Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/57

Rh seems to me to be the most explicitly conceived of primitive values. If we apply to the known facts about the peoples of the lowliest culture the method which has the right to say the last word in anthropology—I mean, a psychological method, a method of critical introjection—we seem to reach conclusions that are diametrically opposed to the contention of Nietzsche; who suggests that the natural man values power simply as a means of self-aggrandizement and the exploitation of his fellows. Nietzsche is welcome to his own opinion as to what should be the final rendering of the idea of virtue. That is a matter of choice; and, being so, it is apt to become an affair of battle-ships and armies. But when Nietzsche implies that it is likewise the original rendering of the idea of virtue, he can be proved by the verdict of anthropology to be wrong; unless, indeed, he claim that the modern savage as compared with his prehistoric ancestor is as 'denaturalized' as the Christian, or perhaps even more 'denaturalized' than some people who call themselves Christians.

Now it would be ridiculous if one sought to represent the man living in a state of nature—if by 'nature' we mean primitive culture—as a sort of 'plaster saint.' The burden of my last address to this Society was that savagery in the sense of ferocity and cruelty is indeed incidental to such a lowly state of society; at any rate so far as concerns the inhabitants of the world's chief areas of characterization, where the struggle for existence is most severe. But I tried to show that the fighting quality of these tougher stocks involved brutality by way of accident rather than of essence. At any rate the savage cannot be charged with claiming for sundry hysterical ebullitions of the blood-lust that these are the only principles having supreme value. Just as there are all sorts of men, so there are all sorts of moods to be reckoned with at every stage of human evolution, and it cannot be contended that the savage, with