Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/680

668 of the philosophy of history from Augustine down. Now history, Wundt holds, is really an account of mental life. Hence the direct approach to a philosophy of history is a psychological study of the development of mankind, aiming to discover the determining motives of historical life and its changes, and of interpreting these by reference to the universal laws of mind. The philosophical interpretation, which has to do with significance, thus rests on the psychological interpretation, that is, on folk-psychology, which seeks to discover the laws immanent in the process of man's development.

Such, in barest outline, is the most general course of the argument. The details are a complicated tissue of ethnological and historical data and hypothesis, which only an expert in this field as competent as Wundt himself can properly appreciate. Few possess his erudition combined with his psychological acumen. He has, besides, the skill to invest his larger constructions, partly perhaps by force of repetition of assumptions, with the grand air of plausibility. One feels that the course of human development may really have been pretty much as he describes it. Nevertheless, even a somewhat limited experience of human nature suggests caution. La Rochefoucauld said of human actions, they are like bout-rimés; we see the end-terms, but the meaning depends on the antecedents, which may be as various as you please. So, it seems, the very same phenomena of folk-lore and tradition may be explained by very various psychological motives. We all know the conflict of opinion regarding the origin of totemism. Wundt contends for a totemic age and considers it "highly probable" that the germs of almost everything in advanced civilization are to be found in it. He bases this opinion largely on the evidence of what he regards as survivals. "Surviving effects of totemic culture," he says, "are everywhere apparent." He mentions the sacred animals of many ancient civilized peoples, divination by the flight of birds and the examination of entrails among the Romans, and the Israelitic law which forbids the eating of the flesh of certain animals. But is it so certain that these are survivals of totemism? Must we assume that wherever an animal appears as possessing peculiar, and especially supernatural, significance, it is due to the fact that at one time it, or some other animal, was conceived as an ancestor? The human mind would seem to be sufficiently plastic to supply other motives. Why should not the race have developed along divergent lines and some branches of it not passed through the totemic stage, in the stricter sense of the term, at all? And there is another reason for caution in the book itself. There is not a single footnote from beginning to end