Esthetology

 he unconsciously reifies the relations of space and makes them seven distinct worlds. In tribal life the notions of seven worlds are intuitive as a habit of judgment.

If a man habitually speaks of an object in terms which involve erroneous notions, the habit of forming the judgments involved becomes intuitive. Persuade him that eating parsnips on Wednesday is a taboo and may lead to bad consequences; a constant avoidance of this habit will lead him to habitual judgments of evil, and he will believe that such judgments are intuitive. It is thus that qualities are generated in the mind from the point of view of the individual.

Beast Fable—Wildwood man worships the beasts as gods. As we have already seen, he believes that all bodies have animate life; that is, he interprets the phenomena of the world from the standpoint of the belief that all bodies, like human bodies, are endowed with mind and that they have motives and enjoy pleasures and feel pains and exercise will as men do. The savage man interprets the environment of bodies as if they were human bodies. This is what has been called anthropomorphism.

With this view of the world savage man develops a vast body of story lore which reveals his thoughts of the nature of things with the causes and effects of events that constitute the history of life and change. This lore is myth. But more; by agencies which are now well recognized in science, he believes that every body has a dual existence, as gross body and attenuated body, and that the attenuated body may enter the gross body or depart from the gross body, and that the attenuated body may sojourn in one gross body or another at will.

The attenuated body is known in our language as ghost, but every primitive language has a name of its own, as manitu in the Algonquian languages, and pokunt in the Shoshonean languages, and wakanda in the Siouan languages. This ghost is held to be the cause of things. All events are caused by ghosts. Every distinct linguistic stock of the world has a body of myth  appear also in melody, harmony, and symphony. Graphic art is expression of form which at first gives us form as molded in sculpture, then form as relief, then the combination of form in perspective, and finally the delicate expression of forms in values or chiaroscuro. In drama we have an art which employs gesture speech as its mode of expression. Its root is the dance, and the first stage of the drama is terpsichorean; its second stage is sacrificial, its third stage is ceremonial, its fourth stage is histrionic. Romance is expression by fictitious history. It appears first as beast fable, then as power myth, then as necromantic tale, and finally in the novel.

In poetry the method of expression is metaphor. We are yet to see the stages through which metaphor is developed. Again I must remind my reader that all of these stages have roots in the primitive stage, that they develop by minute increments, and that a characteristic of poetry is never developed in full panoply of action.

Personification—Personification is the germ of poetic expression. Personification is the fundamental error in the philosophy of savagery. Tylor called this belief animism; already we have set forth its nature. It arises from the mental necessity of making judgments and comparing them with the inferences which the mind draws from sense impressions. The savage interprets the world of bodies in the environment from the concepts of human bodies. From the standpoint of psychology this is anthropomorphism, while from the standpoint of philosophy it is animism. This animism or anthropomorphism is personification from the standpoint of poetry.

Wildwood man is of the opinion that all bodies are animate and that all the tribes of the lower animals, and all the tribes of stars, and all the tribes of clouds and streams, and all the tribes of plants, and all the tribe sof stones are tribes composed of clans like his own. The philosophy of savagery is the essence of poetry, but before it is recognized as such it must undergo 