Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/52

48 Among all races religion is the most potent power to maintain tradition, and for the savage religion enters into every act and thought. To him as to the ancient Greeks everything is a personification of some spirit—everything is somebody. The waterfall is such, for can you not hear the laughter of the nymph, the clouds are spirits for they come and go as only gods may do, and every beast and bird and plant and stone is but the embodiment of a ghost or tribal hero.

Yet it is probable that no savage has ever been more under the dominion of a world of omens and portents than was Louis XI, and even to-day the breaking of a mirror, or the number thirteen, or a stumble while crossing a threshold, remains of significance to many of us. All matters of sentiment and credulity are closely wrapped up in this entanglement of superstition; it is hard to divorce ourselves from the idea that moving machines have life and disposition. We must perforce associate sublimity and grandeur with the inert rock-mass of the Alps, and the great trees under which we played as children are sentient beings to our imagination, and our hearts ache as for the loss of life-long friends when we find them fallen to the woodman's axe. A cold heartless world it indeed would be were we not illogical and therefore "savage" in our sentiments and loves.

Upon analysis we find that lack of sympathy for the savage and ignorance of his tradition blinds our judgment and causes us to regard as ridiculous in him things which we consider to be quite natural in ourselves. The cleverness of the Yankee who sold wooden nutmegs is quite amusing, but the Japanese who counterfeits an American trademark is criminal.

There is within us Europeans an inbred contempt for all that is alien, and this trait, being the dominant characteristic of Christian peoples, has enabled us through aggressive intolerance to impress our customs upon all other races without ourselves being influenced by the cultures we have overawed into a semblance of our own.

In strange and possibly ominous contrast with ourselves, the Japanese have for ages been keen to discover the good things of alien cultures and quick to accept them as their own, while we must remain all but unmoved by the example of their ennobling patriotism and mastery of self, the happy simplicity of their family life, their respect for worthy ancestors, their modesty, and their inbred grace of deportment; and as for their exquisite art we chiefly relegate it to our museums, and their fine chivalric code, the bushido, remains all but untranslated into our language, much less has it entered into our thought.

The savage may know nothing of our classics, and little of that which we call science, yet go with him into the deep woods and his knowledge of the uses of every plant and tree and rock around him and his acquaintance with the habits of the animals are a subject for constant