258 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



own. The difficulty is that, in so representing them, we can never he 

 more than partially right, and are frequently very wrong. The con- 

 ception which any one frames of another's mind, is inevitably more or 

 less after the pattern of his own mind is automorphic ; and in propor- 

 tion as the mind of which he has to frame a conception differs from his 

 own, his automorphic interpretation is likely to be wide of the truth. 



That measuring other person's actions by the standards our own 

 thoughts and feelings furnish, often causes misconstruction, is indeed 

 a truth familiar even to the vulgar. But while anions: members of the 

 same society, having natures nearly akin, it is seen that automorphic 

 explanations are often erroneous, it is not seen with due clearness how 

 much more erroneous such explanations commonly are, when the ac- 

 tions are those of men of another race, to whom the kinship in nature 

 is comparatively remote. We do, indeed, perceive this, if the interpre- 

 tations are not our own ; and if both the interpreters and the inter- 

 preted are distant in thought and nature from ourselves. When, as in 

 early English literature, we find Greek history conceived in terms of 

 feudal institutions, and the heroes of antiquity spoken of as princes, 

 knights, and squires, it becomes clear to us that the ideas concerning 

 ancient civilization must have been utterly wrong. When we find 

 Virgil adopted by Dante as his guide, and named elsewhere as one 

 among the prophets who visited the cradle of Christ when an illus- 

 trated psalter gives scenes from the life of Christ in which there re- 

 peatedly figures a castle with a portcullis when even the Crucifixion 

 is described by Langland in the language of chivalry, so that the man 

 who pierced Christ's side with a spear is considered as a knight who 

 disgraced his knighthood 1 when we read of the Crusaders calling 

 themselves " vassals of Christ ; " we need no further proof that by car- 

 rying their own sentiments, and ideas, and habits, to the interpreta- 

 tion of social arrangements and transactions among the Jews, our 

 ancestors were led into absurd misconceptions. But we do not recog- 

 nize the fact that in virtue of the same tendency we are ever framing 

 conceptions which, if not so grotesquely untrue, are yet very wide of 

 the truth. How difficult it is to imagine mental states remote from 

 our own so correctly that we can understand how they issue in indi- 

 vidual actions, and consequently in social actions, an instance will 

 make manifest. 



The feeling of vague wonder with which he received his first lessons 

 in the Greek mythology, will most likely be dimly remembered by 

 every reader. If not in words, still in an inarticulate way, there passed 

 through him the thought that belief in such stories was unaccount- 

 able. When, afterward, he read in books of travels details of the 

 amazing superstitions of this or that race of savages, there was joined 

 with a sense of the absurdity of such superstitions, more or less of 

 astonishment at their acceptance by any human beings, however 



1 Warton's "History of English Poetry," vol. ii., p. 57, cote. 



