5 H THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the better to interpret deductively the evidence available for induc- 

 tion. And, though we are incapable of reaching the conception by a 

 direct process, we may make some approach to it by an indirect pro- 

 cess. 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 ob- 

 served 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 natu- 

 ral, 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 de- 

 clines, 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 some- 

 thing like the same places, in the same relative positions, and in mov- 

 ing but very slowly always in the same way, they are yet like them 

 in becoming now visible and now invisible. That feeble lights maybe 

 wholly obscured by a bright light, and that the stars are shining dur- 

 ing the day though he does not see them, are facts beyond the imagi- 

 nation 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 alterna- 

 tion 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 



