THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 259 



ignorant or stupid. That the people of a neighboring tribe had de- 

 scended from ducks, that rain resulted when certain deities began to 

 spit upon the earth, that the island lived upon had been pulled up 

 from the bottom of the ocean by one of their gods, whose hook got 

 fast when he was fishing these and countless beliefs equally laugh- 

 able seem to him to imply an irrationality near to insanity. He inter- 

 prets them automorphically carrying with him not simply his own 

 faculties developed to a stage of complexity considerably beyond that 

 reached by the faculties of the savage, but also the modes of thinking 

 in which he was brought up, and the stock of information he has ac- 

 quired. Usually it never occurs to him to do otherwise. Even if he 

 attempts to look at things from the savage's point of view, he most 

 likely fails entirely ; and, if he succeeds at all, it is but very partially. 

 Yet only by seeing things as the savage sees them can his ideas be un- 

 derstood, his behavior accounted for, and the resulting social phe- 

 nomena explained. These seemingly-strange superstitions are quite 

 natural quite rational, in a certain sense, in their respective times and 

 places. The laws of intellectual action are the same for civilized and 

 uncivilized. The difference is in complexity of faculty and amount of 

 knowledge accumulated and generalized. Given reflective powers de- 

 veloped only to that lower degree in which they are possessed by the 

 aboriginal man given his small stock of ideas, collected in a narrow 

 area of space, and not added to by records extending through time 

 given his impulsive nature incapable of patient inquiry ; and these 

 seemingly-monstrous beliefs of his become in reality the most feasible 

 explanations he can find of surrounding things. Yet even after seeing 

 that this must be so, it is not easy to think, from the savage's point of 

 view, clearly enough to follow the effects of his ideas on his acts, 

 through all the relations of life, social and other. 



A parallel difficulty stands in the way of rightly conceiving char- 

 acter remote from our own, so as to see how it issues in conduct. We 

 may best recognize our inability in this respect by observing the con- 

 verse inability of other races to understand our characters, and the 

 acts they prompt. 



" "Wonderful are the works of Allah ! Behold ! That Frank is trudging about, 

 when he can, if he pleases, sit still!" ' 



In like manner Captain Speke tells us : 



" If I walked up and down the same place to stretch my legs, they " (Somali) 

 " formed councils of war on my motives, considering I must have some secret de- 

 signs upon their country, or I would not do it, as no man in his senses could be 

 guilty of working his legs unnecessarily." 2 



But while by instances like these we are shown that our characters 

 are in a large measure incomprehensible by races remote in nature 



1 Burton's " Scinde," vol. ii., p. 13. 



2 Speke's " Journal of Discovery of Source of the Nile," p. 85. 



