Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/420

 406 CRITICAL NOTICES: boy. Of the Versailles elephant, we actually read that, " as if it knew that the painter was the cause of this teasing impertinence," it squirted water over his drawing. Clearly the narrator supposes it did not know that the painter has set on his servant to worry it. Be these things as they may, however, at this level of experience our clues are at best slight. On the other hand, when we come to deal with the facts about savages in whose case we may anthropomorphise with relative assurance we may certainly expect to be given the explicit logic of this or that act, and not such a logic as, by a metaphor, may be said to be implicit in some biological tread discerned by a speculative bystander behind the act. But when Dr. Westermarck lays it down that human resent- ment, moral or otherwise, is " determined by the answer given to the question, What is the cause of the pain ? " I should say that either he is guilty of this confusion between actual and merely potential, or at all events he does not show by the evidence he cites that the savage always puts such a question to himself, though no doubt he often does. Expanding intelligence, I take it, has by no means followed strictly along the lines to which, according to the naturalistic hypothesis, it is foredoomed by biological necessity, but has a wayward trick of shooting away from the path at any angle and yet somehow working round to a point directly ahead of steady-going ' nature '. To particularise, I venture to suggest (though I have not the space in which to sub- stantiate the assertion) that Dr. Westermarck makes rather too little of what for want of a better word we are wont to term savage " religion ' that mass of tortuous superstitions apparently so completely out of touch with the actualities of life, yet capable in the long run of creating in chief part that mental atmosphere which, for better or worse, we civilised beings still breathe. I find that Dr. Westermarck's savage is rather too much of a utilitarian ; whose utilitarianism is, as far as the proofs go, not only conscious or half-conscious, but sometimes altogether non-conscious, that is, for the empirical psychologist, non-existent. On the whole, however, it must be admitted that Dr. Wester- marck's more or less deterministic handling of human conduct appears to yield results approximately correct for a great deal of human history, and more especially for its earlier stages. For example, his brilliant pages on Punishment show force of reason- ing to be almost powerless to determine practice as compared with the purblind coercion exercised by that mass of inveterate passions and prejudices, the public conscience. Indeed, even to this hour the law reflects the workings of emotion rather than of thought. We punish the foiled attempt less severely than the accomplished crime, simply because the indignation it normally evokes is less. In vain theory protests that the criminal intention was in both cases the same. The feeling of the multitude, misnamed our "natural sense of justice," carries the day. Dr. Westermarck, however, with his strong grasp on fact, is forward to admit that