Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/389

 by derivations from the same term. It seems fairly evident that the selection of simple terms must to a certain extent depend upon the chief interests of a people; and where it is necessary to distinguish a certain phenomenon in many varieties, which in the life of a people play each an entirely independent rôle, many independent words may develop, while in other cases modifications of a single term may suffice. In the same way as concepts are classified and groups of perceptions are expressed by a single term, relations between perceptions are also classified. The behavior of primitive man makes it perfectly clear that all these linguistic classes have never risen into consciousness, and that consequently their origin must be sought not in rational, but in entirely unconscious processes of the mind. They must be due to a grouping of sense impressions and of concepts which is not in any sense of the term voluntary, but which develops from entirely different psychological causes. It is a characteristic of linguistic classifications that they never rise into consciousness, while other classifications, although the same unconscious origin prevails, often do rise into consciousness. It seems very plausible, for instance, that the fundamental religious notions, like the idea of will power immanent in inanimate objects, or the anthropomorphic character of animals, are in their origin just as little conscious as the fundamental ideas of language. While, however, the use of language is so automatic that the opportunity never arises for the fundamental notions to emerge into consciousness, this happens very frequently in all phenomena relating to religion.

I believe that anthropological investigations carried on from this point of view offer a fruitful field of inquiry. The primary object of these researches would be the determination of the fundamental categories under which phenomena are classified by man in various stages of culture. Differences of this kind appear very clearly in the domain of certain simple sense-perceptions. For instance, it has been observed that colors are classified according to their similarities in quite distinct groups without any accompanying difference in the ability to differentiate shades of color. What we call green and blue are often combined under some such term as “gall-like color,” or yellow and green are combined into one concept, which may be named “young-leaves color.” The importance of the fact that in thought and in speech these color-names convey the impression of quite different groups of sensations can hardly be over-rated.

Another group of categories that promise a field of fruitful investigation are those of object and attribute. The concepts of primitive man make it quite clear that the classes of ideas