Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/532

514 the better to interpret deductively the evidence available for induction. And, though we are incapable of reaching the conception by a direct process, we may make some approach to it by an indirect process. Guided by the doctrine of evolution in general, and by the more special doctrine of mental evolution, we may help ourselves to delineate primitive ideas in some of their leading traits. Having observed a priori what must be the characters of those ideas, we shall be as far as possible prepared to realize them in imagination, and then to discern them as actually existing.

We must set out with the postulate that primitive ideas are natural, and, under the conditions in which they occur, rational. In early life we have been taught that human nature is everywhere the same. Led thus to contemplate the beliefs of savages as beliefs entertained by minds like our own, we marvel at their strangeness, and ascribe perversity to those who hold them. Casting aside this error, we must substitute for it the truth that the laws of thought are everywhere the same, and that, given the data as known to him, the inference drawn by the primitive man is the reasonable inference.

In the sky, clear a few moments ago, the savage sees a fragment of cloud which grows while he gazes. At another time, watching one of these moving masses, he observes shreds of it drift away and vanish; and presently the whole disappears. What thought results in him? He knows nothing about precipitation and dissolution of vapor, nor has there been any one to stop his inquiry by the reply, "It is only a cloud." The essential fact forced on his attention is that something he could not before see has become visible, and something just now visible has vanished. The whence, and the where, and the why, he cannot tell; but there is the fact.

In this same space above him occur other changes. As day declines, bright points here and there show themselves, becoming clearer and more numerous as darkness increases, and then at dawn they fade gradually, until not one is left. Differing from clouds utterly in size, form, color, etc., differing also as continually reappearing in something like the same places, in the same relative positions, and in moving but very slowly always in the same way, they are yet like them in becoming now visible and now invisible. That feeble lights may be wholly obscured by a bright light, and that the stars are shining during the day though he does not see them, are facts beyond the imagination of the savage. The truth, as he perceives it, is that these existences now show themselves and now are hidden.

Differing greatly from clouds and stars in their behavior as the sun and moon do, they show, in common with them, this same alternation of visibility with invisibility. The sun rises on the other side of the mountains; from time to time going behind a cloud, presently comes out again; and at length hides below the level of the sea. The