Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/534

516 now and then pushing his body with a force he has some difficulty in overcoming. What may be the nature of this agent there is nothing to tell him; but one thing is irresistibly thrust on his consciousness—that sounds can be made, things about him can be moved, and he himself can be buffeted, by an existence he can neither grasp nor see.

What primitive ideas arise out of these experiences derived from the inorganic world? In the absence of hypothesis (which is foreign to thought in its earliest stages), what mental association do these multitudinous occurrences, some at long intervals, some daily, some hourly, some from minute to minute, tend to establish? They present, under many forms, the relation between a perceptible and an imperceptible mode of existence. In what way does the savage think of this relation? He cannot think of it in terms of dissipation into vapor and condensation from it, nor in terms of optical relations producing illusions, nor in any terms of physical science. How, then, does he formulate it? A clew to the answer will be furnished by recalling certain remarks of young children. When an image from the magic lantern, thrown on a screen, suddenly disappears on withdrawal of the slide, or when the reflection from a looking-glass, cast for a child's amusement on the wall or ceiling, is made to vanish by changing the attitude of the glass, the child asks, "Where is it gone to?" The notion arising in its mind is, not that this something no longer seen has become non-existent, but that it has become non-apparent; and it is led to think this by daily observing persons disappear behind adjacent objects, by seeing things put away out of sight, and by now and again finding a toy that had been hidden or lost. Similarly, the primitive idea is, that these various existences now manifest themselves and now conceal themselves. As the animal which he has wounded hides itself in the brushwood, and, if it cannot be found, is supposed by the savage to have escaped in some incomprehensible way, but to be still existing, so, in the absence of accumulated and organized knowledge, the implication of all these experiences is that many of the things above and around pass often from visibility to invisibility, and conversely. Bearing in mind how the actions of wind prove that there is an invisible form of existence which manifests power, we shall see this belief to be plausible.

It remains only to be pointed out that along with this conception of a visible condition and an invisible condition, which each of these many things has, there comes the conception of duality. Each of them is in a sense double, since it has these two complementary modes of being.

Significant facts of another order, from time to time disclosed, may next be noted—facts irresistibly impressing the primitive man with the belief that things are transmutable from one kind of substance to another. I refer to the facts forced on his attention by embedded remains of animals and plants.