characters to sexual selection. Yet, going back to the time before the division of modern Man into races (say, 600,000 years), it seems incredible that any women then went unmarried, hair or no hair, if they were healthy (and the unhealthy soon ceased to exist); or that any man went unmarried, if he could do his share in the hunting-field (and, if not, he also soon ceased to exist). No facts observed amongst extant savages—the choice exerted by women, or the polygamy of chiefs—throw much light upon that ancient state of affairs. There were then no chiefs: the hunt-leader of pack or clan had no authority but his personal prowess, no tradition of ancestry or religion, nor probably the prestige of magic, to give him command of women. Unless, at that time, relative nakedness was strongly correlated with personal prowess in the male and efficiency in the female, it is difficult to understand how it can have been preserved and increased by sexual selection. Forgive me for adding an unkind remark: if the selection of women for their beauty has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years, and has had a cumulative effect upon the race, is not the result disappointing? Go into the street and look. That “women have become more beautiful, according to the general opinion, than men,” is not an objective, truly æsthetic judgment, but one determined by causes of which “general opinion” is falsely unconscious. Schopenhauer[15] thought that men are better looking than women; and of average specimens this seems to be true; though, to be sure, he was a sort of misogynist.

Another explanation of Man’s nakedness was suggested by Thomas Belt, based on the parallel case of certain races of naked dogs, namely, that he is the better able to free himself from parasites.[16] Darwin mentions this hypothesis and, in a footnote, cites in its favour “a practice with the Australians, when the vermin get troublesome, to singe themselves”; but he says, in the text, “whether this evil is of sufficient magnitude to have led to the denudation of the body through natural selection, may be doubted, since none of the many quadrupeds inhabiting the tropics have, as far as I know, acquired any specialised means of relief.”[17] It appears, too, that against the probability of such a result must be set the actual disadvantage of nakedness, as insisted upon by Wallace, who says that savages feel the want of protection and try to cover their backs and shoulders.[18] Still, the disadvantage implied in occasionally feeling the want of protection would not prevent the loss of hair, if this would deliver the race from serious dangers from vermin; and the force of the argument from the condition of other tropical quadrupeds depends, at least in some measure, upon whether or not there is something peculiar in the case of naked dogs and men.

Belt argues that the naked dogs with dark, shining skins, found in Central America and also in Peru,[19] and which were found there at the Spanish conquest, have probably acquired their peculiar condition by natural selection, because they are despised by the natives, and no care is taken of their breeding, and yet they do not interbreed with the common hairy varieties, as usually happens with artificial stocks. The advantage of a naked skin being the greater freedom it gives from ticks, lice and other vermin, the advantage is especially great for a domestic animal living in the huts of savages, where, because they are inhabited year after year, vermin are extraordinarily abundant. The naked dog, then, differs from tropical quadrupeds which are adapted from a dateless antiquity to such vermin as infest them, by having been thrown by human companionship amongst not only strange vermin, but vermin in extraordinarily dense aggregation. Belt would have guarded a weak point in his case, had he explained why naked races of dogs are so scarce. Hairy races may have been more recently domesticated, or bred for their hairiness, or less addicted to an indoor life.

The case of our own forefather also differs somewhat from that of other tropical mammalia; because, by hypothesis, he underwent pretty rapidly such an extraordinary change of life; which may have brought him into circumstances where vermin, formerly negligible, became highly injurious. “Monkeys,” as Belt observes, “change their sleeping-places almost daily”; the Orang is said to construct a fresh nest every night; this is also reported of the Gorilla. Not improbably, then, daily change of locality was the practice of the original anthropoid stock, whence we also are descended: thereby avoiding the accumulation of vermin. Did the hunting life introduce a new habit? In the old frugivorous forest life, the custom was to get up into some tree for the night, and within a short radius there were hundreds equally suitable; and, therefore, there was nothing to check the natural preference for a fresh one. When, however, the hunting pack began to make its lair on the ground, there was no such wide choice amongst caves, rock-shelters, or thickets: one might be better than any other for miles around. If, then, they settled down there as in a common lair, the circumstances were, for the time, favourable to the multiplication of vermin, and therefore to nakedness of skin, in order the more easily to be rid of them. Perhaps, then, this difference of Man from the anthropoids may be referred to one common cause with all the others—the hunting life. There, too, the defilement of blood made fur inconvenient to animals not apt to cleanse themselves, like those in the true carnivorous heredity and tradition.

When we consider how injurious some insects are to vertebrate life, being suspected of having caused in some cases the extinction of species, can it be said that facility in ridding oneself of such vermin as lice and ticks is an inadequate cause of human nakedness, or not one that might outweigh the drawbacks of cold and wet? It is not, however, incompatible with the action of sexual selection, tending to the same result; nor, again, with the preferential destruction of hairy children if ever infanticide was practised. A further possible ground of deliberate selection may have been the mere ambition of differing from other animals; for a tribe on the Upper Amazons is reported to depilate to distinguish themselves from the monkeys, and the wish to be superior to other animals led a tribe in Queensland to pretend that they, unlike kangaroos, etc., have no fathers according to the flesh.[20] Admitting that this last motive can hardly have been primitive, still, our nakedness may be a resultant of several causes.

(4) Cannibalism, where it has been found amongst extant peoples, or is known to have been formerly practised, was often justified by certain magical or animistic ideas, but sometimes frankly by dietetic taste, or by the satisfaction of revenge or of emphatic triumph over an enemy. Was it an ancient and perhaps general custom? The excavations at Krapina in Croatia disclosed along with remains of the Neanderthal species, which seems to have had a habitation there, those of rhinoceros and cave-bear and of some other kind of Man; and “some of the human bones had been apparently split open: on that slender basis the Krapina men have been suspected of cannibalism.”[21] If the suspicion is valid, the practice existed (say) 50,000 years ago in one species of Man; and perhaps much earlier, if we consider how it was merely an extension of the practice of devouring game to include the slain members of a hostile pack; for as primitive Man, or Lycopithecus, his pre-human forebear, no doubt regarded other animals as upon the same level as himself, so he will have regarded human enemies as upon the same footing with other animals. That true carnivores are not generally cannibals may be put down to their more ancient and perfect adaptation to a predatory life. For them persistent cannibalism would have been too destructive, and for us it belongs to the experimental stage of history; though, of course, even in recent times, under stress of famine, reversion to the practice is not unknown to civilised men.

(5) The extraordinary variability of modern Man (considered as one species) in stature, shape of skull, size and power of brain, colour, hairiness, quality of hair, and other characters, physical and mental, may be referred chiefly to his having become adapted to various local conditions upon settling here or there for long periods of time after wandering over the world in quest of game. The settling of offshoots of the original stock in certain regions long enough for them to undergo adaptation to local circumstances is the simplest explanation of existing races: the Negro adapted to equatorial Africa; the Asiatic stock (“Mongolian”) to Central Asia; the Mediterranean race to the neighbourhood of the sea after which it is named. As to the Nordic sub-race (of the Mediterranean, we may suppose), with its fair hair and skin, it has the appearance of an Arctic beast of prey, like the Polar bear. The snow-leopard of the Himalaya is found at a midway stage of such adaptation. Some geologists and zoologists now believe that, during the Glacial Period, the climate of Northern Europe was not everywhere such as necessarily to destroy the local fauna and flora, and in that case our ancestors may for ages have maintained themselves there; or, if that was impossible (as the absence of palæolithic remains in Scandinavia seems to indicate), they may have roamed for many ages along the borders of glaciation, perhaps as far as the Pacific Coast. Chinese annals refer to fair tribes in Eastern Siberia 200 years before the Christian era;[22] and it seems requisite to imagine some extensive reservoir of mankind in order to explain the origin of the vast hordes which in prehistoric as in historical times again and again invaded Europe—hordes

“which the populous North
Poured ever from her frozen loins, to pass
Rhene or the Danau; when her barbarous sons
Came like a deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.”

That the race was formerly fairer than it is now may be inferred from the whiteness of its children’s hair: the trait has outlived its utility. The occurrence of a fair complexion in some mountain tribes, in the Alps, e. g., has occasioned the conjecture that it may be due in some way to mountainous conditions,[23] of which snow might be one; but, if we suppose that the Nordic race extended during the Glacial Period into Western Europe (having already acquired its distinctive characters), a fair complexion in the Alps may be understood by supposing that, whilst the greater number of them followed the ice-sheet back to the north-east, some followed it southward up into the mountains—if the complexion is really ancient there.

Two objections to this hypothesis will occur to every one: (i) Why are not the Esquimo fair? Because, I suppose, they are much more recent immigrants into the Arctic regions, and perhaps were fully clothed when they arrived there. (ii) Could the Nordic people have existed in such circumstances unclothed? Whether this was possible physiologists must judge. We see the Fuegians maintain themselves, practically naked, under very inclement conditions. And it is not necessary to assume that the Nordic hunters were entirely naked; since the correlation between the hair, eyes and all parts of the skin is such that, if the whitening of any part (say the hair) was sufficiently advantageous to determine natural selection, the remainder of the body would be similarly affected. And, no doubt, the Mediterranean race was always whitish.

The Amerinds seem to have been derived chiefly from the Asiatic race. Pygmies and Australians may represent separate and still older stocks. But, as a result of migrations and conquests, most peoples are of mixed descent; and hence (i) individuals in the same locality sometimes vary greatly, because they inherit the blood of different strains in different proportions; and (ii) classification is difficult, so that whilst some observers are content to find half a dozen races, Deniker enumerates twenty-nine.

Besides general racial differences, there exist within each race and within each national group further differences between individuals in their physical, and still more in their mental, stature and ability. As it was necessary that Man should vary greatly in undergoing adaptation to the hunting life (as well as to different local environments), he was in an organic condition favourable to further variation.[24] And this has been utilised in his adaptation to a certain special condition of his gregariousness, namely, life in the hunting-pack; for this requires a difference of personality between leaders and followers, first in the chase and later in war. A good democrat may think it would have been a better plan to make all men equal from the first; and I would it had been so; for then the head of the race would not have had to drag along such an altogether disproportionate tail: a tail so huge and unwieldy that one may doubt whether it can ever be extricated from the morass of barbarism. But in the early days of gregariousness, a pack could not have held together, or have hunted efficiently, if all had been equal and each had exercised the right of private judgment. So in successful packs one led and the rest followed; as they still do, and will continue to do, of whatever kind may be the leader. And of all structures that make up a human being the most variable is the brain: the differences between men in stature and physique are trifling compared with those in mental power. Whatever feat of strength your Samson can perform, half a dozen ordinary men can also accomplish; but in every generation tasks are carried out by intellectual athletes, toward which all the ordinary men in the world, uniting their efforts, could do nothing—absolutely nothing.

§ 4. Prey and Competitors

If we suppose the differentiation of the Hominidæ from the Anthropoidea to have begun in the Upper Oligocene, and that the decisive change was initiated by some ape that adopted the life of a hunter, it is interesting to consider what the world was like in which he lived, what sort of animals surrounded him, what animals probably became his prey, and what were his rivals in the chase.[25]

The surface of the planet was less mountainous than at present; in Europe the Pyrenees had risen, but the Alps were only beginning to rise; and in Asia the Himalayas began to dominate the world only in the middle of the next epoch, the Miocene. The distribution of land and water, too, was very different in the Oligocene from that which we now see: Europe was divided from Asia by a broad gulf stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Arctic Circle, and an arm of this gulf toward the west submerged a great part of Central Europe; Asia was broadly connected with North America, where now the sea penetrates between Siberia and Alaska; Africa had no connection with either Europe or Asia; North and South America were separated—perhaps at Panama. In the Miocene, Europe, Asia and Africa became united. These physiographic changes may have affected climate; for during the Eocene tropical conditions prevailed far to the north, and coal-beds were laid down in Alaska; but from the Oligocene onwards there was a gradual fall of temperature, slow at first, but ending (for the present) in the cataclysms of the Glacial Period. There was also a decrease in some regions of atmospheric moisture, which determines the density of vegetation. In its general character the vegetation was similar to that which now prevails in tropical, subtropical and temperate regions of the world. The species of plants now existing had not yet arrived; but of the same genera and families as those we see, conifers, palms and dicotyledonous flowering plants crowded the forests and overhung the rivers. The forests were more extensive and continuous than ours outside the tropics; for by degrees browsing animals, feeding down the young trees, check the renovation of forests and clear open spaces, where grasses grow; changes of temperature limit the northern or southern extension of certain kinds of plants, and a failure of humidity starves all the larger kinds; converting, at successive stages, forest into steppe and steppe into desert.

Animals, especially mammalia, with which chiefly we are concerned, were, at the close of the Oligocene, very different from any that now roam the lands; all the species, most genera, many families and some whole orders have since disappeared. But there were plenty to eat and a good many to dread. Until we know the neighbourhood in which our ape’s adventures began, nothing precise can be said of his circumstances. Probably it was somewhere in the Old World, and probably it was in Asia. Unfortunately, we know nothing of the zoological antiquities of Asia until the early Miocene, and even then a very small selection of what must have existed, because geologists have hitherto explored a very small part of the continent—a few beds in north-western and northern India and in Burmah. But there is so much evidence of the migrations of animals in successive ages of the Tertiary Period, that any remains from the Oligocene and Miocene will help us to understand what sort of neighbours our remote ancestors had to live amongst.

For prey there was great variety of birds and reptiles (everywhere eaten by savages) and fishes; but we are most concerned with the mammalia, which he may be supposed to have pursued afoot. Of these the most important are the hoofed animals, which fall into two great groups, perhaps not closely connected—the odd-toed (Perissodactyls) and the even-toed (Artiodactyls). During the Oligocene there lived in Europe, or in North America, or in both—and, therefore, probably in Asia—numbers of the odd-toed group: tapirs; rhinoceroses of several species, some without horns, some with, some amphibious (Amynodonts), all smaller than their modern representatives; chalicotheres, strange beasts something like horses, but instead of hoofs they had claws on their toes—perhaps survived in China into the Pleistocene; small predecessors of the horse with three toes on each foot; titanotheres, hugest animals of their age, extinct in the middle of it—something like the rhinoceros and nearly as big as an elephant (Brontotherium). Of the even-toed group, pig-like animals abounded, and some true pigs appeared; entelodonts, or giant-pigs, were common; anthracotheres, somewhat pig-like in size and shape; ancestral camels about the size of sheep were to be had in North America; oreodonts, unfinished-looking creatures of many species; primitive deer and other ruminants, small in size and not having yet grown any horns. In Europe, during the Upper Oligocene, cœnotheres, small and graceful animals, lived in large herds around the lakes. There were also primitive proboscidia about half the size of modern elephants; many insectivores; and, amongst rodents, beavers and tailless hares. Generally, animals of this age that have left descendants were smaller than their modern representatives; and notably their brains were smaller.

In the Lower and Middle Miocene there appeared also horned cervuline deer, chevrotaines, and horned antelopes; dinotheres and mastodons, probably from Africa; primitive hedgehogs, moles and shrews; and in the Upper Miocene, hipparion, true hares, several varieties of hornless giraffe, true deer, and ancestral sheep. True horses and cattle are first known from Pliocene beds; but it is needless to follow the story further: the fauna becomes more and more modern in its character, and uncouth forms die out.

Anthropoids are first met with in the Miocene and in Europe: pliopithecus, allied to the gibbons, in the Lower; and dryopithecus, related to the chimpanzee, in the Middle Miocene; but they are believed to have come from Asia. There, in Pliocene beds of the Siwaliks (southern foot-hills of the Himalayas), occur the orang and chimpanzee, besides macaques, langurs and baboons. Since the orang is now found only in Borneo and Sumatra, and the chimpanzee only in Africa, southern Asia seems to have been the centre from which the anthropoids dispersed; and this seems to be the chief positive ground for believing that the human stock began to be differentiated in that region. Since, again, by the Middle Miocene a chimpanzee form had already migrated into Europe, it may be assumed that the orang was already distinct from it (and perhaps had spread eastward): the differentiation of these genera must, therefore, have happened earlier; and, therefore, also the differentiation of the human stock; so that this event cannot be put later than some time in the Oligocene.

How big was Lycopithecus to begin with? The answer to this question must affect our view of his relations both to prey and to enemies. Inasmuch as the three extant anthropoids and Man are all of about the same size, there is a presumption that their common ancestor was in stature superior to the gibbons and to the largest monkeys—in fact, a “giant” ape (to borrow a term from Dr. Keith). Dryopithecus “was smaller than the chimpanzee, but much larger than the gibbon.”[26] Awaiting further evidence of fossils, which is much to be desired, it is probable, on the whole, that Lycopithecus weighed less on the average than modern man, but more than the wolf.

As to competitors and aggressive enemies, there were snakes and crocodiles; but, confining our attention to carnivorous mammals, the time seems to have been favourable to the enterprise of a new hunter. By the middle of the Oligocene, the ancient Creodonts (primitive flesh-eaters which had flourished in the Eocene) were nearly extinct, represented in the deposits by their last surviving family, the Hyœnodonts. Ancestors of the modern carnivores, such as may be called by anticipation dogs and cats, derived (according to Prof. Scott) from the Creodont Family of the Miacidæ, were becoming numerous, but for the most part were still of small size. Apparently, the primitive dogs and their allies must, for some time, have been more formidable adversaries than the primitive cats, especially if we suppose them to have already begun to hunt in pack; and this is not improbable, both on account of their structure and because several distinct varieties and even genera, now extant, have that habit—such as wolf, jackal, dingo, dhole, Cape hunting-dog, etc. In the Upper Oligocene of North America, occurs a dog as big as a large modern wolf, and in Europe the bear-like dog, Amphicyon, of about the same size, but said to have been clumsy and slow-moving. There were several other dog-like species; they continue in the Miocene, and some of them increase in bulk; but true modern dogs or wolves (Canis) do not appear before the Pliocene. Then, too, first occur true bears (Ursus); hyænas in the Upper Miocene. “Cats” belong to two sub-families: (i) the true felines, our modern species and their ancestors; and (ii) the machærodonts, or sabre-toothed cats. The latter first appear in North America in the Lower Oligocene; the former in Europe in the Middle Oligocene. The sabre-tooths are so called from their thin, curved upper canines; which were so long (3 to 6 inches) that it is not easy to understand how they could open their mouths wide enough to bite with them. That they were effective in some way is proved by the fact that machærodonts, first appearing in the Lower Oligocene, increased in numbers and diversity of species for ages, and some of them in bulk. In North America, in the Upper Oligocene, one species was as large as a jaguar, and some of the biggest and most terrifying were contemporary with Man, and only became extinct in the Pleistocene. Their limbs were relatively shorter and thicker than those of the Felinæ. These, the true cats, at first progressed more slowly than the Machærodontidæ; but in the Siwalik deposits (Pliocene) there occur, along with machærodonts, forms resembling the leopard and the lynx, with others as large as tigers. The largest of all this group seems to have been the cave-lion, perhaps a large variety of the common African lion, which also lived with Man in Europe in the Pleistocene. These were serious competitors in the hunting-life of Lycopithecus and of primitive Man; and the effect of such competition in exterminating inferior forms is shown by the fate of the carnivorous marsupials of South America (allied to Thylacinus), which were the predatory fauna of that region, until in the Pliocene, North and South America having become united by continuous land, cats and dogs came in from the northern continent and put an end to them; and also by the fate of the creodonts, which in the Oligocene seem everywhere to have been exterminated by the new carnivores. In both cases the beaten competitors were very inferior in the size and complexity of their brains; and if Man has succeeded in the struggle for life against the same foes, in spite of his inferior bodily adaptation, it is probably due to his very superior brains. This may also be the reason why modern Man (Homo sapiens!), wandering everywhere over the world, has everywhere exterminated such experiments in human nature as Pithecanthropus, Eoanthropus, and Neanderthalensis; as others are soon to follow them into the Hades of extinct species.

These few pages give a ridiculously faint sketch of the animal world amidst which our remote ancestors began their career. But it may serve to indicate that there was always plenty to eat if you could kill it, and plenty of rivals who wanted their share. After the disappearance of the dinosaurs at the close of the Cretaceous period, the mammalia, already numerous, developed rapidly, and spread in ever multiplying numbers and diverging shapes over the whole area of the land. We may take it that from the Middle Eocene (at least) onwards the earth has always been as full of wild beasts as it would hold. To understand what it was like in the Middle Oligocene, one should read the adventures of hunters in South Africa seventy or eighty years ago (their verisimilitude is vouched for by Livingstone),[27] before a gun in the hands of every Kaffir had begun to thin the vast herds that then covered the whole landscape, and in whose numbers the wild hunters and the lions could make no appreciable diminution. The little Bushmen regarded themselves and the lions as joint owners and masters of all the game. The masters fought one another, indeed; but there was no necessity to fight, for there was more than enough for both: lions were then sometimes met in gangs of ten or a dozen. Game throughout the Cainozoic ages was abundant and of all sizes: many small, many middle-sized and some prodigious. Even in the Eocene, some of the Amblypoda (Dinoceras, Am.) and of the Barypoda (Arsinotherium, Af.) were as big as rhinoceroses; in the Oligocene, Titanotheres not much smaller than elephants; in South America, in Miocene and Pliocene times, the Toxodonts; in the Pleistocene, Ground-sloths of huge bulk, and Glyptodonts. Of Families still represented amongst living animals, dinotheres and mastodons occur in the Miocene; and elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffe have abounded from the Pliocene to recent times, in many species, over most of Africa and the northern hemisphere. Even the marsupials in Australia produced a species (Diprotodon) as large as a rhinoceros with a skull three feet long. Any one of these would have been a meal for a whole pack of hunters, if they could kill it—as we may be sure they could.

§ 5. Conclusion

From the addiction of some ancestral ape to animal food, and to the life of a hunter in order to obtain it, then, the special characteristics of Man seem to be natural consequences. The hypothesis from which everything follows is exceptionally simple and moderate. It is generally admitted that our ancestor was a large anthropoid—possibly more gregarious than others, possibly more apt to live upon the ground; but neither of these suppositions is requisite. He was adapted to his life, as the chimpanzee and gorilla are to theirs: in which, probably, they have gone on with little change for ages. But into his life a disturbing factor entered—the impulse to attack, hunt and eat animals, which extensively replaced his former peaceable, frugivorous habit. The cause of this change may have been a failure in the supply of his usual diet, or an “accidental variation” of appetite. Not a great number need have shared in the hunting impulse; it is enough that a few should have felt it, or even one. If advantageous and inheritable, it would spread through his descendants. It was advantageous (a) in enlarging their resources of nutrition, and (b) in enabling them to escape from the tropical forest. On the other hand, to those least fit for the new life it brought the disadvantages of more strenuous exertion and of competition with other carnivorous types. But with hands and superior intelligence, those that had the requisite character succeeded. There was rapid selection of those whose variations of structure, character, activity were most effective in dealing with game and with enemies; especially of those who combined and co-operated, and learned to direct co-operation by some rudimentary speech.

But, again, the hunting impulse here assumed to have possessed some anthropoid was not something entirely new; anthropoids and many other Primates are known to seize and devour birds, lizards and even small mammals when chance offers an easy opportunity. It is merely a greater persistence in this behaviour that turns it into hunting. How very improbable that such a change should not sometimes occur! Is it not likely to have occurred often, and with many failures? Similarly, of the resulting changes: the differentiation of our hands and feet is only an advance upon what you see in the gorilla; as for our ground-life, can the adult male gorilla be fairly called arboreal? Several Primates use unwrought weapons; most of them lead a gregarious life, to which our own is a return; they are co-operative at least in defence; like many other animals, they communicate by gestures and inarticulate vocal cries. Co-operative hunting, indeed, seems to be new in our Order; but since wolves and dogs, or their ancestors, fell in with it some time or other, why should it be beyond the capacity of apes? On second thoughts, is the co-operative raiding of plantations by baboons something altogether different from hunting in pack? Thus at each occasion of change in structure or function, Lycopithecus merely carried some tendency of the other Primates a little further, and a little further; until, certainly, he went a long way. The whole movement can be distinctly pictured throughout, and it has an air of being natural or even inevitable. Few hypotheses ask us to grant less than this one.

Moreover, if the story is not true, Man is an exception to the rule of animal life, that the structure of every organism is made up of apparatus subserving its peculiar conditions of nutrition and reproduction. Indeed, conditions of nutrition are the ground of the differentiation of animals and plants. Conditions of reproduction need not here be considered, as the apparatus is the same in the anthropoids and in ourselves. With many species to avoid being eaten and to mate are the reasons for some secondary characters, such as protective armour or coloration, fleetness with its correlative structures, nuptial plumage, and so forth. But to avoid being eaten and to mate, it is first of all necessary to eat and live; and accordingly, for each sort of animal, starting from the organisation of some earlier stock, its structure and activities are determined by the kind of food it gets, and the conditions of getting it: in our case, the hunting of game afoot.

CHAPTER II
ON THE DIFFERENTIATION OF THE HUMAN FROM THE ANTHROPOID MIND

§ 1. Heredity, Adaptation, Accommodation

Following the general belief that Man is descended from a stock nearly allied to the greater anthropoids—Orang, Chimpanzee, Gorilla—we may assume that his mental endowments were once much the same as theirs; and that, so far as they are still the same, heredity sufficiently explains his having them. Thus the senses, perception, the simpler forms of comparison and inference, the appetites and many of the instincts and emotions are common to us with the apes, are seen in our children under three years old, and (in short) constitute that generic consciousness (as I have called it) from which the human mind in general and the peculiar traits of races and individuals are differentiated.

So much for heredity; but the differences of the human from the anthropoid mind, alike in intelligence and in character, are enormous, and must be accounted for in some other way. Allowing for some original specific difference which we can hardly hope to discover, the changes that have taken place may be considered as the result of adaptation to those habits of life under which our species (now ranking zoologically as a Family) has been developed. And this adaptation I shall assume to have been brought about under conditions of natural selection: human races, as we now see them, being the survivors of many variations, more or less successful, and the others having been destroyed. For good judges are of opinion that, amongst the discovered remains of ancient specimens of the human family, some that exhibit marked deviations from the modern type—Neanderthalensis, Eoanthropus, Pithecanthropus—should be regarded not as belonging to our ancestral line, but rather as representing distinct species that have failed in the struggle for existence.[28]

But besides the innate dispositions of human nature determined by heredity and natural selection, which are found in some measure universally, because they are adaptations to conditions that, at one time and not long ago, weighed upon the ancestors of all of us, there are numerous traits (some of them quite superficial) that vary from country to country and from age to age, according to the economic or political type of the society in which a man lives, his place therein, geographical circumstances, religious institutions and the countless causes that govern manners and customs. In the lives of most men these traits are not necessary; they may be adopted and cast aside more than once in an individual’s career: they are temporary accommodations due to education, imitation, tradition; and, in fact, are often the disguises of human nature. Still, as society grows more and more complex, orderly and stable, there is, no doubt, again some natural selection of those individuals who are capable of undergoing the requisite accommodations. Those that cannot endure the restraints of civilisation, wander away; the extremely lazy, improvident, dishonest, or aggressive, in considerable numbers, perish.

§ 2. The Original Stock and the Conditions of Differentiation

To the original mentality of man we can only seek a clue in the higher Primates, and especially in the extant anthropoids. No doubt, during the long millennia that have elapsed since the separation of our own stock from those of other genera and species, they also have undergone some evolution, but probably much less change than we have. Unfortunately, our knowledge of their habits and abilities is still deplorably limited. It seems certain, however, that their intelligence is much greater than that of any other kind of animal. They must have extensive knowledge of their habitat, of all the forest can yield for food or shelter, and of its other denizens dangerous or otherwise. They construct for themselves some sort of sleeping-place, not much inferior to the Australians’ “lean-to,” by piling branches together in the trees. Toward men, anthropoids seem to be unaggressive, and usually retreat from them; but, when attacked, defend themselves with fury. From other animals the male gorilla has nothing to fear, and he defends his family against leopards; the chimpanzee is said to fight leopards with varying success; and, as for the orang, Dyak chiefs told Wallace that no animals dare attack him, except crocodiles and pythons, and that he kills both of them.[29] The food of these apes is chiefly fruit and the tender shoots of trees and bamboos; but they sometimes eat eggs and young birds; and the gorilla is said to eat small mammals: in confinement they all take cooked flesh freely. Socially, they hardly get beyond family life. Orangs male and female are even seen alone, and young ones together without parents; gorillas are seen in family parties; chimpanzees in families, and occasionally three or four families in company. It is said that gorillas and chimpanzees have been seen together in a large band. I have met with no report of these animals fighting amongst themselves, except that male gorillas sometimes fight for a wife. Gorillas have also been said, upon very slight evidence, to be polygamous; chimpanzees and orangs seem to be monogamous.[30] Their family life is probably, as amongst all the other Primates, affectionate: the long youth of their children implies much parental care. Whilst the smaller anthropoids—siamang and gibbon—go in troops, as also do the baboons and most monkeys of both hemispheres, the less sociability of the great anthropoids may be understood to result (a) from the limited supply of the right sort of food for them, even in the tropical forest to which they are confined—since animals of their bulk must consume a great deal; and (b) from their having no need of combining for the purpose of defence.

From the type thus outlined the mentality of the human race has departed so widely that some even of those who believe that our bodies have been derived from some simian stock (e. g. Wallace) hesitate to admit that our minds can have had a similar history. But as everywhere else in the animal kingdom mind and body constitute one organism, it is reasonable to consider whether the differentiation of the mind of man may not be understood to have taken place under the same conditions as those which determined the transformation of his body. What were these conditions?

(a) In the foregoing chapter I have collected a number of facts and arguments pointing to the probability that the chief cause of the evolution of the human Family was the adoption by some anthropoid (or allied form) of the life of the hunter in order to obtain animal food. That the change from a frugivorous to a carnivorous diet may itself have had some effect upon our temperament and activity is possible; but I lay no stress upon that. Most monkeys are almost exclusively frugivorous; the only Primate, except man, that depends a good deal upon animal food is, I believe, the crab-eating macaque (Macacus cynomolgus), of the Burmese and Malay littoral; yet monkeys are the most alert and active of animals; some of them are amongst the most courageous; anthropoids are amongst the most powerful. A carnivorous diet alone would not explain any changes in the shape and proportions of our trunk and limbs, nor the upright gait, nor the gregarious habit, nor the development of the brain, nor the invention of weapons, nor the use of fire, nor any of the mental and emotional characteristics that distinguish man from the other Primates; but all these things readily follow from our remote ancestor’s adoption of the life of the hunter.

Sociologists, surveying extant peoples, have usually distinguished four stages of culture, the hunting, pastoral, agricultural and manufacturing; and some have indicated what they suppose to have been a still earlier stage, the “collecting,” such as may be seen, e. g., amongst the Fuegians. But the collecting state is plainly degenerate, the resource of tribes fallen into distress; it cannot have been the first stage, because it implies no conditions that tend in any way to develop body or mind or society. That hunting came first is a true intuition: and, to understand the development of human nature, we need only refer the hunting-life back to the very origin of the human stock.[31]

(b) The great anthropoids are all confined to the equatorial forests; and it is obvious that, with their diet, it is impossible to pass out of tropical or (at furthest) sub-tropical regions. But the adoption of a flesh diet enabled the human stock to extend the range of its hunting (allowing for gradual adaptation to climate or accommodation by clothing) to any country that supplied the requisite prey; and, accordingly, in course of time, it wandered to every part of the world. The settling of various off-shoots of the original stock in certain regions long enough for them to undergo adaptation to local conditions is (as we have seen) the simplest explanation of existing races.

(c) Whilst none of the great anthropoids has advanced socially beyond family life, man is everywhere (with few and doubtful exceptions) gregarious—living at the lowest grade in tribes or bands of about fifty; and the gregarious life is one of the most important conditions of his peculiar development. Possibly, he may originally have been more gregarious than any extant anthropoid, in spite of his not needing society for defence, and of its seeming to be for so large a frugivorous animal inconvenient in relation to nutrition. Moreover, if the great anthropoids and our own ancestors were descended from some stock of the lower monkeys, such as always go in troops, the gregarious instinct may have remained with them as a latent character. Still, it is my conjecture that man became gregarious, or recovered the social habit, because of the utility of co-operative hunting; so that he became at first a sort of wolf-ape. This will be discussed in the next section. I observe here, however, that the hypothesis helps us to understand why man is still imperfectly sociable; the purpose of the hunting-pack, each wolf-ape seeking prey, was unfavourable to social life in other relations. That in human life group-consciousness preceded self-consciousness is a groundless and fantastic notion: all known savages are fully self-conscious, as their sentiments and behaviour imply; and even the higher brutes are (in my judgment) self-conscious in their relations with others. Current speculations about fashion, imitation, tradition, crowd-psychology, are in danger of exaggeration, and overlook the patent facts of individualism, as shown by the hypocrite, the criminal, the vagrant, the contra-suggestible, the hermit, the sceptic, the saint. Some people—without being in any way morbid—find that a good deal of solitude is necessary to the complete life: by nature the student and the pioneer escape from the crowd.

(d) The later stages of human development have been considerably modified by certain imaginary conditions peculiar to Man; for he—we know not at what date—invented them. These may be summed up under the names of Magic and Animism; and in subsequent chapters they will be discussed, with their astonishing vagaries and still more astonishing reactions upon human life.

The chief conditions, then, to which man has been adapted, and thereby differentiated in body and mind from the anthropoid stock, I take to be four: the hunting life; geographical circumstances; social life; and his own imaginations.

§ 3. Primal Society

In looking for the probable form of the earliest human or (rather) prehuman society, one naturally makes a survey of other mammalian societies; and the task is soon accomplished. It is surprising how few and simple the types of them are, in contrast with the elaborate polities of some hymenoptera and of the termites: these have much greater superficial resemblance to modern human societies; but, in fact, they are families rather than societies; their interesting activities will one day probably be traced to relatively simple mechanisms; and in every way they are too remote from us for any useful comparison. As for mammalian societies, even using the term to include families, they may be classified under four or five types:

(1) Families: (a) Monogamous: of which the best examples seem to be found in some monkeys. Many of the cats are believed to pair monogamously; but it is doubtful whether, or in what measure, the male takes part in the rearing of the whelps.

(b) Polygamous: characteristic of many species of deer;—after the breeding-season, the stags often wander away by themselves.

(2) Associations of families without apparent structure or organisation, such as those of the vizcacha and the beaver. They have no leaders, and make no attempt at mutual defence; but their inco-ordinated activities, in making their burrows, dams, etc., have results which, especially in the case of the beavers, look as if the animals had worked upon a common, premeditated plan. Gregariousness exists widely in the animal kingdom without any utility in attack or defence, but merely for convenience of breeding, or for the advantage of signalling the approach of danger, from any direction, to the whole flock.

(3) Troops or herds, comprising several families. This type is common amongst monkeys: generally the families are monogamous, and both parents care for the offspring; they have leaders, and combine in mutual defence. This is especially effective with the baboons—who, however, are polygamous. A very similar type is characteristic of cattle; who also have leaders as the result of battle between the bulls, each trying to control and keep together as many cows as he can; and they often combine their forces against beasts of prey.

(4) Hunting-packs—most noticeable with wolves and wild dogs: they have leaders, and probably an order of precedence determined by battle. In the breeding-season (February to August) a pack of wolves breaks up into pairs; but whether their pairing is for life or merely seasonal is disputed; and it is also doubtful whether the male takes any share in caring for the puppies; such habits may vary in different localities.[32] The numbers of the pack depend on circumstances, and are now much smaller in Canada than in Russia.

Was our own primitive society, then, like any of these? Since direct evidence cannot be obtained, we must be guided in forming our hypothesis by two considerations: (a) what type of society gives the best explanation of human nature as we now find it? and (b) for which type can we give the best reason why it should have been adopted? So I point out (a) that man, in character, is more like a wolf or dog than he is like any other animal; and (b) that for the forming of a pack there was a clear ground in the advantage to be obtained by co-operative hunting.[33]

It must be admitted that Darwin, discussing sexual selection in man, suggests a different hypothesis. He says: “Looking far enough back in the stream of time, and judging from the social habits of man as he now exists, the most probable view is that he aboriginally lived in small communities, each with a single wife, or if powerful with several, whom he jealously guarded against all other men. Or he may not have been a social animal, and yet have lived with several wives, like the gorilla; for all the natives ‘agree that but one adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community.’ The younger males, being thus expelled and wandering about, would, when at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close inter-breeding within the limits of the same family.”[34] The information concerning the polygamy of the gorilla, quoted here from Dr. Savage, who wrote in 1845, has not since (I believe) been confirmed, except by Prof. Garner.[35]

Naturally, the above passage has attracted the attention of anthropologists; and I am sorry to expose myself to the charge of immodesty in venturing to put forward a different view. Atkinson in his essay on Primal Law, edited with qualified approval by Andrew Lang, starts from Darwin’s hypothesis, and merely modifies it by urging that the young males, when driven off by their father, did not wander away, but kept near the family, always on the watch to murder their father. This amendment he makes, because he had observed the same habits in cattle and horses. Then, through a row of hypotheses with little evidence or rational connection, he arrives at an explanation of certain savage laws of avoidance, exogamy, etc. More recently, Prof. Freud has produced a most ingenious and entertaining essay on Totem und Tabu, in which he builds upon the same foundations. You easily see how the “Œdipus complex” emerges from such a primitive state of things, but will hardly, without reading the work, imagine the wealth of speculation it contains or its literary attractiveness. Atkinson probably relied upon the supposed parallel case of wild cattle and horses, because those animals resemble the apes in being vegetarian: though the diets are, in fact, very different. But even if such a comparison indicates a possible social state of our original ape-like stock, what is there in such a state that can be supposed to have introduced the changes that made our forebears no longer ape-like? Supposing those changes to have already taken place, what evidence is there that the same social state endured? None: for it was assumed to have been the social state of our forebears on the ground of their resemblance in diet and family economy to the gorilla.

Returning, then, to our hypothesis as to the chief cause of human differentiation, namely, that a certain Primate, more nearly allied to the anthropoids than to any other, became carnivorous and adopted the life of a hunter, there are (as I have said) two ways in which this may have happened: either by such a variation on the part of our ancestor that he felt a stronger appetite for animal food than the gorilla does—strong enough to make him hunt for prey; or by such a change of climate in the region he inhabited—say from sub-tropical to temperate—as to make his former diet scarce, especially in winter, so that he became a hunter to avoid starvation. Every one admits that he became a hunter at some time: why not at the earliest? Nothing less than some great change of life, concentrating all his powers and straining every faculty, can possibly account for the enormous differentiation of Man. The adoption of the hunting life is such a change; and the further back we put it, the better it explains the other changes that have occurred in our physical and mental nature.

From the outset, again, our ancestor may have attacked big game, probably Ungulates—to whom he owed much; for not only did they provide prey, but by clearing the forest over wide areas compelled him to run in pursuit remote from his native trees, thus giving great selective advantage to every variation of legs and feet adapted to running: though at the very first there may have been little need to run, as he was not yet an object of terror; “we must remember that if man was unskilful, animals were unsuspicious.”[36] I suppose him, at first, to have fallen to with hands and teeth: combining with others in a hungry, savage onslaught. By attacking big game advantage was given to those individuals and families who co-operated in hunting: thus forming the primal society of the human stock; a society entirely different from that of any of the Primates, or of cattle, and most like that of the dogs and wolves—a hunting-pack.

As in the course of generations the hunting-pack developed, no doubt, it had recognised leaders, the most powerful males, one perhaps pre-eminent. But it was not subject to one old male who claimed all the females; for the more adult males it comprised, the stronger it was; and, for the same reason, pairing, as among wolves, was the most efficient form of sexual relationship. But, in my judgment, it is altogether vain to try to deduce from this form of society, which may have existed three or four million years ago, any of the known customs of savages concerning marriage, such as avoidance, totemism, exogamy; which would be of comparatively recent date if we put back their origin 500,000 years. Many such rules can only have arisen when there was already a tradition and a language capable of expressing relationships.

§ 4. Psychology of the Hunting-pack

Possibly our ape-like ancestor was more sociable than any of the anthropoids; but sociability in ape-life would in no way account for our present character as men: nothing accounts for it, except the early formation of the hunting-pack. Since, however, we can know nothing of that institution directly, we must try to learn something about it from the parallel case of dogs and wolves. Galton remarks how readily the proceedings of man and dog “are intelligible to one another. Every whine or bark of the dog, each of his fawning, savage, or timorous movements is the exact counterpart of what would have been the man’s behaviour, had he felt similar emotions. As the man understands the thoughts of the dog, so the dog understands the thoughts of the man, by attending to his natural voice, his countenance, and his actions.”[37] No more, if as much, could be said of the terms upon which we stand with a tame chimpanzee, in spite of greater physical and facial resemblance and nearer kinship. What can connect us so closely in mind with an animal so remote from us in lineage and anatomy as the dog is? Adaptation to the same social conditions, the life of the hunting-pack.

(1) The master-interest of every member of the pack lies in the chase, because success in it is necessary to life. To show how this passion actuates ourselves, I quote Mr. F. C. Selous; who, during an expedition in Canada, roused a caribou stag within twenty yards, saw “the dreadful terror” in his eyes, and shot him. “Did I feel sorry for what I had done? it may be asked. Well! no, I did not. Ten thousand years of superficial and unsatisfying civilisation have not altered the fundamental nature of man, and the successful hunter of to-day becomes a primeval savage, remorseless, triumphant, full of a wild, exultant joy, which none but those who have lived in the wilderness, and depended on their success as hunters for their daily food, can ever know or comprehend.”[38] To the hunter my paradox must seem a truism. And that the hunter temporarily released from civilised restraints, who suffers such intoxication, merely renews old savage raptures is shown by the following curious parallel: a Bushman, returning from a successful hunt to the wagons of the traveller Baines—“Behold me!” he shouted, “the hunter! Yea, look on me, the killer of elephants and mighty bulls! Behold me, the big elephant, the lion! Look on me, ye Damaras and Makalaka; admire and confess that I am a great Bull-calf.”[39]

Again, since the interest of the chase culminates in the kill—for this is the condition of making a meal—to kill becomes, in some predatory animals, a passion that is often gratified without regard to their needs. Wolves often slay many more sheep than they devour: a sheep-dog that undergoes reversion kills by night the sheep on neighbouring farms without any call of hunger; and, says Mr. Thompson Seton (writing of the natives of North Canada), “the mania for killing that is seen in so many white men, is evidently a relic of savagery; for all these Indians and half-breeds are full of it.”[40] They fired at everything they saw. The manners of my own pack—now long dispersed—were very similar to the Indians’; and the sport of pigeon- or of pheasant-shooting has been reduced to its last element—skilful slaying.

The disposition to slay is reinforced, when prey makes serious resistance, by anger; and generally by a distinct tendency, sometimes called “destructiveness,” perhaps a latent character derived from the monkeys, and which I take to be partly a play-impulse and partly an expression of curiosity.

(2) The gregariousness of the pack is variable; probably, amongst wolves, it was much greater anciently than it is to-day. There are conflicting statements about the gregariousness of wolves that have been studied in different countries. Couteulx de Canteleu (France) says: “The wolf is an enemy of all society; when they assemble it is not a pacific society, but a band of brigands.”[41] Thompson Seton (Canada) says: “Wolves are the most sociable of beasts of prey; they arrange to render one another assistance. A pack seems to be an association of personal acquaintances, and would resent the presence of a total stranger.”[42] Gregariousness of wolves must be reduced by failure of game (as by the destruction of bison in North America), and still more by the encroachments of civilisation (as in France). The primitive human pack, probably, was more constantly gregarious than wolves are: (a) because its individuals, having no instinctive or traditionary knowledge of hunting, were more dependent on co-operation; and (b) because the long youth of children made it necessary for parents to associate with the pack during their nurture—else no pack could have existed; for whilst wolves are nearly full-grown at eighteen months, apes are not mature until the eighth or ninth year. At a later period, after the invention of effective weapons, an individual became, for many kinds of game, less dependent on co-operation; but by that time, the hunting-grounds of a pack were circumscribed by those of other hostile packs; so that no one dared go far alone.

(3) With gregariousness went, of course, (a) perceptive sympathy—every animal read instantly in the behaviour of others their feelings and impulses; (b) contagious sympathy—the impulses of any animal, expressed in its behaviour, spread rapidly to all the rest; and (c) effective sympathy, so far (at least) as that all united to defend any associate against aggression from outside the pack. Perceptive and contagious sympathy, however, extend beyond the limits of the pack or the species. Most of the higher mammalia can read the state of mind of others, though of widely different kinds, in their expression and behaviour; and many are liable to have their actions immediately affected by signs of the emotional impulses of others, especially fear. These modes of sympathy, therefore, though liveliest amongst gregarious animals, are not dependent on specific gregariousness.

(4) The pack has a disposition to aggression upon every sort of animal outside the pack, either as prey or as a competitor for prey: limited no doubt by what we should call considerations of prudence or utility; which must vary with the size of the pack, the prowess of its individuals, the possession of weapons, etc. After the invention of weapons and snares, many savage tribes can kill every sort of animal in their habitat, as the palæolithic Europeans did many thousands of years ago. From the outset the human pack must have come into competition with the true carnivores, must have defended itself against them, may have discovered that attack was the safest defence, and may have been victorious even without weapons. Mr. G. P. Sanderson writes: “It is universally believed by the natives (of South India) that the tiger is occasionally killed by packs of wild dogs.... From what I have seen of their style of hunting, and of their power of tearing and lacerating, I think there can be no doubt of their ability to kill a tiger.... Causes of hostility may occasionally arise between the tiger and wild dogs through attempted interference with each other’s prey.”[43]

(5) A hunting-pack, probably, always claims a certain territory. This is the first ground of the sense of property, so strongly shown by domestic dogs: the territorial claims of the half-wild dogs of Constantinople are well known. To nourish a pack the hunting-grounds must be extensive. Mr. Thompson Seton says that in Canada the wolf has a permanent home-district and a range of about fifty miles.[44] Very many generations must have elapsed before the deviation of our forebears from anthropoid habits resulted in the formation of so many packs as to necessitate the practical delimitation of hunting-grounds. Then the aggressiveness of the pack turned upon strangers of its own species; the first wars arose, and perhaps cannibalism on the part of the victors. It is certain that, in North America, wolves kill and eat foxes, dogs, coyotes; and it is generally believed that wolves will eat a disabled companion; though, according to Mr. W. H. Hudson, a wolf will only eat another when it has killed that other, and then only as the carrying out of the instinct to eat whatever it has killed.[45] It may be so.

(6) A pack must have a leader, and must devotedly follow him as long as he is manifestly the best of the pack; and here we have a rudimentary loyalty.

(7) Every individual must be subservient to the pack, as long as it works together; and this seems to be the ground of the “instinct of self-abasement” (McDougall), so far as the attitudes involved in such subserviency are due to a distinct emotional impulse, and are not rather expressive of fear or of devotion.

(8) The members of the pack must be full of emulation; in order that, when the present leader fails, others may be ready to take his place.

(9) For the internal cohesion of the pack, there must be the equivalent of a recognised table of precedence amongst its members; and this is reconciled with the spirit of emulation, by fighting until each knows his place, followed by complete submission on the part of the inferior. Mr. Th. Roosevelt says of a pack of dogs employed in bear-hunting, “at feeding-time each took whatever his strength permitted, and each paid abject deference to whichever animal was his known superior in prowess.”[46] Mr. W. H. Hudson writes of dogs on cattle-breeding establishments on the pampas, that he presumes “they are very much like feral dogs and wolves in their habits. Their quarrels are incessant; but when a fight begins the head of the pack, as a rule, rushes to the spot,” and tries to part the combatants—not always successfully. “But from the foremost in strength and power down to the weakest there is a gradation of authority; each one knows just how far he can go, which companion he can bully when in a bad temper or wishing to assert himself, and to which he must humbly yield in his turn.”[47] The situation reminds one of a houseful of schoolboys, and of how ontogeny repeats phylogeny. Where political control is very feeble, as in mining camps or backwoods settlements, civilised men revert to the same conditions. Fifty years ago, “all along the frontier between Canada and the United States, every one knew whom he could lick, and who could lick him.”[48] Amongst Australian aborigines, we are told that “precedence counts for very much.”[49]

(10) A pack of wolves relies not merely upon running down its prey, but resorts to various stratagems to secure it: as by surrounding it; heading it off from cover; driving it over a precipice; arranging relays of pursuers, who take up the chase when the first begin to flag; setting some to lie in ambush while the rest drive the prey in their direction. Such devices imply intelligent co-operation, some means of communicating ideas, patience and self-control in the interests of the pack and perseverance in carrying out a plan. Failure to co-operate effectually is said to be punished with death. Primitive man, beginning with more brains than a wolf, may be supposed soon to have discovered such arts and to have improved upon them.

(11) When prey has been killed by a pack of wolves, there follows a greedy struggle over the carcass, each trying to get as big a meal as possible. Mr. Th. Roosevelt writes of dogs used in hunting the cougar (puma): “The relations of the pack amongst themselves (when feeding) were those of wild beast selfishness.... They would all unite in the chase and the fierce struggle which usually closed it. But the instant the quarry was killed, each dog resumed his normal attitude of greedy anger or greedy fear toward the others.”[50] As this was a scratch pack of hounds, however, we cannot perhaps infer that a naturally formed pack of wolves is equally discordant, or that the human pack was ever normally like that. Galton, indeed, says: “Many savages are so unamiable and morose as to have hardly any object in associating together, besides that of mutual support;”[51] but this is by no means true of all savages. At any rate, the steadier supply of food obtained by our race since the adoption of pastoral or agricultural economy, with other circumstances, has greatly modified the greedy and morose attitude in many men and disguised it in others; though it reappears under conditions of extreme social dislocation, and it is a proverb that “thieves quarrel over their plunder.” In the original pack such a struggle over the prey may have subserved the important utility of eliminating the weak, and of raising the average strength and ferocity. But some custom must have been established for feeding the women and children. No doubt when fruits were obtainable, the women and children largely subsisted upon them. But the strong instinct of parental care in Primates, the long youth of children, and the greater relative inferiority of females to males (common to anthropoids and savages) than is found amongst dogs and wolves, must have made the human pack from the first differ in many ways from a pack of wolves.

So much, then, as to the traits of character established in primitive man by his having resorted to co-operative hunting: they all plainly persist in ourselves.

On our intelligence life in the hunting-pack had just as revolutionary an influence, as already explained in the first chapter. The whole art of hunting had to be learned from its rudiments by this enterprising family. With them there was no inherited instinct or disposition, and no tradition or instruction, as there is with the true carnivores: they depended solely on observation, memory, inference. With poor olfactory sense (as usual in apes) prey must be followed and inconvenient enemies outwitted, by acquiring a knowledge of their footprints and other visible signs of neighbourhood, and by discrimination of all the noises they make. The habits and manners of prey and of enemies, their favourite lairs, feeding-grounds and watering-places, their paths through forest, marsh, thicket and high grass, must all be learnt: so must their speed, endurance, means and methods of attack and defence. The whole country within the range of the pack must be known, its resources and its difficulties; and whenever new territory was entered, new lessons in all these matters had to be learned. This must have entailed a rapid natural selection of brains. Only a rapidly developing, plastic brain could have been capable of the requisite accommodation of behaviour in such conditions: a mechanism was required by which more and more new lines of specialised reaction were related to numerous newly observed and discriminated facts.

The very crudest weapons may be handled with variable dexterity; the best handling must be discovered and practised; and this had a high selective value for the hands as well as for the brain. Probably crude weapons were very early used; for some monkeys (and baboons generally) throw sticks or stones, or roll stones down upon an enemy. In Borneo, Wallace came upon a female orang who, “as soon as she saw us, began breaking off branches and the great spiny fruits [of the durian] with every appearance of rage, causing such a shower of missiles as effectually kept us from approaching too near the tree. This habit of throwing down branches has been doubted; but I have, as here narrated, observed it myself on three separate occasions.”[52] The importance of the observation consists in its proving the existence in an anthropoid of the impulse to use missiles under the occasional stress of anger; so that it might be expected rapidly to develop under the constant pressure of hunger. The use of clubs and stones induced the discrimination of the best materials for such weapons, and where they could be found; and, in process of time, brought in a rough shaping of them, the better to serve their purposes. Then came the invention of snares and pitfalls and the discovery of poisons.

Thus the primitive human, or prehuman mind, was active in many new directions; and depending for its skill, not upon instinct or imitation, but upon observation and memory and inference, it was necessary for it to arrange ideas in a definite order before acting upon them, as in making weapons or planning a hunt; indefiniteness or confusion in such matters was fatal. The contrast between growing memory of the past and present experience, between practical ideas and the actions realising them that had been suspended until the right moment came, furthered the differentiation of self-consciousness amidst the world; the contrasts of co-operation and greed, of emulation and loyalty and submission, of honour and shame, furthered the differentiation of self-consciousness amidst the tribe.

If it be asked—how much of all this development attributed to the hunting-pack might have been brought about just as well by the formation of a defensive herd, such as we see in cattle and horses?—a definite answer can be given. The herd is, of course, marked by (2) gregariousness, (3) perceptive and contagious sympathy and sometimes effective sympathy in common defence, (7) recognition of leaders (all herds that travel have leaders), (8) emulation, (9) precedence; but not by (1) interest in the chase and in killing, nor (4) aggressiveness, nor (10) strategy and perseverance in attack, nor (11) greed; and herd-life affords no conditions for the development of intelligence and dexterity, nor for any of the physical characters that distinguish man. Herd-life does not involve the great and decisive change which is implied in the evolution of human nature. We must conceive, then, of the primitive human mind as a sort of chimpanzee mind adapted to the wolfish conditions of the hunting-pack. Wolves themselves have undergone no great development, compared (say) with cats, for want of hands and other physical advantages which we had to begin with. If some species of baboon had taken to the hunting-life, there might have been very interesting results.

§ 5. The Wolf-type of Man established by Natural Selection

The differentiation of the human from the anthropoid stock must have begun a long time ago; as to when it began there is no direct evidence; and even if fossil remains of the earlier stages of our evolution had been discovered, we could only judge from the strata in which they occurred what must have been their relative antiquity. When it comes to reducing the chronology of past ages to figures, geologists either decline to make any estimate, or the results of their calculations may differ as 1 to 10. Since my own studies give me no claim to an opinion on such matters, whilst it is helpful to have clear ideas, however tentative, I shall adopt the views of Dr. Arthur Keith in his work on The Antiquity of Man, based on estimates published by Prof. Sollas.[53] On turning to p. 509 of that work, a genealogical tree will be found, showing the probable lines of descent of the higher Primates. The separation of the human from the great anthropoid stock is represented as having happened at about the last third of the Oligocene period—say 2,000,000 years ago (or, according to the later estimate, 3,500,000). Pithecanthropus (of Java) branched off as a distinct genus about the middle of the Miocene. Neanderthal man (Homo Neanderthalensis) and Piltdown man (Eoanthropus Dawsoni) separated as distinct species (or genera) from the stock of modern man (absurdly named Homo sapiens) early in the Pliocene, and became extinct respectively (say) 20,000 and 300,000 years ago. The races of modern man began to differentiate near the end of the Pliocene (say) 500,000 years from the present time. Such is the “working hypothesis.”

The skull capacity of the great anthropoids averages 500 c.c.; that of Pithecanthropus is estimated at 900 c.c.; the Australian native average is 1200 c.c.; Eoanthropus, according to Dr. Keith, rises to 1400;[54] a Neanderthal skull has been measured at 1600 c.c.; the modern English average is under 1500 c.c. Of course, mental power depends not on size of the brain only, but also on its differentiation, which may have recently advanced.

As to culture, the Neolithic period extends in Western Europe from about 2000 to 10,000 B.C.: and to that age is usually attributed the introduction of agriculture, the domestication of animals, pottery, weaving, permanent constructed dwellings, and monuments requiring collective labour; but some of these improvements may be of earlier date. In other parts of the world, e. g. in the Eastern Mediterranean region, such culture is probably older, but still comparatively recent. What is known as the Palæolithic stage of culture is often supposed to have begun early in the second quarter of the Pleistocene period, giving us a retrospect of (say) 300,000 years. But if we include under “Palæolithic” all unpolished stone-work that shows clear signs of having been executed according to an idea or mental pattern (and this seems a reasonable definition), the “rostro-carinate” implements must be so called, and then the beginning of this culture must be pushed back into the Pliocene.[55] In Pliocene (and perhaps Miocene) deposits have further been discovered numerous “eoliths”: stones so roughly chipped that they do not imply an idea-pattern; so that, whilst many archæologists accept them as of human workmanship, some experts dispute their claim to be considered artefacts. Of course, there must be eoliths; the only question is whether we have yet unearthed any of them. Our forefathers cannot have begun by shaping stones to a definite figure and special purpose. Beginning with stones taken up as they lay, they discovered that a broken stone with a sharp edge inflicted a worse wound than a whole one; then broke stones to obtain this advantage; used sharp fragments to weight clubs; and very slowly advanced to the manufacture of recognisable axes and spear-heads, meanwhile discovering other uses for flaked stones; and it seems to have needed at least 1,400,000 (or 2,800,000) years to arrive at the poorest of known palæoliths. This strikingly agrees with the law, often stated, that the progress of culture is, by virtue of tradition, cumulative, and flows, as a stone falls, with accelerating velocity: in spite of the ebb, to which from age to age we see it to be liable. At any one time, moreover, the art of stone-working was, probably, even in adjacent tribes, at different stages of advancement; it depends partly upon the kind of stone obtainable; but it has been only recently that such contrasts could occur as Herodotus[56] describes among the hosts of Xerxes: when, beside the well-accoutred Persians and Medes, marched Libyans and Mysians armed with wooden javelins hardened in the fire, and Ethiopians with stone-tipped arrows and spears headed with the sharpened horns of antelopes.

The moral of all this is that there was abundant time before the rise of Neolithic culture (which may be called the beginning of civilisation) for the complete adaptation of mankind everywhere, by natural selection, to the life of hunters; and that, since then, there has not been time for the biological adaptation of any race to the civilised state. We shall see that natural selection has probably had some civilising influence; but any approach to complete adaptation has been impossible, not only for want of time, but also because of rapid changes in the structure of civilisation, the social protection of some eccentrics, the persistence of the hunting-life as a second resource or as a pastime, and by the frequent recurrence of warfare—that is to say, man-hunting. To civilisation we are, for the most part, merely accommodated by experience, education, tradition and social pressure. A few people seem to be adapted to civilised life from their birth, and others to the slavish life; but all inherit, more or less manifestly, the nature of the hunter and warrior. This is a necessary basis of general and social psychology; and perhaps tribal or national characters (so far as distinguishable) may be understood by assigning the conditions under which they have, in various directions, been modified from this type.

To avoid the appearance of overlooking an obvious objection, I may add that the life of the hunter does not imply an exclusively carnivorous diet, but merely that hunting is the activity upon which his faculties are bent and upon which his livelihood chiefly depends. It is most unlikely that a cousin of the frugivorous anthropoids should entirely give up his ancestral food, immediately, or perhaps at any time. Even the diet of the wolf, in North-East Canada, includes “much fruit, especially the uva-ursi”; and the coyote there also eats berries;[57] so does the jackal in India. Savage women everywhere subsist largely on roots and fruits. Dr. Keith says the teeth and jaws of the Neanderthal species were adapted to a coarse vegetable diet.[58] Yet the Neanderthal burials at La Ferrasie, La Chapelle aux Saints, Jersey and Krapina, with their implements and animal remains, leave no doubt that the species hunted the biggest game. At Krapina, besides mammoth and rhinoceros, “the cave-bear occurred abundantly, it was evidently a favourite article of diet”: the inhabitants were not fanatical vegetarians.

§ 6. Some further Consequences of the Hunting-life

Between the remote age when our hypothetical ancestor became a hunter and the time to which probably belong the remains of the oldest known men, there lies a gap of (say) one (or two) and a half million years, concerning which we have not only no direct evidence but not even any parallel in the world by means of which to apply the comparative method. Just at the beginning, the parallel of the wolf-pack sheds some light upon our path; but the light soon grows faint; for the primitive human, from the first more intelligent than wolves, and inheriting from the ape-stock qualities of character which the new life greatly modified but could not extirpate, must under pressure of selection have become, after not many ages, an animal unlike any other. Just at the end, again, something concerning those who lived many thousand years before the beginning of history may be inferred from the parallel of existing savage customs; from their rock-dwellings, drawings, tools, weapons, hearths, something about their way of life; from evidence of their burial-customs, something of their beliefs. But what can be said of our ancestors during all those years that intervene between the beginning and the end?

Having been a hunter at the first and at the last, we may reasonably suppose that he had been so all the time. But, with our present knowledge, our chief guide as to other matters seems to be the fact that the most backward of existing savages possess powers of body and mind, and forms and products of culture, which must have been acquired gradually through a long course of development from no better origins than are traceable in apes and wolves. As the use of good stone weapons by living savages and the occurrence of stone weapons in deposits of various age in the Pleistocene—less and less perfectly made the further we go back—justify us in assuming that there must have been eoliths of even cruder workmanship at remoter dates, so the possession by savages of extensive languages, intricate customs, luxuriant myths, considerable reasoning powers and even humane sentiments, compel us to imagine such possessions as belonging to our prehistoric ancestors, in simpler and simpler forms, as we go back age by age toward the beginning. A tentative reconstruction of the lost series of events may sometimes be supported by what has been observed of the individual development of our children.

(a) For example, the constructive impulse, slightly shown by anthropoids that make beds and shelters in the trees, was called into activity in man especially in the making of weapons, tools and snares, and became an absorbing passion; so that a savage (often accused of being incapable of prolonged attention!) will sit for days working at a spear or an axe: they are inattentive only to what does not interest them. Many children from about the sixth year come under the same sort of fascination—digging, building, making bows and arrows, boats and so forth. This is a necessary preparation for all the achievements of civilised life; and it is reasonable to suppose that the stages of growth of such interest in construction are indicated by the improvement of ancient implements.

(b) As to language—in the most general sense, as the communication of emotions and ideas by vocal sounds—the rudiments of it are widespread in animal life. A sort of dog-language is recognised, and monkeys seem to have a still greater “vocabulary.” Hence, a number of emotional vocal expressions was probably in use among the primitive human stock. And the new hunting-life was favourable to the development of communicative signs; for it depended on co-operation, which is wanting in ape-life, and in the lower extant savages hardly exists, except in hunting, war, and magical or religious rites. Hunting, moreover, is (as I have said) especially encouraging to onomatopœic expression in imitating the noises of animals, etc. It was still more favourable, perhaps, to the growth of gesture-language in imitating the behaviour of animals and the actions involved in circumventing and attacking them. Increasing powers of communication were extremely useful, and the pack must have tried to develop them. Without the endeavour to communicate, there could never have been a language better than the ape’s; nor could there have been the endeavour without the need. That gesture alone was very helpful may be assumed; and it must have assisted in fixing the earliest vocal signs for things and actions and qualities, and probably determined the earliest syntax; but when, in hunting, members of the pack were hidden from one another, or when their hands were occupied, gesture was not available, and communication depended on the voice. The speech of children similarly emerges from emotional noises and impulsive babbling, assisted by gesture.

Passing to later ages, we cannot expect to learn much about the speech of prehistoric men, whom we know only by a few bones. As to the Java skull, Dr. Keith observes that “the region of the brain which subserves the essentially human gift of speech, was not ape-like in Pithecanthropus. The parts for speech are there; they are small, but clearly foreshadow the arrangement of convolutions seen in modern man.” On the other hand, “the higher association areas ... had not reached a human level.”[59] The jaw of this skull not having been found, nothing can be said of its fitness for carrying out the process of articulation. As to Eoanthropus, “if our present conception of the orbital part of the third frontal convolution is well founded, namely, that it takes part in the mechanism of speech, then we have grounds for believing that the Piltdown man had reached that point of brain-development when speech had become a possibility. When one looks at the lower jaw, however, and the projecting canine teeth, one hesitates to allow him more than a potential ability.”[60] The jaw had not undergone the characteristic changes which in modern man give freedom to the tongue in the articulation of words.[61] But Dr. Keith “cannot detect any feature in the frontal, parietal or occipital areas which clearly separate this brain-cast from modern ones.”[62] Eoanthropus, therefore, must have had a good deal to say and, being a social animal, must have felt the need of expression; and, though he was not a direct ancestor of ours, it can hardly be doubted that at some period the jaws of our own ancestors were no better adapted than his to articulate speech. May we not infer that articulate speech, meeting a need of the stock, arose very gradually, and was slowly differentiated from some less definite and structural connection of expressive and onomatopœic vocables, such as we have seen may naturally have arisen amongst the earliest hunters? Pari passu the jaw was modified.

(c) All savages live by custom; gregarious animals have their customs; and in the primitive hunting-pack customs must have been early established as “conditions of gregariousness.” M. Salomon Reinach, indeed, thinks that the anthropoid probably became human as the result of inventing taboos, especially in sexual relations; there was economy of nervous energy in the direction of the senses, and consequent enrichment of the intellect.[63] His hypothesis does not carry us far, perhaps, into the particulars of human form and faculty; but it contains this truth, that without the growth of customs there could have been no progress for human nature; and it certainly points to the probability that some custom was early established with regard to marriage. In Prof. Westermarck’s opinion our species was originally monogamous.[64] Supposing this to have been the custom, as it is amongst many Primates, could it have persisted after the formation of the hunting-pack? According to Mr. Thompson Seton, wolves pair “probably for life”;[65] but this is disputed; and so it is whether or no the male of a seasonal pair takes part in caring for the puppies.[66] Of the primitive human stock one may say that whilst, on the one hand, the association of many males and females in the same pack may have tended to break up the family, on the other hand, the long youth of the children and the parental care generally characteristic of Primates would have tended to preserve it; that the practice of pairing requires the largest number of males (setting aside polyandry), and lessens quarrelling, and is therefore favourable to the strength of the pack; and that any custom may have been established that was most favourable to the species in its new life. The least probable of all conditions is promiscuity; for the rearing of children with their ever-lengthening youth must have been difficult, taxing the care of both parents.

(d) The claim to property is instinctive in most animals—claim to a certain territory, or to a nest, or lair, or mate. Each early human pack probably claimed a certain hunting-range; and each family its lair, which it guarded, as our domestic dog guards the house. In Australia “every tribe has its own country, and its boundaries are well known; and they are respected by others”;[67] and the Bushmen, who retained the ancient hunting-life more perfectly than any other known people, are said to have been formerly divided into large tribes with well-defined hunting-grounds.[68] As weapons or other implements, charms, or ornaments came into use, the attitude toward the territory or lair will have been extended to include them; indeed, it seems to be instinctive even in lower Primates. “In the Zoological Gardens,” says Darwin, “a monkey, which had weak teeth, used to break open nuts with a stone; and I was assured by the keepers that, after using the stone, he hid it in the straw, and would not let any other monkey touch it. Here, then, we have the idea of property.”[69] Among the half-wolf train-dogs of Canada, the claims of one to property seem to be recognised by others; for a dog will defend its cache of food against another that ordinarily it fears; and “the bigger dog rarely presses the point.”[70] The utility of keeping the peace within the tribe, no doubt, led to the growth of customs concerning property, and to their protection by the social sanction, and later by the taboo.[71] For taboo cannot be the origin of respect for property or for any custom: it implies a custom already existing, which it protects by the growth of a belief in some magical penalty that is effective even when there are no witnesses. The same utility of order must have established customs of dividing the kill of the pack: later also protected by taboo, as we still see in many savage tribes.

The attitude towards property is very variable amongst the tribes now known to us. Still, considering how early and strongly it is manifested by children, we may infer with some plausibility its antiquity in the race. The urgent desire of property, and tenacity in holding it, displayed by many individuals, though not an amiable, has been a highly useful trait, to which is due that accumulation of capital that has made possible the whole of our material and much of our spiritual civilisation. Amongst barbarians it may be a necessary condition of social order. Had not wealth been highly prized amongst our own ancestors, it is hard to see how revenge could ever have been appeased by the wergeld. The payment, indeed, was not the whole transaction; it implied an acknowledgment of guilt and of the obligation to make amends; but these things would not have mollified an enemy nurtured in the tradition of the blood-feud, if silver had not been dear to him. It is still accepted as compensation for injuries that seem difficult to measure by the ounce. Wealth gives rank, and gratifies not only the greed but also the emulative spirit of the pack. Acquisitiveness is an essential trait of aristocracy, and adhesiveness of its perpetuity. Homespun prudence belongs, in our ancestry, to a more recent stratum of motives; we see it as a blind instinct in squirrels and beavers, a quasi-instinctive propensity in dogs and wolves (who hide food that they cannot immediately devour); but it is not known in any anthropoid, and is acquired at some stage by some human races—not by all; for it is not found in many extant savages. The only occasion on which Australian tribes show prudential foresight as to food is on the approach of the season of magical rites, when they lay in a stock of food before giving themselves up for weeks or months body and soul to thaumaturgy.[72] Prudence is not, however, merely a function of foresight or intelligence, or else the Irish would be as prudent as the Scotch.

(e) The first wars, probably, were waged for hunting-grounds; and this may have been a revival, for the carnivorous anthropoid pack, of a state of affairs that existed amongst their ancestors at a much earlier date; for battles for a feeding-ground have been witnessed between troops of the lower Primates. Such a battle between two bands of langur (Semnopithecus entellus) has been described;[73] and Darwin relates after Brehm how “in Abyssinia, when baboons of one species (C. gelada) descend in troops from the mountains to plunder the fields, they sometimes encounter troops of another species (C. hamadryas), and then a fight ensues. The Geladas roll down great stones, which the Hamadryas try to avoid, and then both species, making a great uproar, rush furiously against each other.”[74] As packs of the wolf-ape increased in numbers and spread over the world, they no doubt generally came to regard one another as rivals upon the same footing as the great cats and packs of dogs, and every attempt at expansion or migration provoked a battle. Wars strengthened the internal sympathies and loyalties of the pack or tribe and its external antipathies, and extended the range and influence of the more virile and capable tribes.

It is true that neighbouring tribes of savages are not now always mutually hostile. In Australia, we are told, local groups and adjacent tribes are usually friendly;[75] but with them the age of expansion seems to have closed some time ago, and a sort of equilibrium has been established. On the other hand, it is a shallow sort of profundity that insists upon interpreting every war as a struggle for nutrition, an effort to solve the social problem. Aggressiveness and insatiable greed are characteristic of many tribes—passions always easily exploited by their leaders, as in the civilised world by dynasts and demagogues. Plethora is more insolent than poverty. Lust of power, of glory, of mere fighting is a stronger incentive than solicitude for the poor.

However, in the development of society nothing has been so influential as war: an immense subject, for the outlines of which I refer to Herbert Spencer’s Political Institutions.[76]

(f) Most of the amusements as well as the occupations of mankind depend for their zest upon the spirit of hunting and fighting, which they gratify and relieve, either directly or in a conventionalised and symbolical way, and at the same time keep alive. Sports and games involve the pursuit of some end by skill and strategy, often the seizing upon some sort of prey, or slaying outright, and they give scope to emulation. Emulation is a motive in the race for wealth, in every honourable career, even in addiction to science and learning: though here the main stress is upon an instinct older than the pack—curiosity, a general character of the Primates. That children at first play alone, later play together, and then “make up sides,” repeats the change from the comparatively solitary life of anthropoids to the social life and combined activities of the hunting-pack. From the interest of the chase and the aggressiveness that is involved in it must be derived all that we call “enterprise,” whether beneficent or injurious: a trait, certainly, which there is little reason to regard as inherited from the anthropoid stock.

(g) The great amusement and pastime of feeding has, no doubt, descended to us in unbroken tradition, through harvest and vintage festivals, from the unbridled indulgence that followed a successful hunt. And I offer the conjecture that the origin of laughter and the enjoyment of broad humour (so often discussed) may be traced to these occasions of riotous exhilaration and licence. We may suppose, indeed, that these conditions began to prevail not in the earliest days of the ravenous pack, but after some advance had been made in the customs of eating. Savages usually cram to repletion when possible, and with huge gusto, for there may not soon be another opportunity. If uproarious feasting was advantageous physically and socially (as till recently we all thought it was), addiction to the practice was a ground of survival; and laughter (a discharge of undirected energy, as Spencer says), being its natural expression and enhancement, shared in its perpetuation. This social origin agrees with the infectiousness of laughter, with its connection with triumph and cruelty, and with the quality of the jokes that still throughout the world excite most merriment—practical jokes and allusions to drunkenness, the indecorous, the obscene. Sir Robert Walpole preferred such humour as the most sociable; because in that everybody could take part. Many refinements have been introduced in polite circles; but it is in vain that one begins a theory of laughter with an analysis of the genius of Molière.

Similarly, I suppose that weeping, lamentation and the facial and bodily expressions of grief were developed by the social utility of common mourning in tribal defeat and bereavement.

§ 7. Moralisation of the Hunters

We are left to speculate about the earliest growth of magnanimity, friendliness, compassion, general benevolence and other virtues. They cannot be explained merely by the hunting-life, which so easily accounts for greed, cruelty, pride and every sort of aggressiveness. Robert Hartmann writes: “It is well known that both rude and civilised peoples are capable of showing unspeakable and, as it is erroneously termed, inhuman cruelty towards each other. These acts of cruelty, murder and rapine are often the result of the inexorable logic of national characteristics and, unhappily, are truly human, since nothing like them can be traced in the animal world. It would, for instance, be a grave mistake to compare a tiger with a bloodthirsty executioner of the Reign of Terror, since the former only satisfies his natural appetite in preying on other animals. The atrocities of the trials for witchcraft, the indiscriminate slaughter committed by the Negroes on the coast of Guinea, the sacrifice of human victims by the Khonds, the dismemberment of living men by the Battus, find no parallel in the habits of animals in their savage state. And such a comparison is, above all, impossible in the case of anthropoids, which display no hostility toward men or other animals unless they are first attacked. In this respect the anthropoid ape stands upon a higher plane than many men.”[77] Are we, then, to explain the more amiable side of human nature, partly at least, by derivation from the frugivorous Primates, extensively modified by our wolfish adaptation, but surviving as latent character?

(a) Several further considerations may be offered to account for the growth of what we call humanity, (i) The long non-age of human children is favourable to the attachments of family life, and such attachments may under certain conditions be capable of extension beyond the family; but I cannot trace the whole flood of altruistic regard to the sole source of maternal or parental love. (ii) Friendliness and the disposition to mutual aid are so useful to a hunting-pack that is not merely seasonal but permanent (as I take ours to have been), both to individuals and to the pack as a whole, within certain limits (as that the wounded, sick, or aged must not amount to an encumbrance), that we may suppose natural selection to have favoured the growth of effective sympathy, not merely in mutual defence, but so far as it is actually found at present in backward tribes. It nowhere seems to be excessive; and its manifestation in some civilised races seems to depend not upon a positive increase of benevolence in the generality, but (iii) upon the breaking down here and there of conditions that elsewhere oppose and inhibit it. Thus the generosity, mercy and magnanimity that constitute the chivalrous ideal, depend (I believe) upon the attainment by a class of such undisputed superiority that there is no occasion for jealousy or rivalry in relation to other classes; for should the superiority be disputed, these virtues quickly disappear. Similarly, what have been called the “slavish virtues” of charity, humility, long-suffering may arise amongst those who are free from rivalry, because they have no hope of aggrandisement in wealth or honour, and who have indeed suffered long. With the interfusion of classes, their virtues interfuse; for they have a common root, and are active, provided that circumstances do not inhibit them.

(iv) But since in individuals our complex nature varies in all directions, and amongst the rest in the direction of benevolence; and since any organ or quality that varies is apt to continue to do so, and may go on varying even beyond the limits of biological utility; why in human life may not this happen with benevolence (or with any other passion or virtue); so that in some men it expands with wonderful richness and beauty even to the sacrifice of themselves—nay, by excessive clemency or generosity, even to the injury of the tribe or of the race?

(b) The moral sense or conscience has been discussed by Darwin[78] “exclusively from the side of natural history”; so as this is the way of considering human nature in the present book, I shall epitomise his account of it; which seems to be true, and to which I see little to add. He finds four chief conditions of the growth of a moral sense: (a) the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to sympathise with them and to help them. (b) When the mind is highly developed, images of past actions and motives continually recur; “and that feeling of dissatisfaction or even misery which invariably results ... from any dissatisfied instinct would arise as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression”—as with anger or greed. (c) After language has been acquired, public opinion can be expressed, and becomes the paramount guide of action; though still “our regard for the approbation and disapprobation of our fellows depends on sympathy.” (d) Social instinct, sympathy and obedience to the judgment of the community are strengthened by the formation of habit. Darwin then proves successively these four positions.

Seeing the stress here laid upon sympathy, it may make the matter clearer if we observe that the word occurs in different senses—for the participation in another’s satisfaction or distress (emotional sympathy) and readiness to help (effective sympathy); and these are the meanings under (a), the first of the above heads: and, again, for the knowledge that there are ideas or judgments in another’s mind together with approval or disapproval of our actions; and this is the meaning under (c), the third head. But knowledge of another’s thoughts is not sympathy, except so far as, being accompanied with assent to his judgment, there is participation in his feelings of approval or disapproval; and, if we dissent from his judgment, there may, indeed, be perceptive sympathy as to his feelings, but there is no emotional sympathy or participation in them—there is rather fear or resentment. It is necessary to bear in mind that perception of another’s feelings, participation in them and impulse to help or relieve are separable processes, and that perceptive sympathy is as active in cruelty as in generosity or mercy.

It may be added that (b), the second of the four conditions assigned by Darwin as determining the growth of the moral sense or conscience, accounts more especially for “remorse of conscience”; and that (c), the third condition, explains that tone of authority attaching to conscience on which Bishop Butler laid so much stress.[79]

How early the moral sense began to form itself in our stock cannot be estimated because it must have been a very gradual process. Probably the rudiments of it appeared in the family life of the ape even before our differentiation; and the authoritative character of conscience established itself under the discipline of the hunting-pack before there was much development of mind (for dogs know what theft is), and under pressure of a public opinion that managed to express itself without language. In an original and suggestive book[80] Mr. Trotter has shown that a herd (pack, tribe or nation) necessarily approves of whatever actions are done in its interests as good or right, and disapproves of the contrary actions as bad or wrong. Confident that its beliefs and customs are good and right, the pack persecutes dissenters and nonconformists. “Good” is a relative idea. “‘The good are good warriors and hunters,’ said a Pawnee chief; whereupon the author who mentions the saying remarks that this would also be the opinion of a wolf if he could express it.”[81] Hence we may guess the principal contents of the primitive categorical imperative. The study of Ethnology and History enables us to trace the modification and enrichment of those contents under varying conditions of culture, and for the results of such study I refer to Edward Westermarck’s Origin and Development of Moral Ideas.

(c) After the introduction of agriculture, the stress of natural selection was in certain directions altered. At first, indeed, most agricultural work, probably, was done by women; but in its progress it fell extensively into the hands of men; and then advantage accrued to those tribes that were capable of steady industry and prudence. The new employment decreased aggression on the principle that “had Alexander been holding the plough, he could not have run his friend Clitus through with a spear.” The sick and aged were now less an encumbrance than they had been to hunters. Those who could not endure a settled life wandered away in their old pursuits. The more aggressive clans slaughtered one another in the vendetta. Social pressure and hanging eliminated many of the more idle, improvident, dishonest and unruly, whose instincts resisted “accommodation.” The more neighbourly and co-operative tended to predominate. As civilisation intensifies, the numerous ways of getting a livelihood, which (as we have seen) derive their motive-force from the spirit of the pack, gratify that spirit under so many disguises and with so little direct personal collision, as to be compatible with a great deal of friendliness and benevolence; and co-operation, direct or indirect, steadily increases.

(d) Increasing capacity of forming ideas of remote ends and of co-ordinating many activities in their pursuit, implies the inhibition of many aggressive or distracting impulses, and constitutes an automatic control. And although it is now fashionable to depreciate the power of intelligence in human life, surely, its development has had great influence. As men come to foresee the many consequences of action they learn to modify and regulate it, as each foreseen consequence excites some impulse, either reinforcing or inhibiting action. Reflection upon our lot has done much to ameliorate it. The “conditions of gregariousness” (to use W. K. Clifford’s definition of morality) have been expounded by the more penetrating and comprehensive minds—prophets, poets, philosophers; and some disciples have understood them and have persuaded many to believe. Nor have such luminaries arisen only in the later phases of culture when their writings have been delivered or their sayings recorded. Probably it was some one man who first pointed out to a tribe that had ignored the fact, that whether a wrong had been done by accident or on purpose affected the agent’s guilt and ought to affect the penalty exacted. Some one man, probably, first saw what injustice is often disguised by the specious equality of the lex talionis; another first tried to assuage the bitterness of a vendetta by appointing compensation; another, perhaps first proposed to substitute animal for human sacrifice, or a puppet for a slave. And when we read the lists of sagacious proverbs that have been collected from many savage tribes, we must consider that it was by eminent individuals that those sayings were first uttered one by one: individuals with the gifts of insight and expression to summarise the experience of a whole tribe in memorable words, rude forerunners of our prophets and philosophers.

§ 8. Influence of the Imaginary Environment

The necessity of learning the whole art of hunting from its rudiments, without the help of instinct or tradition, by sheer observation, memory and inference, put extraordinary stress upon the brain. At first by knowledge, strategy, co-operation and persistence of will, later by devising weapons and snares, evolving language and discovering the ways of making and utilising fire, man found means of entirely changing the conditions of his life; but this would have been impossible without a great development of his brain; and, accordingly, it appears that Eoanthropus, at the beginning of the Pleistocene, had a skull with three times the cubic capacity of the anthropoids. With the growth of the brain came a continually increasing fecundity of ideas. “Piltdown man saw, heard, felt, thought, and dreamt much as we do.”[82] The use of ideas is to foresee events and prepare for them beforehand: the great advantage of distance-senses over contact-senses, is to give an animal time to adapt its actions to deferred events; and ideas give this power in a vastly higher degree. So far the utility of brains and ideas seems obvious. But in order that ideas may be useful in this way, they must (one would suppose) represent and anticipate the actual course of events. If they falsely indicate the order of nature, or even beings and actions that do not exist at all, ideas may seem to be worse than useless.

Now, when we turn to the lowest existing savages, they are found to possess, in comparison with apes, a considerable fecundity of ideas; constituting, on the one hand, a good stock of common sense, or knowledge of the properties and activities of the things and animals around them, and of how to deal with them, which enables them to carry on the affairs of a life much more complex and continuous than any animal’s: but including, on the other hand, a strange collection of beliefs about magic and spirits, which entirely misrepresent the course of nature and the effective population of the world. These latter beliefs, or imaginative delusions, hamper them in so many ways, waste so much time, lead them sometimes into such dark and cruel practices, that one may be excused for wondering whether their bigger brains can have been, on the whole, of any biological advantage to them in comparison with the anthropoids. The anthropoids live by common sense. So do savages, and they have much more of it; but the anthropoids seem not to be troubled by magic and animism. We must suppose that the common sense of primitive man increased age by age, as he became more and more perfectly adapted to the hunting-life, and that at some stage his imagination began to falsify the relations of things and the powers of nature. It seems that imagination-beliefs depend chiefly upon the influence of desire and fear, suggestibility, hasty generalisation, and the seduction of reasoning by analogy. At what stage imaginations, thus divorced from reality, began to influence human life, it is impossible to say; but it cannot be less than half a million years ago, if (as Dr. Keith says) Eoanthropus, 400,000 years ago, “thought and dreamt much as we do.” Why did not such delusions hinder our development? Or did they promote it?

The first consideration is, that biological adaptation is nearly always a compromise: if any organ or faculty be useful on the whole, in spite of some disutility, its increase favours the survival of those in whom it increases; and this is true of the brain and its thinking. The second is, that nearly all the magical and animistic beliefs and practices that are socially destructive, probably belong to a stage of human life that is attained long after our differentiation has been established, and when some progress has been made in arts and customs. Savages of the lowest culture have few beliefs that can be called positively injurious. Talismans and spells, not by themselves relied upon, but only adscititious to common-sense actions, give confidence without weakening endeavour. To curse, or to “point the bone,” does not create but merely expresses a malevolent purpose; and, although sometimes fatal by suggestion, is on the whole better than to assassinate. Taboos do more good by protecting person and property and custom than they do harm by restricting the use of foods. Belief in imaginary evils waiting upon secret sins exerts, whilst supported by social unanimity, a control upon all kinds of behaviour: it is the beginning of the “religious sanction,” and one sort of conscience. The dread of spirits that prowl at night keeps people in the family-cave or by the camp-fire; and that is the best place for them. Many rites and observances are sanitary. Totemism rarely does any harm, and may once have usefully symbolised the unity of social groups. Totemic and magical dances give excellent physical training, promote the spirit of co-operation, are a sort of drill; and (like all art), whilst indulging, they also restrain imagination by imposing upon it definite forms. For a long time there was no special profession of wizard or priest, with whose appearance most of the evil of magic and animism originates; though probably even they generally do more good than harm by their courage and sagacity, by discovering drugs and poisons, by laying ghosts, and by their primitive studies in medicine and psychology.

The wizard, however, and the priest, who could never have existed but for the prevalent beliefs in Magic and Animism, have a further and far more important function in human life, namely, the organisation, or rather reorganisation of society. The organisation of the hunting-pack described above was liable through several causes to fall asunder. Some of these causes are obvious: (a) The improvement of weapons and snares and discovery of poisons made very small parties, or even single families, self-sufficing—as among the Bushmen (though they sometimes assembled for a grand hunt).[83] (b) Failure of game from desiccation, as in Australia, or because the tribe has been driven into a poor country like Tierra del Fuego; so that a small population is scattered over a wide area, and reduced to a greater or less dependence on “collecting.” (c) The adoption of even a primitive agricultural or pastoral life may make hunting a secondary interest. In such cases the natural leaders of a clan are no longer (as in the old pack) plainly indicated; and if society is to be saved from anarchy, some new control must establish itself for the preservation of tradition and custom. Conceivably this happened in several ways; but in fact (I believe) we know of only one, namely: First, the rule of wizards, who are chiefly old men credited with mysterious power that makes the boldest tribesman quail, such as the headmen and elders of an Australian tribe. In New Guinea, too, and much of Melanesia, the power of rulers, even though recognised as of noble birth, depends chiefly upon their reputation for Magic. And among the Bushmen secrets about poisons and antidotes and colours for painting (probably considered magical) were heirlooms in certain families of chiefs, and gave them caste.[84] Secondly, at a later stage, as the belief in ghosts more and more prevails, and ancestral ghosts are worshipped, and ghosts of heroes or chiefs become veritable gods, the priests who celebrate their worship strengthen the position of chiefs or kings descended from these gods, and help to maintain more comprehensive and coherent governments than those established upon Magic only; though to these later forms, also, and to Religion itself magical beliefs contribute their support. The inevitable development of illusory imaginations along with common sense, then, assisted early and also later culture, because they preserved order and cohesion by re-arousing the ancient submission and loyalty of the pack. For common sense is always limited to present conditions, it could never have foreseen the dependence of human life upon order and the necessity of maintaining cohesion even at great immediate sacrifices. These interests were, therefore, served indirectly through delusions; natural selection must, within certain limits, have favoured the superstitious. Excessively imaginative and superstitious tribes may sometimes have been eliminated; for common sense also has biological utility. But, perverse as it may seem, imaginations utterly false have had their share in promoting “progress”: co-operating with agriculture and trade, magic, religions and the fine arts have, by supporting government and civil order, helped in accommodating us, and even in some measure adapting us, to our present condition, such as it is.

CHAPTER III
BELIEF AND SUPERSTITION

§ 1. Superstition

Inasmuch as the influence of superstition upon the history of society can hardly be exaggerated, it must be worth while to inquire into its origin and nature. But this inquiry leads into a quagmire of ambiguous words: and to attempt to define them for all purposes would entangle the discussion in endless controversies. So it will be best to explain merely in what sense certain words will be used in this book. “Superstition,” for example, means in common use (I think) false beliefs concerning supernatural powers, especially such as are regarded as socially injurious, and particularly as leading to obscurantism or cruelty: but it is often extended to cover beliefs of a negligible or frivolous kind, such as stories about “fairy-rings,” or the unluckiness of seeing the new moon for the first time through glass. Plainly the injuriousness of a false belief is often in dispute, and at any rate is a question of time and place. “Superstition,” then, is here used merely as a collective term for the subjects of the ensuing chapters—Magic (or the belief in occult forces) and Animism (or the belief in the activity of spirits).

The consequences of a belief, again, whether good or evil, cannot affect its psychological character: in trying to explain its nature and origin, one cannot take account of its social values. The explanation of superstitions must hold of all false beliefs, whatever their utility or disutility. Nay, further, whether a belief is false or true does not necessarily affect its psychological character: for a man may hold two doctrines, one true and the other false, both derived from the sincere testimony of the same person, and he may not be able to discern any difference in the degrees of confidence with which he holds them or in their influence upon his conduct. The understanding of false belief, then, requires an examination of belief in general.

Still, whilst in the mind of any given man a true and a false belief may have the same character and origin, considered generally they must surely have different origins and grounds; and to make the sequel clearer, I will anticipate its conclusions so far as to say that true beliefs seem to rest on perception or inferences verified by perception, and false beliefs seem to depend upon imagination that cannot be verified. This general statement will need several qualifications. But I rely upon it at present so far as to say that superstitions are essentially imagination-beliefs.

We shall find that these superstitions, though often held by whole tribes with the utmost assurance, differ in some subtle way from the perception-beliefs of their common sense, as that “fire burns” and that “water quenches fire.” They are unstable: (1) they become active on occasions, and otherwise are apt to be forgotten—as ghosts are only thought of at night. (2) They are modifiable merely for the sake of economy or other convenience. (3) They lose their hold on a tribe, fall off and die in course of time without any change in the evidence for them. (4) They depend a good deal upon the assent of a crowd. (5) They often vary in neighbouring countries or families, or amongst the members of a family. This is not like common sense. Superstitions or imagination-beliefs are unstable, in spite of being often held with great obstinacy (so that people die for them), and of their enduring, in the simpler forms and at a certain level of social life, for thousands of years. There is something wanting in the holdfast or anchorage of imagination-beliefs.

It is necessary to explain what I mean by “imagination.”

§ 2. Imagination

Is it enough to define “imagination” as merely the having of mental “images,” pictures before the mind’s eye? This would confine imagination to visual representations, to the exclusion of auditory, olfactory, etc., which are all a man born blind can have, and which sometimes occur to those who can see, though the visual are commonest. The word “images,” therefore, is sometimes used to cover all these modes of representation; though “phantasmata” would be better.

Again, a mental image or phantasm, visual or auditory, is improperly called an imagination, if there is nothing more than the reproduction of a single sense-quality. Imaginations represent not abstract sensations, but perceptions. To see an armed knight is not merely to have a visual impression of him, but to perceive a living, solid, heavy object definitely in space; and imagination reproduces the whole of this, and otherwise would be quite uninteresting. What would the tournament in Ivanhoe amount to if the knights were only phantoms?

Further, imagination, merely as a reproduction of perception, is not distinguished from memory; but, in use, the two are always contrasted. Memories are recognised (in their complete form) as returning to us from earlier experience, both their component pictures and the order of them, and they are relatively stable; imaginations are felt to be more or less novel, and can easily be modified. Probably all the elements of an imagination might have occurred in a memory; but the arrangement of these elements is often so different from any actual experience as to baffle every attempt to redistribute them amongst their sources. Hence, in normal cases, our attitudes toward a memory and toward an imagination are entirely different. If a seeming memory prove false, we say it was only an imagination.

But, once more, a good many men never have images or phantasmata (except words), or very few or faint ones, or only when falling asleep, and so on. Yet they are not wanting in imagination; words or other signs serve them instead of images to carry all meanings (the important matter); they enter into the spirit of poetry and literary fiction: so that imagination may be active without images. And the fact seems to be that the effectiveness of mental processes depends very little upon phantasmata, but upon something much deeper in the mind; and that there exist in men all degrees of concrete representative power, from those who picture everything they think of with vivid and definite detail, down, through many stages of decreasing realisation, to those who have only faint or fragmentary “images,” or even none at all: without its being possible to say (at present) that one type of mind is better or worse than another; though they may be adapted to different tasks.

Expectation and reasoning, which are closely allied (for every definite expectation is a sort of inference), are often carried on in pictures—“picture thinking”—and this also is called imagination. Tyndall’s brilliant address on The Scientific Uses of the Imagination is well known. It greatly helps some men in thinking to form pictures of what they think about, such as a machine or an anatomical specimen, as if they had the thing before them; or even of an atom, which no man ever has before him, and which cannot be imagined by reproducing the precept, but only by constructing a picture from much grosser materials according to concepts. The picture thus formed necessarily falls short in some ways of the thing thought or meant, and can only be prevented from misleading us by guarding it with definitions or rules or abstract ideas; and this shows that the effectiveness of thought, the deeper process mentioned above, is a concatenation or evolution of meanings or general ideas, and that it is, in part, by illustrating these that pictures are useful: they also serve to fix attention, as words do.

Thus reasoning may express itself by imagination. On the other hand, imagination is more frequently contrasted with reason, as dealing in fiction, not reality. Our confusion is shown thus: to call an historian imaginative is depreciatory; yet it is as bad to say he is wanting in imagination. In the latter case, we mean that he fails adequately to conceive the events he treats of; in the former, that he embellishes or distorts them with unverifiable representations.

Again, the term “imagination” is sometimes confined to intellectual processes in the fine arts: dramas, novels, etc., are works of imagination. Now dramas and novels all proceed upon one method, namely: they begin by stating or insinuating an hypothesis concerning certain persons in a given situation, and then deducing (that is reasoning out) the consequences, occasionally helping the plot by further assumptions: at least that is how it appears, though probably the main incident of the plot is thought of first, and then an hypothesis is framed that conveniently leads up to it. And if the reasoning is feeble, and if the subsidiary assumptions are too numerous or too facile, we say the work is flimsy or improbable—allowing for the genre; for a romance is not expected to be as probable as a modern novel. Gulliver’s Travels afford the most perfect example of this method; for each voyage begins with a frank absurdity—men six inches or sixty feet high, a flying island, rational horses; but this being granted, the sequel makes tolerable logic. Well, many scientific investigations seem to follow exactly the same method—begin with an hypothesis, deduce the consequences, and occasionally help out the argument with further hypotheses (though that is not all): and here again the conclusion is usually thought of first, and the hypothesis invented to explain it. If it be said that the scientist believes his hypothesis to be true, whilst the romancer does not, it may be replied that the scientist sometimes expressly warns us that his assumption is only a “working hypothesis,” which may not be true (though he thinks it may be), whereas early epic poets and minstrels often regarded their work as by no means without a foundation in fact.

Imagination and reasoning, then, are closely allied or interwoven, and the contrasting of them depends entirely upon this, that there is a sense in which imagination is not a presentation of truth or matter-of-fact, whether it is believed to be or not; and a sense in which reasoning is devoted solely to the discovery of truth concerning facts, and to that end is protected by a methodology, carefully comparing its premises, carefully verifying its conclusions; whereas the imagination that is contrasted with reasoning knows nothing of a methodology nor of verification. Even the modern novelist, a great part of whose hypothesis is usually true—the present state of society, facts of history or geography, etc.,—does not pretend to present a truth of fact. It belongs to his art to play at reasoning; he has learnt to play the game very well; but it remains play: he aims at and attains not truth but verisimilitude. And when we look back on the history of fiction we see (on the whole) the verisimilitude growing, age by age, slighter and fainter; till in early romance and poetry it is disturbed and broken and destroyed by stories about monsters, impossible heroes, magicians and gods, believed at one time to be true, and just the same as stories still believed by barbarians and savages, but which we believe no longer.

It is such stories as these last, including all superstitions, that I especially call “imagination-beliefs.” The term includes all false beliefs, but with the rest I am not directly concerned. How are imagination-beliefs possible?

§ 3. Belief

Belief is here used to denote the attitude of mind in which perceptions are regarded as real, judgments as true of matters-of-fact, actions and events as about to have certain results. It is a serious and respectful attitude; for matter-of-fact compels us to adjust our behaviour to it, whether we have power to alter it or not. Hume describes belief as having a certain “force, vivacity, solidity, firmness, steadiness; influence and importance in governing our actions”;[85] and these terms are quite just, but most of them are synonyms; and the whole dictionary will not make anybody understand what belief is who has never felt it. However, there is no such person.

The quality of this attitude (or the “feeling” of it) as a specific “state of consciousness” is difficult to observe, because (like pleasure or displeasure) it is always marginal to something else in the focus of attention, some object, judgment or action; but we can appreciate it in its variations by considering the very different degrees of “force, steadiness,” etc., which characterise several beliefs regarded as more or less probable. The degree of belief ought to correspond with the weight of evidence: if evidence for any judgment is complete and uncontradicted, it may be called 1, and the corresponding state of mind should be “certainty”; if evidence for it there is none, or if evidence for the contradictory judgment is complete, it may be called 0, and the state of mind “disbelief.” Between these extremes there is room for an infinite series of fractions, and for corresponding shades of doubt (which, of course, do not really occur); and in the middle, at ½, there should be suspension of judgment. But most of these refined attitudes are the luxury of a few men severely trained in estimating evidence, and by them enjoyed only in the departments they have been trained in. For the mass of mankind, a very few shades of confidence or dubiety fill up their scale of judgment-values; and these may be far from corresponding as they should do with the quantity or quality of the evidence; and the nearest they get to suspension of judgment is a state of hesitation between alternatives that by turns seem equally likely. Disbelief, though the opposite logically to belief, as rejection to acceptance, has, nevertheless, much in common with it—the character of finality and positiveness, which is often (perhaps always) derived from belief in something else which is incompatible with the given judgment.

When the attitude of belief is established in one’s mind by evidence clearly conceived, whether by the examination of facts or the weighing of arguments, it is called “conviction,” and so is the process of bringing it about; but if it results from considerations imperfectly appreciated, and from emotional appeals, especially when urged by another person, it may be called “persuasion,” though the word describes the process rather than the result. Most imagination-beliefs, including all superstitions, are persuasions.

It is generally admitted that the test of the strength of one’s belief is its influence upon our actions—where the test is practicable. With full belief one acts “confidently” (a significant verbal proposition!); in doubt, hesitatingly or cautiously; in disbelief, not at all, or in the sense of the contrary belief. But we cannot always judge of a man’s beliefs from his actions; for he may be actuated by several beliefs, and we do not know what they are. And popular actions that involve no loss or hardship may express mere assent without belief.

There is a kind of imagination-belief, and the purest kind, which has nothing to do with evidence: it is often called “make-believe” or “play-belief”: the entering into or contemplating some activity, which we know to have no direct bearing on our necessary interests, with as much ardour and absorption as if it were the only important thing in the world: as in games and sports, especially in drama and romance. This is one of the many things that do not astonish because they are so common; and the usual (and probably the true) explanation of it is, that this state of mind is of the utmost utility in giving zest to play, especially during youth. For many animals share in this spirit; and the young of the higher animals, which enjoy a long protected youth, pass the time chiefly at play, and thereby develop and train all their faculties, physical and mental. It somewhat outlasts youth in many animals, and conspicuously in ourselves, some having nothing better to do (and they might do worse), and others relieving from time to time the strain or tedium of work and, in some sort, prolonging youth into middle age; till play becomes gradually less engrossing.

This play-belief depends entirely upon imaginative excitement; and it shows that the attitude of belief may be adopted voluntarily, or fall upon us (as it were) by surprise and maintain itself for a time in great strength: with many at a melodrama it runs to anxiety, weeping and anguish; and this not only without evidence, but in spite of the knowledge that this is London, whose magistrates would never permit such doings: only one forgets London, with all its dull conventions of law and order. Attention is engrossed by the play.

Play-belief has the same traits as were said above to mark superstitions: (1) it becomes active on occasions, and otherwise disappears; (2) it is always modifiable for convenience or by a change of taste; (3) it loses its hold and tends to die out in a man as time goes on; (4) it is strengthened by the assent of an excited crowd; (5) the objects of such beliefs are very variable. We shall find that in other ways there is a close alliance between superstition and play. But, certainly, superstition has a much deeper hold upon our nature; for it not only excites fear and anxiety, but itself is born of those passions: the desire of security and confidence, the dread of impending and unknown perils, these are its life and strength. So that the wonder is that superstitions are not more enduring. And the truth seems to be that the tendency to adopt superstitions does endure at a certain level of mentality, though particular superstitious beliefs are mutable; just as in the individual, a disposition to play outlasts many particular modes of recreation.

Belief, then, is an attitude of mind in which we may find ourselves for good reasons, or for bad reasons, or for none at all; sometimes even slipping into it voluntarily or involuntarily when we know the situation is unreal; indeed, an attitude in which, in play or earnest, we pass our lives, unless something happens to arouse doubt or criticism.

§ 4. Causes and Grounds of Belief

The source, direct or indirect, of all belief is perception. In perception must be included, for subjective studies, introspection; though being difficult to keep steady, to repeat and to compare with the observation of other minds, it carries less conviction. As to perception we say that “seeing is believing”; and, in fact, an object holds the eye in a way that vouches for its own reality; but, if we suspect that our eyes deceive us, reassurance comes with the handling of the thing. Belief has sometimes been discussed as if it were chiefly concerned with ideas or the relations of ideas; and systems of philosophy have sought justification in the coherence of ideas, with little or no regard (not to say with contempt) for the coherence of ideas with perceptions. But nearly the whole of every man’s life (savage or philosopher) passes in an attitude of unquestioning belief in the evidence of his senses; and it is thence that belief extends to ideas on a presumption of their representing reality. We know that a perception may be fallible, but perceptions and the comparison of perceptions in the long run overrule everything else; and experimental methods consist in taking precautions against the errors of perception, and in bringing every hypothesis to the test of perception.

Further causes of belief are either Evidentiary, which (though often misleading) may generally be justified on reflection as raising some degree of probability, and which may, therefore, be called “grounds”; or Non-evidentiary, which (though very influential) cannot, on reflection, be justified as having any logical value, and are, therefore, causes only and not grounds.

(1) Evidentiary grounds of belief are (a) memory, which is plainly indispensable if we are to learn by experience; and (b) testimony, which must be trusted if language is not to be useless and social co-operation impossible: both these grounds are supposed to rest upon the primary rock of previous perception, but are slippery and treacherous. Memory is only valid so far as it truthfully represents original experience, and testimony only so far as it presents (i) a valid memory, (ii) correctly reported. Hence in serious matters precautions must be taken against their fallibility: otherwise they are not good evidence. A specious memory, so far as it is false, is imagination; and false testimony, so far as it reports (i) a false memory or (ii) an invention of the reporter, is also imagination. Testimony gathers force, as a cause of belief, with the numbers and consideration of those who support it, and is especially strengthened by their unanimity; but, as a ground of belief, it depends only on their knowledge and truthfulness. A third ground of belief is (c) inference; which is necessary to all original adjustment of our conduct to the future or to unperceived circumstances, but highly fallible, and constituting the chief problem for the exercise of Logic when that science arises: especially to explain the conditions of valid observations and experiments, of probability, of the conclusion of an argument being covered by its premises, and of the sufficiency of verification. False inferences that cannot be verified are imaginations.

As the growing mind of society deals with true beliefs they are piled up and classified in systems of science and philosophy: in which systems each belief or judgment strengthens and is strengthened by the rest. Even without systematisation, the mere structural similarity of judgments, formed unconsciously on the same implicit principles of causation and classification, throws them into those loose apperceptive masses which we call “common sense.” Such systems or masses, whether of science or of common sense, readily assimilate and confirm new inferences having the same character, and offer resistance to all inferences having a different structure, such as those about magic and spirits. The selective power of these apperceptive masses over novel ideas constitutes “understanding,” and is the plain solid man’s substitute for Logic; and so it is with many scientists, who often neglect the abstract study of Logic. For these systems or masses of experience are the substance of Logic and Methodology, which are their skeletons abstracted from them. They are the basis of all effective comparison and criticism; agreement or disagreement with them is the test of truth or error. It is the chief defect of common sense that the verification of its judgments depends almost entirely upon repetition of experiences (what Logicians call “simple enumeration”), without that analysis of observations which alone can show the necessary relations of facts; but this defect is in some measure remedied in good minds by that power of unformulated ideas of natural order, the result of unconscious analysis, which we call “good judgment”—a power which the fortunate possessor may be unable to explain.

(2) Non-evidentiary causes of belief are all reducible to bad observations, imaginations, and the causes that excite imagination; and bad observations are caused by false imaginations as to the meaning of sense-data. If it should seem to any one that since imagination consists of ideas it must be by nature incompatible with intense belief, we must consider that memory, the effects of testimony, and inferences also consist entirely of ideas; so that in that character they do not differ from imagination. Even perception depends for its meaning upon implicit ideas, and erroneous perception is due to erroneous ideas. The weakness of imagination-belief which (despite its frequent intensity) always in time becomes manifest, is due to its not being constantly confirmed by experience.

In detail the non-evidentiary causes of belief are as follows: (a) not only the truths of experience become massed or systematised in common sense and science, but the errors of misinterpreted experience and tradition form similar aggregates. Coincidences mistaken for causation, illusions, dreams, tales of thaumaturgy and ghost-stories, so far as they have anything in common in their outlines or emotional tone, form apperceptive masses which function in the same way as scientific systems: each of their constituent beliefs strengthens and is strengthened by the rest; and each mass (as a delusive “understanding”) readily assimilates and confirms any new tale or illusion having its own character, and resists and repels every judgment having a different structure—and, therefore, refuses explanation. And just as science and common sense have a sort of internal skeleton of principles which has been exhibited as Logic, so some of these comparatively obscure and chaotic masses of illusion and tradition contain certain structural principles which, though unconscious at the lowest human level, obtain recognition as culture advances—for example, the principles of mimetic and contagious magic; and then, too, arise such caricatures of science as theogonies and cosmologies, chiromancy, astrology and so forth. But nothing ever emerges from them that can be called a test of truth or methodology; much less, of course, can such a thing be found at lower levels of culture. There you see the accumulating clouds of imagination-belief, which gather together from all the winds and pile themselves up to overshadow poor humanity age after age; which still, in our own world, are by no means dissipated; and to whose persistent influence we may (I suppose) attribute the mysticism that periodically infects philosophy itself.

(b) Contributory to these masses of error are bad observations, confused and distorted memories, dreams and corrupted testimony and tradition, all of them having their origin in some sort of experience and matter-of-fact, and all issuing in vain imaginations. For of course there is no such thing as imagination underived from experience; experience is distorted and corrupted by superstition, but it transfers to superstition the attitude of belief that always belongs to experience, and supplies materials from which (as we shall see) it is often possible to construct such a defence of superstition as, to an unsophisticated mind, must be very plausible and persuasive.[86] Direct experience is often interpreted by a story in such a way as to make the story more credible. If a stone is shown as marking the tomb of a hero, or a cleft in the mountain as proving the prowess of a wizard, one unconsciously transfers the attitude of belief involved in contemplating these relics to all the legends concerning those mighty men of old.

(c) The causes determining belief are reinforced in various ways by feeling and emotion. The agreeableness or disagreeableness of any judgment draws attention to, or diverts it from such a judgment and the evidence for it: except that some disagreeable emotions, especially fear, by a sort of fascination of attention, are favourable to belief in the reality of an imagined evil. They possess the whole mind.

(d) Every desire fixes attention upon beliefs favourable to it, and upon any evidence favourable to them, and diverts attention from conflicting beliefs and considerations. Thus every desire readily forms about itself a relatively isolated mass of beliefs, which resists comparison and, therefore (as Ribot says),[87] does not recognise the principle of contradiction. Incompatible desires may be cherished without our becoming aware of their incompatibility; or, if the fact obtrudes itself upon us, we repudiate it and turn away.

The more immature a mind, again, and the less knowledge it has, the less inhibition of desire is exerted by foresight of consequences that ought to awaken conflicting desires or fears; and the less compassion one has, the less is desire inhibited by its probable consequences to others: therefore, in both cases, the less check there is upon belief.

(e) Voluntary action in connection with any belief, whether of a rational kind or in the routine of rites and ceremonies, favours that belief: (1) by establishing the idea-circuit of means and end, the end suggesting the means to it, and the thought of means running forward to the end—a circuit that resists interruption: (2) by the general effect of habit and prejudice; for every habit of action or of thought has inertia, and, moreover, it is agreeable, and to break it is disagreeable; so that, again, a relatively isolated system is formed, which resists comparison and criticism.

On the influence of desire and of activities for an end depends “the will to believe.” We cannot believe anything by directly willing it; but we can will what to attend to, or what to do, and that determines belief.

(f) Finally, belief is determined by certain social influences besides testimony and tradition: especially by sympathy and antipathy between families, parties, tribes; and by imitativeness and suggestibility (qualified fortunately by contra-suggestibility); so that beliefs become fashionable, endemic, coercive, impassioned and intolerant. The power of a crowd to inflict its passions and beliefs upon the individual has recently been much explained: it has always been practically understood by wizards, priests and politicians who lead mankind by the ears. Suggestibility, in general, is the liability to follow example or testimony without criticising it; and for many people it is so easy to fall into the attitude of belief upon slight provocation, that this liability, to the extent of weakness, is very common. Contra-suggestibility in general is the opposite tendency. But special suggestibility (I should say) is the liability to adopt a belief on testimony not only in the absence of evidence, but against evidence; and contra-suggestibility is the liability to reject a belief against the evidence. They are merely extreme cases. If you draw two equal straight lines, A and B, and say, “It seems to me that B is longer than A,” one person will reply “Certainly,” another “Certainly not; A is the longer.” The art of suggestion consists in reducing your audience to this state of imbecility; it requires you to bring them into such a condition of exclusive attention to your words that, comparison and criticism being excluded, their natural disposition to assent shall (for the time) have free play. The specially suggestible person is easily thrown into this state of exclusive attention, as if hypnotised. He who is suggestible by one man may not be so by another; or he may be more suggestible in the line of his prejudices than against them.

§ 5. The Beliefs of Immature Minds

All these grounds and causes of belief, evidentiary and non-evidentiary (except Logic and Science) are common to both mature and immature minds: but their proportional influence with individuals or with societies is very different at different stages of development; and in immature minds and in the lower stages of culture, the power of the non-evidentiary causes is excessive. Probably the chief cause of the growth of common sense in the generality of men is an increasing regularity of social life, as (notably) in the bloom of the classical civilisations and in the last four hundred years.

Perception, in normal circumstances, is accepted by all as a matter of course or, rather, of necessity: it controls the activities of practical life in hunting and in industry, in making weapons, hoeing the ground, building houses: however, these labours may sometimes be modified or interrupted by the intrusion of beliefs derived from other sources. If a savage sings a spell to his prey, or weapon, or tool, or keeps the head of a slain enemy on a shelf that his victim’s soul may assist him as a slave, he may thereby increase his own confidence in the work of hunting or gardening; but, otherwise, if his work be no better, neither need it be the worse for such fancies. The properties of matter exact practical recognition, without which nothing can be done. Even magical practices presuppose a sane perception of the central facts: as who is acting, for what purpose, when and where, with what and toward whom. Upon this basis there may be an astonishing superstructure of imagination-belief; but there are limits to the effectiveness of such beliefs.

M. Levy-Bruhl, indeed, in a very interesting book, maintains[88] that, under the influence of social ideas (représentations collectives), the primitive mind actually perceives things differently from what we do. Whilst we succeed in attaining an objective presentation, eliminating subjective associations, with primitives propriétés mystique, forces occultes are integral qualities of the object. He grants that, in certain cases of immediate practical interest, we find them very attentive and able to discriminate slight impressions, and to recognise the external signs of an object on which their subsistence or even their life depends; but holds that, in a very great majority of cases, their perceptions are over-weighted by subjective elements. This doctrine reverses (I venture to think) the real relations between perceptions and other causes of belief and their proportionate influence in savage life. It is not only where subsistence or life is at stake that backward peoples see things as they are: in merely experimental tests, Dr. Rivers found amongst both Papuans and Todas, that, as to suggestibility in perception, they showed a high degree of independence of judgment.[89] Their confidence in perception is not, like imagination-belief, occasional, modifiable for convenience, liable to lapse in course of time, dependent on the assent of a crowd. So far as occult or mystical attributes are by a savage assigned to things, such as magical force to a weapon, they constitute a secondary, imaginary integration with the percept. Such imaginary attributes cannot, like perception attributes, be verified by sensation: compare the hardness of a spearhead with its magical force.

The peculiarity of savage beliefs is due, not to corrupt and clouded perception, but to the influence of desire and anxiety upon their imagination, unrestrained by self-criticism and reinforced by the popular consensus. The savage’s imagination is excited by the pressing needs of his life in hunting, love, war, agriculture, and therefore by hunger and emulation, hate and grief, fear and suspicion. Imaginations spring up in his mind by analogy with experience; but often by remote or absurd analogies; and there is no logic at hand and not enough common sense to distinguish the wildest imaginative analogies from trustworthy conclusions. The same pressing needs and the same emotional storms often affect a whole tribe, and simultaneously stimulate every one’s imagination; and originating (no doubt) in ancient times and slowly accumulating and condensing, there grows up a mass of public imagination-beliefs, which are inculcated into every individual by tradition and common ceremonies. Such beliefs embodied in stories and formulæ, and associated with rites and customs, have for a long time the strength of custom in governing the behaviour of individuals and in tribal respect; but they prove at last to be weaker than custom, inasmuch as the observances may continue whilst the beliefs are forgotten or replaced by others, as the progress of culture makes it necessary to think of the old rites in a different way. In their flourishing period they extensively influence practical affairs, sometimes helpfully or harmlessly, sometimes injuriously and disastrously. In general, imaginations are prevented by biological necessity from modifying a tribe’s conduct beyond certain limits; but, exceptionally, they result in tribal insanity, tending toward, if not accomplishing, the tribe’s destruction, as in extreme cases of the practice of human sacrifice or of the ordeal by poison.

Indeed, so violent and tyrannous is the power of superstitious beliefs in many cases, that it may be difficult to understand how they are almost entirely born of the imagination. In a civilised country there are always current some beliefs as imaginative and absurd as any to be found in the middle of Africa; but surviving amidst a greater mass of perception-beliefs and positive ideas about industry and commerce, they have lost much of their driving power; and when the imaginative character of any belief has been recognised, it passes into the region of fine art or mythology, or even of ridicule. If such things have any place in our life, we turn to them of personal choice in the intervals of affairs. Under the influence of the fine arts or of literature treating of such things, our emotional states may be intense; but they are dissociated from action, exist for their own sake, have an appropriate tone (æsthetic) which marks their lack of energy, so that they require only an imaginary satisfaction. With a backward people there is much less “positive” opposition to their imaginative prepossessions and pursuits; what seems to us absurd, seems to them necessary; the actions and observances that express their beliefs are not performed as a matter of personal choice, but of public custom; the ends to be obtained (they think) are the same as those of what we call “business.” And it must be so. Considering the function of superstition in promoting political evolution, it is plain that primitive man must have been capable of believing and doing those things which (within certain limits) had so much biological and social value.

To understand how the magical and religious beliefs of savages and the play-beliefs of civilised man, having a common source in imagination, are (in spite of strong contrasts) closely allied, we must call to mind the many degrees of intensity of play-belief in ourselves, varying from the momentary entertainment of playing with a child, through many grades of fiction or ceremony, down to a deeply serious frame of mind, a profound movement of dread or compassion that may long outlast our play. A child’s absorption in such beliefs is more intense than ours; but circumstances prevent his attaining to the solid faith of a savage. The child of civilised people has little or no support in tradition (except from nursemaids); he is not driven by the desires and anxieties of subsistence; and he is frequently interrupted by his seniors. The savage has an overwhelming tradition and authority, pressing anxieties and no seniors. Until the civilised sceptic reaches his shores, there is, for the average tribesman, nothing but tardy experience or social fatigue to check his vagaries. His imagination vies with the sense of reality, often overpowers it; yet his beliefs show many signs of their insecure foundations.

It is not only the influence of society and tradition that renders imagination-beliefs coercive to a savage; in the immature mind of the individual there are certain conditions favourable to their prevalence.

(a) The process of imagination itself, the memory and the picture-thinking of savages, seems to be more vivid, sensuous, stable, more like perception than our own normally is. “The Australians,” says Spencer and Gillen, “have the most wonderful imagination.”[90] They often die of it; and so do Hindoo peasants, Maories, Fijians, Negroes and others, if they know they have been cursed or have broken a taboo. With the Melanesians, says Dr. Coddrington, thinking is like seeing;[91] and Dr. Rivers has confirmed this statement. Hence there is a tendency to accept imaginations as perceptions are accepted; and to believe in the efficacy of rites, because the mere performing of them with an imagined purpose makes their purpose seem to be accomplished. When a man of intense and excited imagination makes an image of an enemy, and stabs it, that his enemy may suffer, his action gratifies the impulse to stab, as if he wounded the enemy himself, and revenge seems to be a present fact. Similar intensity of imagination is found in civilised children—greater than in ordinary adults. Savages, again, seem to dream more vividly and convincingly than is usual amongst ourselves, and are said to be more liable to hallucinations. Physiological conditions of the immature brain (childish or savage), in which excitement does not rapidly spread through many associated neurones, may be the basis of the vividness of imagination, dreaming and hallucination.

(b) But more important than any intensity of picture-thinking to the growth and persistence of imagination-beliefs, is the want of a mental standard, by which they might be discredited. It is true that even at a low level of culture individuals are found for whom common sense constitutes a private standard, and who are sceptics in relation to their tribal beliefs.[92] But such a private standard cannot be communicated, and for the great majority of the tribesmen common sense is no confident guide; and perhaps they are even incapable of effectively comparing their ideas. At any rate, one reason why we believe our memories and not our imaginations is that, whilst in both cases the images (or elements of images) entering into them are derived from experience, in memory the relations of images in place, time and context are also derived directly from experience; whereas in imagination images (or their elements) are reconstructed in relations in which they have never been experienced, by analogies of experience (often distorted) or by condensations the most capricious. Therefore, to make imaginations credible to us, even in play, the relations of experience must be faithfully imitated, as (e. g.) in Robinson Crusoe; or else our emotions must be so strongly excited as to possess our minds with the fiction to the exclusion of all criticism. But with immature minds observation of fact, outside the practical, repetitive, necessary course of life, is not exact and coherent; and, accordingly, their memories are not coherent, especially as to time-relations; so that, by comparison with such memories, irregular imaginations suffer little. There is not enough orderly memory or general knowledge to discredit even absurd imaginations; for so far as observation and memory are disorderly, generalisation, conscious or unconscious, is impossible. Hence not only traditionary myths may be monstrous and arbitrary, but occasional tales of private invention, amongst both children and savages, usually exhibit disconnected transitions and impossible happenings. Yet they satisfy the immature mind.

(c) There are certain other conditions of the immature mind that hinder the comparison of ideas and, therefore, the criticism of beliefs. About every imperative need, such as success in hunting, with its desires and anxieties, rites and ceremonies grow up to gratify imaginatively the desires and relieve the anxieties; and ideas of these observances form relatively isolated systems. To us these ideas usually seem absurd and irrelevant when compared with the savage’s own experiences and his other practices. We see a hunter, for example, endeavour to gain his ends by two distinct series of actions. In one he fasts, enchants his weapons, casts spells upon his expected prey; in the other he carefully prepares his weapons, patiently tracks his prey, warily approaches and slays it. The latter series we approve and appreciate as causation; the former we ridicule as hocus-pocus, contributing objectively nothing to the event (though probably it increases his confidence); and we pity “the heathen in his blindness.” And, indeed, he may be said to be mind-blind; for in observing the rites, his attention is so occupied by means and end, and caught in the circuit in which these ideas revolve, and he is so earnest in carrying out the prescribed actions, that he cannot compare them with the really effective actions, so as to discover their absurdity and irrelevancy. In short, a state of mental dissociation is established for the system of magical ideas. So far does illusion go that he seems to regard the rites as the most important part of his proceedings. But that is not really his deepest conviction: he trusts in Magic and keeps his bowstring dry.

(d) In the case of children we may assume, and in the more backward races of men we may suspect, that the comparison of judgments is difficult, or sometimes even impossible, because of the imperfect development of the cerebral cortex. There must be some structural conditions of the free flow of energy through all organs of the brain, corresponding with the associability and comparability of all ideas. We may doubt if these conditions are complete even in good cultivated minds; since everybody finds one or another study or art especially difficult for him, or the freeing of himself from this or that sort of prejudice especially repugnant. And it is not only deliberate comparison that is hindered in the immaturity of the brain, but also that automatic process (more or less unconscious) of assimilation and discrimination to which (I think) we owe most of the results of abstraction and generalisation that may seem to have required purposive comparison. Such imperfections of structure, greatest at the lowest levels of organisation, and gradually decreasing as ideal rationality is approached, we may call “incoördination”; and, so far as it obtains, the results must be somewhat similar to the discoördination, the breaking down or interruption of organic efficiency, that occurs in hysteria, hypnosis and some forms of insanity. One of the results probably is suggestibility—the tendency to accept what is told, or insinuated, without examination; for freedom from this common liability depends (apart from the contra-suggestible disposition) upon the rapidity and definiteness with which one can compare that which is suggested with present fact or with one’s knowledge and former experience; and this is hindered by incoördination.

Effective incoördination may, however, be merely functional for want of practice in thinking; and it exists often enough in civilised people, because they have not even the desire to be consistent. In either case, whether from defective structure or from the dull inertia of disuse, there will be failure of comparison and, therefore, of criticism, and also (we may suppose) a greater intensity of imagination and of dreaming and a liability to hallucination, such as is said to be frequently the case with immature minds.

§ 6. The Reasoning of Immature Minds

We have seen that many beliefs result from inferences, and that inferences, when logically justifiable, may be considered as grounds (raising some degree of probability); but, when not justifiable, they are only causes of belief and their results are only imagination-beliefs. Since the general nature of reasoning is the same for Socrates and Sambo, we must inquire into the particular nature of the reasoning which leads immature minds into such bewildering mazes of error as we see (for example) in the world-wide prevalence of Magic and Animism.

On the inductive side of knowledge (the obtaining of premises) there is, of course, much imperfect observation and hasty generalisation; but, in spite of these faults, a savage learns by repeated experiences a great many narrow general truths about the physical world, plants, animals and his fellow-men, which constitute his stock of common sense and on the strength of which he lives as a very intelligent animal. We shall find from time to time errors of observation (such as the taking of a dream for reality) and of generalisation (such as the classing of worms with reptiles); but, strictly speaking, this is not reasoning: all reasoning is deductive, and the immature mind’s deductive processes need a fuller analysis.

Our Logic consists of a few universal principles generally accepted, with which any more particular judgment may be compared in order to test its validity. The matter may be superficially acquired in a few hours; but the full comprehension of it implies the widest comparison of types of judgment from all departments of knowledge: Logic being (as I have said) a sort of skeleton of knowledge. Hence in any mind incapable of comparison and criticism—or so far as it is incapable—there must be an absence of Logic. So much effective comparison of experience, however, goes on without our specially attending to it that a man’s logical power bears no proportion to his investigations into the structure of knowledge. One man may be a great student of Logic and a very inefficient reasoner from a want of discipline in the world of fact; another, who has never opened a text-book, may yet show by the definiteness of his judgments and the adequacy of his plans, that he is a sort of incarnate Logic, that his mind works according to reason or (in other words) according to the order of facts. It is the highest manifestation of common sense. Such men occur among backward peoples.

The only universal principles that need be considered here are the Law of Causation and the Form of Substance and Attribute (Mill’s doctrine of Natural Kinds): which may be called the principles of parallel reasoning; because the greater part of ordinary reasoning consists in drawing some inference parallel to one or the other of them, usually in some restricted shape. For example, a restriction of causation is the proposition that “exposure to intense daylight causes sun-burn,” of substance and attribute that “the specific gravity of gold is about 19·5”: whence we infer that if we expose ourselves to sunlight our faces or hands will suffer, or that any piece of gold will be relatively very heavy. But in such cases erroneous inferences are easy: for example, to expect that exposure to London sunshine will cause sunburn; for there the foul atmosphere cuts off the actinic rays: or to expect that a lump of brass will have specific gravity 19·5. A necessary precaution before trusting an inference, therefore, is the ascertaining that the inference deals with the very same sort of case as the premise describes: else there is no complete parallel. And Logicians show in the form of the syllogism this necessary precaution—to use their favourite example in a case of Substance and Attribute:

The conclusion Socrates is Mortal is parallel to the major premise All men are mortal; and that it deals with the very same sort of case is secured by the minor premise, Socrates is a man. Whoever reasons must see to it that this premise is true. But the savage has never noticed that necessity; and thence come most of his errors.

The syllogism (it is now admitted) does not describe the way in which we reason, but is only a form which gives some help in testing the validity of reasoning if one should ever think of doing such a thing. In practice we do not think first of the major premise, then of the minor premise and lastly of the conclusion. As a rule we do not think of either premise at all: the “conclusion” comes first to mind. In certain circumstances of association, because of our hopes or our fears, it occurs to us that “Socrates is mortal.” If some one should doubt this judgment and ask for proof, we might think of the major premise, and then put it into words for the first time—“All men die;” even then it might not seem necessary to add that “Socrates is a man.” But although we may not have been at the time aware of these premises until we were asked for them, their presence in the mind in some way was necessary to determine the inference: the major premise was there as latent memory of one or more cases of people who had died; the minor premise was represented by the assimilation of the case of Socrates to those cases of mortal men. The former experiences have left an engram, which serves as a mould into which subsequent experience may run, and which conceivably may determine subsequent judgments even though the former experiences can no longer be remembered.

The phrase “form of thought” is most used for premises of high generality, such as the axioms of mathematics, causation, substance and attribute, space in three dimensions; and, undoubtedly, these are forms which determine the lines of all thinking to which they are relevant; but they would be useless, if there were not, under them, forms established in very concrete material by the repetition of simple experiences and ordinary events (or even by single impressive events), such as “men are mortal,” “water quenches fire,” which determine the lines of common-sense judgments. If there has been an experiential judgment—X is related to Y, when X again appears it is expected to be related to Y.

Amongst savages also, of course, experience settles in their minds such forms of thought; both the most general ones, which they never formulate but which necessarily control their thoughts, and many particular ones concerning the experience of daily life; which last control the details of their thoughts, and for practical purposes are true; but which, through ignorance of the minor premise, are allowed to assimilate many judgments of a very different nature. Thus, X being known to be related to Y, they are apt to infer that things that are like X, or which they suppose to be like X, are also in the same way related to Y; and this is disastrous. In civilised life, most occupations are so mechanical, and the general tradition is so positive, that there is little encouragement to think nonsense; so that the average man reasons tolerably about simple matters without having heard of the minor premise; but the savage’s life is much less regular, and less fully occupied, and the tradition is full of magic and ghosts. Accordingly, he is always ready to think about magic and ghosts; and since his thoughts about such things can only run in the mould of his experiences (with some playroom for amplification, distortion and condensation), whilst he is also ignorant of the function of the minor premise, he seems to draw often from a very sound major premise a very absurd conclusion. For the minor premise is an invention of Logicians (perhaps their greatest): it does not occur to cursory, but only to critical thought.

For example, a savage judges that to put a lock of a man’s hair in the fire injures and may destroy him: how comes he to think so? He has learnt by experience that for a man to put his hand in the fire, or to fall into it, hurts him; and this supplies the mould in which his inference about the lock of hair is cast. Similarly, he is apt to judge that to throw a man’s image into the fire hurts him and may destroy him; and this clearly rests upon the same experience. His reasoning assumes the minor premise that (for the purpose of his revenge) a separated part of a man, or his image, is the same as the man himself; and this assumption is made explicit in the famous maxims of Magic, that in rites, whatever has been in contact with a man—or that any likeness of a man—may be substituted for him. But the generalisation of these maxims is left for an advanced stage of culture; the savage, who acts as if he held them, has never thought of, much less formulated them. They are derived, by later thought, entirely from an analysis of his conduct in magic. What the causes are that determine him to act as if he accepted the maxims of Magic will presently be discussed.[93]

There are certain other reasonings implied in savage practices, where the error lies not so much in the minor premise as in the minor term, thus: It is matter of experience that a sense of personal power and elation is produced by dancing and singing; and (perhaps without remembering such experience) a savage infers that magical power is increased by the same means. Or, again, it is matter of experience that men eat and use solid food and weapons; and a savage infers that ghosts eat ghostly food and use ghostly weapons; that is to say, that where food and spears are left at a tomb and remain untouched, the ghost has taken to himself the soul of these things which was his proper share. Now granting that there are such things as magical powers and ghosts, the reasoning that identifies them respectively with physical power and with men is, for the purpose of the inference, not unplausible; with a liberal examiner the minor premises might pass. But if magical powers and ghosts do not exist, the minor terms are imaginary.[94] In short, all these reasonings turn upon imaginations. The experiential major premises are true enough, but the minor premises are illusory, and as it is a maxim with Logicians that the force of reasoning follows the weaker premise, the conclusion is illusory. It is not in perception but in imagination that a part is the same as the whole, or that a likeness is the same as the thing itself; that magic controls events and that ghosts haunt their sepulchres.

These reasonings are fallacious imitations of parallel inferences according to cause and effect; but there are others of a kind peculiar to imagination: I mean reasonings by analogy—as when a Zulu, courting the dusky fair, chews a piece of wood, in the expectation that, as the wood is reduced to pulp, her heart, too, will be softened. These processes are not parallel; there is no resemblance between a lady’s heart and a piece of wood, nor between mastication and court-ship; but the relation involved, the softening process, is felt to be the same in both connections and, therefore, the cases on the whole are thought to be the same. Many rites and observances depend upon such analogies—for this is the strict sense of analogy, “like relations of unlike terms”; and they have a leading part in the formation of myths in which natural events are represented as personal relations—Apollo chasing the Dawn, and so forth. And I formerly thought that such arguments as the foregoing, in which the actions of ghosts are identified with those of men, or the sufferings of a part are equated with those of the whole, were examples of analogical reasoning; for certainly, the terms involved are different: a ghost, or an image, or a nail-paring is not the same as a man. But, on reflection, I see that though these terms are really different, that has nothing to do with the psychology of the matter, for they are conceived by the savage to be the same; and, therefore, the inference is conceived as parallel to the experiential ground (even though this remain latent in consciousness).

Analogical thought is now understood to be imaginative only, and is confined to the metaphors and similes of poetry or rhetoric; though it is not very long ago that it was seriously trusted in argument, as in defending absolute monarchy in the State by the examples of patriarchy in the family, and even by the supposed “regiment” of bees and quails in their societies, of the lion over beasts and of the eagle over birds.

In this spirit, Malays, having identified the life of the rice plant with human life, regard the flowering rice as in its infancy, and proceed to feed it with pap: and carry out the analogy at further stages of its development. Similarly, to facilitate childbirth, or to liberate the struggling soul of the dying, it is a respected recipe to untie all knots, unfasten all buttons, unlock all doors, open all windows; for opening or loosing, no matter what, is always the same process-relation.

These seem to be the chief modes of fallacious thinking—(1) false parallels and (2) analogies—which mislead the untutored mind and give to imagination-beliefs such coherence as they ever attain. Two accounts of superstitious reasoning have been given by those who admit that savages reason at all; one is that they reason correctly from absurd premises; the other that they reason absurdly from correct premises. If the foregoing analysis is sound, there is some truth and some error in both these doctrines. So far as primitive ratiocination is purely analogical, it is quite futile, whether its premises be true or false; for it cannot be cast in any admissible logical form. So far as in superstition it imitates parallel reasoning, according to cause and effect or substance and attribute, the major premise is, for the most part, empirically true; the minor premise is false; and the conclusion is a vain imagination. There are three types of ratiocination: (1) equations, as in mathematics; and here primitive man for a long time got no further than the counting of things by his fingers and toes. (2) Parallels of premise and inference, according to causation or substance and attribute, as in the physical and natural sciences; and here the savage collects by experience much common sense, and by inevitable fallacies much superstition. (3) Analogies of imagination. The natural progress of reason consists in relegating analogies to poetry and rhetoric; in introducing greater and greater accuracy into the judgments that serve as major premises, and greater caution in assuming minor premises; at last, in counting and measuring the facts reasoned about, and so preparing the beginnings of mathematical method. Such progress is promoted by the high biological value of greater definiteness of thought. Immature man in the necessary practical life—which may be called the biological life—has many definite perceptions and judgments and well-adjusted actions; outside that life, in the region of superstitious observance, he is not a rational, but an imaginative animal.

§ 7. General Ideas at the Savage Level

The language of savages is often wanting in names of classes of things for which names are with us a matter of course, and it has been supposed that those who use the language must be without the corresponding general ideas. Thus it is reported that a tribe had a name for each kind of tree but none for tree in general; another had a name for coco-nuts at various stages of growth (when they serve different uses) but none for coco-nut at all times: therefore, it is inferred, they had no general idea of tree or of coco-nut. A Siberian example is still more remarkable. The Tunguses depend entirely upon reindeer for food, clothes, tents and locomotion, and keep herds of them; yet they have no name for the animal. But they have a name for wild and another for tame reindeer; a name for domestic reindeer that have been broken in, and another for the unbroken; a name for the female fawn, for the doe with young, for a doe with one fawn, a doe in the third year with two fawns; a name for each age-class of buck, and so on.[95] Are we to infer that the Tunguses have no general idea of reindeer?

It was, no doubt, natural to assume that we first perceive individuals, which now stand clearly before us, and then, having compared them, arrive at general ideas. But if knowledge grows by the assimilation and differentiation of experiences, the class on the one hand and the individual on the other, must be joint products of this process: classes becoming clearer as more and more individuals are discriminated. Classes, or class-ideas never stand before us as individuals do; but the greater part of the meaning of every perception of an individual is the kind of thing it is. And as to priority, to perceive the kind of thing is (biologically) far more important than its individuality. If the individual did not mean the class, to perceive it would be useless as a guide to action. The general idea derived from the assimilation of experiences is the apperceptive mass that converts sense-stimulation into cognition: when unconscious Romanes called it a “recept.”

The primitiveness of general ideas is shown by gesture-language, which probably precedes speech, and which (except in direct indication of what is thought of) depends wholly upon general ideas suggested by imitative or significant actions. Primitive language must have described things by general characters, so far as it consisted in onomatopœia; to growl like a lion could only suggest the kind of animal. Primitive drawing (whether by children or savages) is nearly always generic: dog, horse, frigate-bird, hammer-headed shark, but not any individual.

There can be no doubt that savages are capable of general and abstract ideas; and no one now supposes that language is an adequate measure of thought. A language contains names only for things, groups, and aspects or actions of things which the people who use it need to discuss: if they do not need to speak of abstractions, there are no words for them. But we cannot assume of the contents of the mind, any more than of the outside world, that things do not exist unless we have noticed and named them. Professor Franz Boas has shown[96] that languages of the northern Amerinds, that do not idiomatically express abstract ideas, may be made to do so without violence, and that the abstract expression is intelligible to men native to the languages. “Every one who knows people of low culture,” says Dr. Rivers, “must recognise the difficulty which besets the study of any abstract question, not so much because the savage does not possess abstract ideas as that he has no words of his own to express them.”[97]

Amongst the ideas attained by savages, and having an important part in their lives, though often taken for granted and unexpressed, are some of the highest generality: for example “force.” The notion of force is derived from the experience of effort in our own muscular exertions; but with the development of our perception of physical objects by the integration of sense-data—sight, touch, movement and resisted movement (kinæsthesis), smell, hearing—this sense of effort, being transferred to objects as equivalent to our own exertions about them, becomes the all-important core of every object (or meaning of every perception of an object), without which the thing would be a mere show, neither useful nor injurious—sheep and tigers, rocks and pumpkins alike indifferent. Probably the perceptions of all the higher animals (down to reptiles) have this meaning. Force is reality, and by primitive man is thought of as the essence of whatever he conceives of as real, such as spells, talismans and ghosts. Having a subjective ground, from which it never becomes free, the notion of it is indefinite, varies for each of us with our constitution, age, health, and not only lends itself to the wildest whims of superstition, but has misled scientific investigations.

Relations are a class of general ideas familiar to savage thought, often appreciated with great subtlety and especially prominent in some magical operations. Relations are not only thought of by savages but compared, and likenesses discovered between them that may often surprise us. A gardener of New Guinea, having planted taro, ensured the growth of the crop by saying: “A muræna, left on the shore by the tide, was exhausted and on the point of expiring, when the tide returned, and it revived and swam away.” And he struck the ground with a branch three times.[98] He saw that renewal of life in the muræna and in the taro were the same thing; so that to describe one must strengthen the other—such is the “force” of a spell!

The most important relation involved in knowledge and in its practical applications is causation. Savages who have no word for causation and have never thought of it in the abstract, must always act as if they assume it. This is apt to be misunderstood. It is written: “The natives [of Australia] have no idea of cause and effect. They notice that two things occur one after the other, and at once jump to the conclusion that one is cause and the other effect.” They have, then, some idea of the relation, though ill-discriminated. Thus, having noticed that the plover often cries before rain, they imitate the cry when performing rites to bring on rain. We rather suppose that an atmospheric change, preceding the approaching rain, excites the plovers. But that does not occur to the natives: that “one after the other” is the same as effect after cause, or (as Logicians say) post hoc, ergo propter hoc, lies at the bottom of innumerable superstitions. The subconscious control exercised by this latent form of thought is very imperfect. The maxims of indirect Magic, that a likeness may be substituted for the thing itself, or a part of it for the whole, are merely formulæ of causation assumed under an erroneous belief as to what can be a cause. There are cases in which the like may be a substitute (one man for another) and a part may nearly serve for the whole (part of a broken knife). Hence these principles were stated and avowed by physicians and alchemists of the Middle Ages, and observed in their practice.

The quantitative axiom of mediate relation—“Magnitudes equal to the same magnitude are equal”—is, of course, never expressed by savages; but it is practically understood and applied by them whenever they use a common measure—the fingers for counting, the pace, or hand or arm-stretch to measure distance. These devices are gesture language; and the truth which the gestures assume has been forced upon the observation of primitive men whenever they saw three or more nearly equal things together—men in a row, birds in a flock, eggs in a nest. We need not suppose that conscious analysis is necessary to determine the relations between such things; the brain has its own method of analysis; and some day we learn the results. It was late in the day that the results became known; not, apparently, till the Greeks gave scientific form to the rudiments of mathematics. For then, for the first time, articulate axioms were wanted—to satisfy the form of science. The innumerable exact calculations of Egypt and Assyria could go on very well without them. Their discovery required the specific purpose of a scientist in search of them, the state of profound meditation and abstraction, excluding all irrelevant ideas, when in the emptiness and darkness of the mind their light became visible, like a faint sound in a silent room. Thus an idea, whose functioning has for ages controlled thought without being recognised, suddenly takes its place in the organisation of knowledge.

§ 8. The Weakness of Imagination-beliefs

With immature minds their superstitions seem to rest on good evidence. Some of those who pray to Neptune are saved from shipwreck, and the drowned are forgotten: all confirmatory coincidences are deeply impressive, and failures are overlooked or excused. By suggestion the sick are often healed, and the hale are struck down. Curses and incantations, if known to the intended victim, fulfil themselves. So do good omens that give confidence, and bad omens that weaken endeavour. If a magician has the astuteness to operate for rain only when the wet season approaches, the event is likely to confirm his reputation. Sleight of hand, ventriloquism and the advantages of a dark séance are not unknown to sorcerers tutored in an old tradition of deceit, and their clients take it for demonstration. The constant practice by a whole village of both magic and industry for the same end, makes it impossible for ordinary mortals to see which of them is the real agent of success. For the failures of magic or of sacrifice the practitioners always have plausible explanations. Hence between imagination-beliefs and perception-beliefs, as to their causes, there may be, for the believers, no apparent difference.

But in character, also, imagination-beliefs may seem indistinguishable from perception-beliefs; in immediate feeling-quality they are certainly very much like them; and, on a first consideration, they appear to have as much influence over men’s actions: but this is not true. We must not infer that to suffer martyrdom for a cult (as witches have done) can be a sign of nothing but unalterable faith in it: besides fanaticism and other abnormal states of mind, one must allow for loyalty to a party or leader, for oppositeness and hatred of the persecutor, for display, self-assertion and (in short) for a strong will. Those who take part in a religious war—are they driven wholly by enthusiasm for the supernatural, and not at all by hatred of aliens, love of fighting and hope of plunder? Discounting the admixture of other motives, the power of imagination-beliefs is, with most people, much less than we are apt to suppose. They are unstable, and in course of time change, though the “evidence” for them may remain the same. Moulded from the first by desire and anxiety, they remain plastic under the varying stress of these and other passions. In a primitive agricultural community, preparation of the soil, hoeing, reaping and harvesting go on (though with inferior tools and methods) just as they do with us; and from age to age the processes are generally confirmed or slowly improved. At the same time, every such employment is surrounded by a sort of aura of rites, which seem to be carried out with equal, or greater, scrupulosity and conviction; yet, age by age, these rites slowly atrophy and lose their importance and their ancient meaning, which is explained by new myths; or other rites may be learnt from neighbours or from invaders; for some rites may be necessary to their life, though not any particular ones.

The unstable character of superstitions and their close alliance with play-beliefs may be shown in various ways:

(a) The rites which express them are often carried out with deception, practised on the crowd in a public performance, as by obtaining from heaven a shower of rice, which (over night) has been lodged in the tree-tops, and is shaken down at the decisive moment; or, in private practice, played off on the patient, by bringing a stone in one’s waist-belt and then extracting it from his body. Half the tribe may deceive the rest, the men mystifying the women and children, or the old the young.

(b) Religious beliefs often comprise incompatible attitudes: the worshippers of a god acknowledge in prosperity his superior wisdom and power—at the same time, perhaps, employing devices to cheat him; or, in long continuing distress from drought or war, they may threaten to punish him, withhold his sacrifices and desecrate his shrine. In Raiatea, when a chief of rank fell ill, extravagant rites and sacrifices were practised; but if these failed, “the god was regarded as inexorable, and was usually banished from the temple, and his image destroyed.”[99]

(c) Imagination-beliefs break down under various trials—such as economy, selling the Rice-mother when the price of grain rises; offering the gods forged paper-money instead of good, or leaving many things at a grave and taking back the more precious; self-preservation, as in substituting the king’s eldest son for himself in sacrifice; compassion, in burying with the dead puppets instead of slaves (though in this economy may have some part), or substituting in sacrifice a bull for a man.

In such cases as these we see how any desire, whose satisfaction is incompatible with a given belief or observance, tends to create a limiting belief and to modify the rites. Social indolence and fatigue—the product of many individual fatigues and occasional levity, whereby the meaning of rites is forgotten, and the rites themselves are gradually slurred and abbreviated—must be an important condition of the degeneration of rites, as it is of language. Foreign influence through trade or war introduces disturbing ideas that appeal to lovers of novelty, and show that other people with other beliefs are as well off as ourselves. Even repeated experience of failure may shake a man’s confidence and make him throw away his fetish: though usually he gets another.

(d) The beliefs of Magic and Animism are generally supported by intense emotional excitement during the incantations and ceremonies that express them. Emotion is artificially stimulated and, probably, is felt to be necessary in order to sustain illusion. It excludes criticism and increases suggestibility.

(e) The specific connexion of such beliefs with the play attitude is shown: by their rites including games, such as leaping, swinging, spear-throwing—supposed to have some magical efficacy; the ceremonies themselves are often dances, dramas, choruses; and with the degeneration of belief, the rites remain as dramatic or musical pastimes, whilst the myths survive in epic poems, fairy-tales and ghost-stories. When rites and incantations are not intended to incite to immediate action, it is necessary that the emotions generated in their performance shall subside with only an imaginary satisfaction: they, therefore, acquire the æsthetic tone of beauty, or sublimity, or pathos (or some rudimentary form of these feelings); so that the performance, thus experienced, becomes an end in itself.

These beliefs with their correlative ceremonies have a further resemblance to play in the indirectness of their utility. Play develops faculty; but no child thinks of that. Magic and Animism (as we have seen) tend to maintain custom and order; but this is not known to any one at first and hardly now to the generality. Rites of public interest, to procure rain or to encourage the crops, though useless for such purposes, gratify the desire to do something, or to feel as if something were being done toward the end desired, especially in the intervals when really effective work cannot be carried on, as whilst the crops are growing or after harvest: they allay anxiety and give hope and confidence. Moreover, they are organised pastimes—not that they are designed to pass the time, but that they have in fact that valuable function. The men of backward societies, during a considerable part of their lives, have not enough to do. Social ceremonies keep people out of mischief, and, at the same time, in various ways exercise and develop their powers. With us industry is a sufficient occupation, or even too engrossing, and circumstances keep us steady; so that, in leisure, pastimes may be treated lightly. With the savage some pastimes must present themselves as necessary periodical religious duties, whose performance (in his belief) encourages and enhances industry. So far, again, as needs and interests are common to a tribe, village or other group, these ceremonies ensure social co-operation and unity and also emulation in their performance; and they preserve tradition and the integration of successive generations. Our games are free from practical hopes and anxieties; but the more elaborate, such as horse-racing, have still a social function; or, like cricket and football, a tribal character: the school, college, county or even the nation feels deeply concerned about them. The Olympic Games, which interested the Greek world throughout all its scattered cities, have been traced back to primitive religious observances.[100]

As for the dark side of superstition, it needs no other explanation than crime, fanaticism and insanity: which also are diseases of the imagination. Jealousy, hatred, greed, ferocious pride and the lust of power are amongst the causes that mould belief. Any calling pursued in secret, like that of the sorcerer, under a social ban, is of course demoralised. Where the interest of an organised profession stands in a certain degree of antagonism to the public interest, it may become the starting-point of unlimited abominations; and of this truth the interests of magicians and priests have supplied the most terrific examples. Dwelling upon what you know of black magic and red religion, the retrospect of human culture fills you with dismay; but need not excite astonishment; for human nature is less adapted to its environment (chiefly social) than anything else in the world; the development of the mind and of society has been too recent for us reasonably to expect anything better.

CHAPTER IV
MAGIC

“The histories I borrow, I refer them to the consciences of those I take them from.”—Montaigne, I. 20.

§ 1. Antiquity of Magic

Magic, until recently, was somewhat neglected by those who treated of savage ideas. In Sir E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture only one chapter is given to Magic, against seven to Animism (belief in the agency of spirits). In Spencer’s Sociology, Part I. is almost wholly devoted to the genesis and development of Animism, without a single chapter on Magic. The importance of early Animism became such an obsession, that travellers observed and reported upon it wherever they went, making only casual references to Magic—much to our loss. The tradition of this way of thinking seems to run back to Hume’s Natural History of Religion, where he traces the development of religion from a primitive belief that all natural activities are like our own, and that everything is possessed and actuated by a spirit. This idea was adopted by Comte, and elaborated in his celebrated law of the three stages of the explanation of Nature as determining the growth of human culture: Fetichism, which ascribes all causation to the particular will of each object, and which by generalisation leads through polytheism to monotheism; Metaphysics, which, giving up the notion of personal will, attributes the activities of things to abstract forces; and Positivism, which, discarding the variety of forces that can never be known, turns to the exact description of the order of phenomena. Mill, in turn, adopted these doctrines from Comte, and gave them currency amongst us, as part of the extraordinary influence which for many years he exerted upon all our thoughts. Hence the priority of Animism to every other theory of things seemed at that time a matter of course.

Recently there have been signs that this conception of primitive thought is giving way to another, namely, that Animism was preceded by Magic. Sir J. G. Frazer puts it, that the idea of Magic is simpler than that of Animism; that Magic is found in full force amongst people whose Animism is feebly developed, and that its beliefs are more uniform throughout the world.[101] Substantially—with qualifications that will appear hereafter—this view of the matter is here accepted. When one comes to argue it, to produce the primitive facts is, of course, impossible. It must even be admitted that such evidence as we have amongst the few facts collected of late years concerning ancient races of men, gives the earlier date to animistic ideas; for if some of the cave-paintings of Aurignacian origin, in which, for example, wild cattle are shown pierced with arrows, may be interpreted as of magical significance; on the other hand, the burial at Le Moustier, still more ancient, shows a regard for the corpse, in the disposal of it and in the things left with it, such as usually goes with the ghost-theory. These discoveries take us back some thousands of years before Menes; but probably leave us far from the beginning of human ideas concerning the supernatural.

If Magic preceded Animism, we must insert a stage of thought at the beginning of Comte’s series, making four instead of three; and the suggestion may perhaps be made to appear plausible, that the Metaphysical stage, the reign of occult forces in explanation, is not a mere residue of Fetichism after the spirit has departed, but rather the re-emergence into daylight of magical ideas of force, that always persisted, but for ages were kept in comparative obscurity by the vogue of Animism.

§ 2. What is Magic?

In his Development of Moral Ideas (II. 47) Prof. Westermarck observes that savages distinguish two classes of phenomena; the natural or familiar, and the supernatural or mysterious. The latter again are divided into the mechanical (Magic) and the volitional (Animism). This seems to be true: it corrects the notion, still common, that the savage explains all natural activities by Animism; recognises that he takes some phenomena as a matter of course, as the animals do; and, as to events that are not a matter of course, rightly marks the distinction between his conceptions of them as either mechanical (due to some uniformly acting force) or volitional (that is, arbitrary or capricious). With the savage, then, there are ongoings of things around him that are perceived to be regular and continuous; and there are others between which connections are imagined to take place, and these either regularly or capriciously: for thus I venture to interpret the difference between the natural and the supernatural; it is the difference between perception-belief and imagination-belief. Common sense, Magic, Animism—these are the three great congeries of ideas that compete for the control of his thoughts and in his interpretation of the world.

Magic may be defined as a connexion of events imagined to be constant and to depend upon the agency of some thing or activity possessing an efficacious quality or force (in fact unreal), and not to depend (as a connexion) upon the will of any particular person.

Whether Magic is ever wrought by the bare wish or will of a human being will be discussed below (§ 6). Here, the proviso that a magical connexion does not depend upon the will of a person, is meant to exclude Animism. For pure Animism involves the belief that a ghost, spirit, or god (though he may work by Magic) can produce an effect by his direct action, without using any visible or invisible means other than his own spiritual body and force. This is not what a magician does: he works by means of a connexion of events known (so he thinks) to himself and often to others. The magical implement (talisman or spell) that he uses has qualities that are magical facts, just as the qualities of his spear are physical facts. He can make a stone spear-head by means of another stone; and he may be able to make a talisman by means of a spell; but the powers of the talisman or of the spell are their own; he cannot create Magic, but only discover and use it. Whether he shall use it, depends upon his choice; but its powers do not; they are inherent, like physical forces. Faust can conjure the devil; but so can Wagner, if he knows the spell: the power of the spell is indifferent to the conjuror. A man may, indeed, be a source of magical power because he is a chief, or has the evil eye, or is taboo for unpurged homicide; but these things do not depend upon his will; he is in the same class with impersonal things that are magical.

A rule of Magic, as describing a uniform connexion of events, resembles what we call a law of nature; and further in this, that it is not supposed to be absolute or unconditional, but a tendency, subject to counteraction by hostile Magic or (perhaps) by demonic force. But it differs from a law of nature in being wholly imaginary and incapable of verification.

To practise Magic is to use some such rule in order to obtain an end desired. This can be attempted by any man, so far as his knowledge reaches; and the greater his knowledge the greater his power, provided he have the courage to act upon it. All stages of proficiency may be traced from the simple layman who swings a bull-roarer to raise the wind, to the wizard who lives by his art, and is feared by all his tribe and far beyond it, or to the erudite magician who controls the demons and vies with the gods.

Magical things, objects or actions, in their simplest forms, are charms, spells and rites; and since the ends for which they can be used are either to protect oneself or to exert power over other persons or things, each of these kinds of magic-thing may be defensive or offensive. A defensive charm is called an amulet; an offensive charm is a talisman. For a defensive spell (say, against sickness or accident) there is, I believe, no appropriate name; offensive spells (say, to control the weather or to curse an enemy) may be called incantations (but the usage is not fixed). Rites (that is, any magic actions that are not spells) may also be defensive (as to touch wood), or offensive (as to point at a man); but we have no names for these different intentions. From these simplest beginnings the whole learning and mystery of Magic seems to have developed.

§ 3. The Beginnings of Magic

The quest of origins is fascinating, because, if successful, it will help us to frame that outline of the history of the world which the philosophic mind regards as a necessary of life. To discuss the beginnings of Magic must necessarily be, in some measure, a speculative undertaking; because the facts are lost. If Magic was practised in the Aurignacian culture (say) 20,000 years ago, how can we get to the back of it? But speculation is not guess-work, if we always keep in view such facts as we have; if we are careful to give notice whenever the facts fail us; if we guide ourselves by scientific principles; and if we make no assumptions merely to suit our case, but only such as are generally admitted in all departments. For example:

(1) We may reasonably assume that the simplest magical beliefs and practices are of the earliest type: and nothing can be simpler than the belief in charms, rites and spells. It is, indeed, difficult to find many of these practices—though some can be produced—in their simplest forms in our records of backward peoples; partly because they have not been enough observed; partly because Magic is apt everywhere to become saturated with Animism; partly because charms, rites and spells are generally, for greater efficacy, compounded with one another. But these considerations do not affect the simplicity of the idea involved in the magical beliefs; which is merely this, that a certain object by its presence, or that an action, or an utterance, by merely entering into the course of events, will serve our purpose. A bare uniformity of connexion—if A, then B—in accordance with the familiar ongoings of Nature and our common activities, is all that is assumed. Many kinds of obstacles stop an arrow or a dart; carrion collects the vultures: so a patterned comb in one’s hair stops the demon of disease; a patterned quiver, or a certain song, brings the monkeys down from the tree-tops.[102] A spell assumes merely that certain objects, or animals, or spirits, must always comply with a wish or command expressed in words, just as another human being often does. It is their supposed uniform coerciveness that makes the words magical. If any form of words ever seems to have been successful, it must be repeated; because to have the same effect the action must be the same. Immersed in an indefinite mass of experiences, the postulate that we call “cause and effect” (unformulated, of course) underlies every action, and therefore underlies Magic; it is the ground of all expectation and of all confidence.

(2) The types of Magic that are the most prevalent are probably the earliest; and these are charms, rites and spells. They are found not only amongst savages, but the world over: even in civilised countries most of the uneducated, many of the half-educated, and not a few of those who have “finished their education,” employ them; whereas more complicated magical practices, except such as have been taken up into religious celebrations, are apt to fall into desuetude. What is universal must be adapted to very simple conditions of existence; these beliefs, therefore, to mental wants and proclivities that are probably primitive; and what conditions can be more simple, or more primitive, or more universal than ignorance of our fate and eagerness to clutch at anything that may give us confidence.

And not only are charms, rites and spells in all ages and everywhere employed in their simplest forms; but analysis of the most elaborate ritual and of nominally animistic practices will discover the same beliefs at the bottom of them. The idea of the amulet or the talisman is found in fetiches, beads, praying-wheels, and equally in a long mimetic dance or a passion-play; whose central purpose always is to avert some evil or to secure some good—success in hunting, or war, or agriculture. Similarly, the spell is involved in all rites, so far as verbal formulæ are used in them; and in all curses or prayers, so far as their efficacy depends upon a sound form of words.

The persistence of magical beliefs amongst civilised people is, in some measure, due to tradition; though the tradition could not continue effective if there were not in every generation a predisposition to accept it; and how far it is due to tradition, how far to a spontaneous proclivity, in any one who is inclined to believe in charms, rites and spells, he himself must judge as best he can. Superstition having been at one time extremely useful socially, there is some presumption that tribes addicted to it (within limits) had an advantage, and that the disposition became hereditary. It is a recent acquisition compared with the love of climbing; but once ingrained, it must remain till disutility breeds it out. Meanwhile, it is a stain on the human soul. So much of one’s early life is always forgotten that no one can be sure that he was not inoculated with such notions in childhood; especially when we consider that religious practices, taught before they can be well understood, must often wear a magical habit to a child; and that medicines, whose operations nobody used to understand, were on the same foot with Magic. For my own part, bating the last considerations, I cannot remember ever to have heard in childhood any sort of Magic spoken of except with amusement; yet magical beliefs have always haunted me. With Animism it was otherwise. When six or seven years old, I was told by a nursemaid—a convinced adherent of one of the many little sects that have ramified out of Wesleyanism in Cornwall—the most appalling ghost-stories; and these stories, exciting no doubt an ancient disposition, and reinforced by a visualising faculty that nightly peopled the darkness with innumerable spectres, entirely overpowered the teachings of those whom there was better reason to trust, that ghosts are a superstition from which true religion has for ever set us free. The effects lasted into middle age. Andrew Lang said of ghosts that “he did not believe, but he trembled”; and that precisely describes my own state of mind for many years. Now, as to Magic, my impression is that had it been suggested to me in a serious way, and not merely by casual allusions to “luck,” the experience would have stuck in my memory. The first time that I can remember practising rites, I was between ten and eleven years old, living at a small boarding-school. To keep off a dreaded event, I used to go every morning to the pump, fill my mouth with water and spurt it out in a violent stream—three times. This went on for some weeks. To the best of my recollection, the impulse was spontaneous, and I cannot remember why the particular rite was adopted: to spout water out of the mouth may have been symbolic of a pushing away of what was feared; but I do not think I was conscious of that meaning. Nothing further of the kind recurs to me until about the age of fifteen, when, at another school, the master-passion of my life was cricket; and I always practised some rite before going on the field, and carried a charm in my pocket; but I cannot recall what they were. At present, a day rarely passes without my experiencing some impulse to practise Magic. In lighting my first pipe in the morning (for example), if I remember how I lit it, where I struck the match, etc., yesterday, and if no misfortune has happened since, I feel an unmistakable impulse to “light up” again in the same way. No reason is distinctly present to me for acting so, and therefore it is hazardous to analyse the attitude; but it is not merely incipient habit: to the best of my judgment it is this, that such a way of lighting my pipe was one amongst the antecedents of a quiet time, and that it will be well to reinstate as many of them as possible. It is more comfortable to do it than to alter it: one feels more confident.

Inquiry amongst my friends shows that some have similar experiences, and others (both men and women) have not. A questionnaire on such a point might be useful; but difficult to arrange without giving suggestion or exciting bias.[103]

(3) There are causes originating the belief in charms, rites and spells so simple that nothing could be more natural to the primitive human mind. What is more universally powerful in producing belief in the connexion of events, and consequent expectancy of repetition, than an interesting coincidence? If, says Sir E. F. im Thurn,[104] a Carib sees a rock in any way abnormal or curious, and if shortly afterwards any evil happens to him, he regards rock and evil as cause and effect, and perceives in the rock a spirit. This is animistic; but the same tendency to be impressed by coincidence underlies Magic. For example: A hunting party of Esquimos met with no game. One of them went back to the sledges and got the ham-bone of a dog to eat. Returning with this in his hand, he met and killed a seal. Ever afterwards he carried a ham-bone in his hand when hunting.[105] The ham-bone had become a talisman. Such a mental state as the Esquimo’s used to be ascribed to the association of ideas; but it is better to consider it as an empirical judgment. Other circumstances of the event may have been associated in his mind; but as to the ham-bone and the kill, he thinks of them together, and judges that they are connected. Then, having judged that the ham-bone influenced the kill, he carries it with him in future in order to repeat the conditions of success.

We may perhaps discern the moment when Magic first fastened upon the human mind by considering how the use of weapons and snares by the primitive hunter impaired his sense of the mechanical continuity of the work. In a struggle with prey body to body, success or failure was thoroughly understood; but with the use of weapons and snares it became conditional upon the quality of these aids and upon his skill with them: more and more conditional as the number of steps increased between the first preparation and the event; at any one of which unforeseen occurrences might frustrate his plans. Hence an irresistible desire to strengthen and insure every step of his task; and to gratify this desire Magic arose.

That Magic should depend upon the assumption that “things connected in thought are connected in fact” seems unintelligible, until we consider that the thought in which they are connected is a judgment concerning the facts. But how is it possible to judge so foolishly? Absurd association is intelligible; it cannot be helped; but judgment is not a passive process. Well: a logician might interpret the case as a fallacy in applying the inductive canons: the Esquimo had two instances: (a) no ham-bone, no seal; (b) ham-bone, seal: or, again, into the circumstances of his expedition he introduced a ham-bone, and the seal followed. Therefore, the carrying of a ham-bone was the cause of getting a seal. He had not read Mill, and did not know what precautions should be taken before adopting such conclusions. The mind must have begun in this way; and after many thousands of years, the opportunities of error in empirical judgment began to be appreciated, and the canons were formulated. The experience of every man at every stage of life, personal or social (probably evoking an inherited disposition), continually impresses him with the belief in some connexion of antecedent and consequent, that each event arises out of others. But what it is in the antecedent that determines the event can never, in practical affairs, be exactly known. In definite cases, where method is applicable, we may analyse the consequent into the tendencies of forces in amount and direction; or we may sometimes reproduce it by an experiment exactly controlled. But where these resources fail us, as they often do in practical affairs, we are little confident of grasping all, or even the chief conditions of any event that interests us. The savage knows nothing of method, and, therefore, feels less distrust. He learns something of the conditions of success in hunting; this is biologically necessary to him as it is to a tiger; only those survive that learn them. He knows that he must have weapons as efficient as possible, must go to the habitat of his prey, must not be heard, or seen, or smelt. But with all precautions he sometimes fails; therefore there must be some other condition which he does not understand. Hence anything observed, or any word or action, that happens to be followed by success, may have been a means to that success.