Page:Will to Believe and Other Essays (1897).djvu/274

252 which the savage gets yield the notion very imperfectly, and in but few cases. Of all the objects around,—trees, stones, hills, pieces of water, clouds, and so forth,—most differ widely,… and few approach complete likeness so nearly as to make discrimination difficult. Even between animals of the same species it rarely happens that, whether alive or dead, they are presented in just the same attitudes.… It is only along with a gradual development of the arts … that there come frequent experiences of perfectly straight lines admitting of complete apposition, bringing the perceptions of equality and inequality. Still more devoid is savage life of the experiences which generate the conception of the uniformity of succession. The sequences observed from hour to hour and day to day seem anything but uniform; difference is a far more conspicuous trait among them.… So that if we contemplate primitive human life as a whole, we see that multiformity of sequence, rather than uniformity, is the notion which it tends to generate.… Only as fast as the practice of the arts develops the idea of measure can the consciousness of uniformity become clear.… Those conditions furnished by advancing civilization which make possible the notion of uniformity simultaneously make possible the notion of exactness.… Hence the primitive man has little experience which cultivates the consciousness of what we call truth. How closely allied this is to the consciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is implied even in language. We speak of a true surface as well as a true statement. Exactness describes perfection in a mechanical fit, as well as perfect agreement between the results of calculations."

The whole burden of Mr. Spencer's book is to show the fatal way in which the mind, supposed passive, is moulded by its experiences of 'outer