Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/78

 XII Primitive Thought A ND now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation ; how / did it feel to be a man in those early days of the human -^ ^ adventure ? How did men think and what did they think in those remote days of hunting and wandering four hundred centuries ago before seed time and harvest began ? Those were days long before the written record of any human impressions, and we are left almost entirely to inference and guesswork in our answers to these questions. The sources to which scientific men have gone in their attempts to reconstruct that primitive mentality are very various. Recently the science of psycho-analysis, which analyses the way in which the egotistic and passionate impulses of the child are restrained, sup- pressed, modified or overlaid, to adapt them to the needs of social life, seems to have thrown a considerable amount of light upon the history of primitive society ; and another fruitful source of suggestion has been the study of the ideas and customs of such contemporary savages as still survive. Again there is a sort of mental fossiliza- tion which we find in folk-lore and the deep-lying irrational super- stitions and prejudices that still survive among modern civilized people. And finally we have in the increasingly numerous pictures, statues, carvings, symbols and the like, as we draw near to our own time, clearer and clearer indications of what man found interesting and worthy of record and representation. Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks, that is to say in a series of imaginative pictures. He conjured up images or images presented themselves to his mind, and he acted in accord- ance with the emotions they aroused. So a child or an uneducated person does to-day. Systematic thinking is apparently a compara- tively late development in human experience ; it has not played any great part in human life until within the last three thousand years. And even to-day those who really control and order their thoughts 58