Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/487

 428 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899

lines. By some, the uniformity of mental action has been deemed mystical or extranatural, just as every striking manifestation of nature is deemed mystical in pre-scientific culture ; yet the mys- tical view would seem unnecessary and no less misleading in this case than in others.

In brief, just as the organic body must (under the primary postulates already outlined) be regarded as an assemblage of sub- stances and powers reflecting the interactions of ancestral organic existence, so (under the same postulates) the mind organ can be regarded only as an assemblage of substances and powers epito- mizing all ancestral interactions between itself and the rest of the somatikos, and between the somatikos and the great external. It follows that, just as any two organisms of the same species are like in physiologic process and in response to external stimuli, so any two brains of equal faculty must function alike or so nearly alike as the environments by which their final shaping was given. Accordingly, the much-mooted unity of the human mind would appear to be nothing more than a manifestation of cerebral homology (itself the record of eons of organic development) perfected during the final eon of demotic progress.

It is significant that the more striking activital coincidences (such as the independent development of corresponding calendar systems on opposite hemispheres) exemplify like responsion to like stimuli by minds approximately equal in culture status; the well observed cases by no means exemplify like responsion to unlike stimuli, as might be anticipated if mental faculty were either (1) extranatural in origin or (2) derived from a single original source ; so that, on the whole, the recorded examples of uniformity in intellectual action seem to point toward a natural and spontaneous development of mental faculty in full accord with environing conditions — a course of development caught by Bacon, albeit in narrower range, three centuries ago.

While so conspicuous as to challenge attention (in accordance

�� �