Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/536

516 would be excited clearly at first, not by the general order of Nature, not by familiar sights and sounds, but by unusual events, more especially by events occurring suddenly and attended or followed by danger or disaster; and it would not be until a spirit of curiosity was active that such events would be attempted to be explained. Curiosity is of late appearance in the course of mental evolution in animals, as Mr. Romanes has pointed out in his book on that subject: it is most marked in the family of apes, and must have been a principal factor in determining the development of human attributes in certain branches of that or a kindred family of primates. The natural operation of curiosity in those half-animal beings, when directed toward especially unaccountable cosmical events, would determine the nature of primitive religion. In what manner such curiosity would be satisfied can be approximately ascertained only by considering the mental operations that at that time had been evolved.

At the time in question, prior to the existence of definite language, reasoning could be little more than half-conscious, half-unconscious inferences from one set of objective phenomena to another, reasoning by analogy, of the crudest, baldest, most unscientific and unphilosophic form. This process of reasoning has its purely physical counterpart in the simplest reflex actions of the least developed organisms, that react in a similar manner to similar impressions. A Venus's fly-trap will clasp and inclose a little stone as well as a fly, although the fly only is digestible; and it is only by the gradual evolution of more and more delicate organs of sense and of nerves and nerve-centers of corresponding delicacy and complexity, that things apparently, but not really, alike come to be discriminated. The senses do not deceive, but it is the reasoning powers that fail, when a fish rises to a worsted fly, or a bird pecks at a painted cherry, or a little puppy barks and snaps at a rolling ball; and the method of reasoning, instinctive or conscious, is in each case the same, from similarity of appearance to similarity of cause. The basis of all reasoning is essentially the same, depending on the involuntary association of ideas, by which is simply meant the tendency when two ideas have once been associated in the mind for the first idea on its subsequent recurrence to recall the second idea, and vice versa. Similar habits of thought must have been normal among primitive men, largely instinctive, and unmodified by reflection. To the earliest men the movements of other men would seem to require no philosophical explanation, as to a dog the movements of another dog presumably seem to require none, except so far as their actions might seem indicative of hostility or assistance. To such men the movements of animals would be regarded as not different in kind from the actions of their fellow-men, and until they had learned better by experience or experiment they would tend to regard animals as not widely different from men, proper to coax or to blame, or if very strong and ferocious, to supplicate. In a similar way all moving things might