Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/548

532

We have now reached a position where we may compare with more interest than before the mental activities of the savage with those of the routine laborer in civilized life, and thus show inductively that the conclusions adopted are sustained by an applied and practical test.

We are all equally well qualified probably to form an estimate of the degree of emotional intensity and mental strain exercised in making again and again for a lifetime the same one single thing—for instance, a pair of shoes or trousers or a coat; in doing mason, painting, or plumbing work; in constructing furniture, shoeing horses, or setting type; in putting bobbins into and taking them from a machine in a factory, or in running the machine itself by switching on and off the belt; or in running the engine which propels the machine, or even in running a lathe which carves out over and over again the same part of some machine or implement; or in planting, harvesting, mowing, or chopping, or any other kind of routine work which is learned by imitation and thereafter performed automatically. Of course, the case was different when the same man, as formerly, had to perform nearly all the above kinds of labor for himself.

It is safe to say, however, since the recent extreme division of labor, that a month of any one kind of such work would not give rise to as many exciting incidents or unexpected exigencies stirring the emotions and requiring sagacity, mental alertness, quick perceptions, rapid decisions, and skillful execution, as would be encountered in a successful attempt to catch a squirrel, kill a deer, or fight a wild cat with savage appliances.

Flippant and superficial as such a comparison may seem, at first blush, in a serious paper, it is, however, quite necessary to illuminate, as no other method of presentation would do, the almost immeasurable difference between all the vocations of the savage and those of the routine laborer in our civilized life. To get a living, the hunting savage of the stone age is obliged to go through these wildly exciting experiences and vicissitudes, no two of which are exactly alike, nearly every day of his life, and frequently several times a day. It is, moreover, the exciting nature of primitive pursuits which makes this everyday labor of the savage a lively and interesting recreation for the most cultured and intellectually advanced classes among the civilized.

Now this wide and extreme dissimilarity arising from the very nature of savage pursuits, when compared with those of the routine laborer, uncovers to our view a far-reaching cause in development of which careful note should be taken.

The savage, as we might even now imagine, and a little later