IS CONSCIENCE PRIMITIVE? 651 



and brained the officer, and when brought into court could hardly be 

 restrained from inflicting the same punishment upon the constable's 

 assistants whom he recognized there. He was acquitted, on the ground 

 that, being entirely ignorant of the legal rights of the case, he had only 

 obeyed one of the first laws of nature in defending his father and his 

 property. 



The uneducated deaf-mute never rises to the conception of a God or 

 Great First Cause. If he reasons at all on the subject, he concludes 

 things have always been as they are, or as one expressed it, "it was 

 natural to be so." He has no idea of a life beyond the grave, nor of 

 future rewards and punishments. The more intelligent will work out 

 philosophies not of creation but of physical phenomena, sometimes 

 strangely like the mythologies of the ancients, and the similarity of 

 these myths indicates how naturally the primitive mind materializes 

 and seeks explanation of phenomena by the generaUzations of personal 

 experience. The association of causes is sometimes ludicrous. 



An English deaf-mute boy observing that he could raise quite a 

 stronor wind with his mother's bellows, naturallv concluded that the 

 wind which sometimes took his hat off in the street came from the 

 mouth of a gigantic bellows. He never stopped to inquire who blew 

 the bellows. A little girl imagined that the plants which spring up 

 from year to year in the fields and woods were like those in her 

 mother's garden, planted and watered by "some woman" — an infantile 

 conception, in which, however, may be traced a kindred germ to the old 

 Greek notions respecting nymphs and dryads. One lad, struck by the 

 similarity between flour falling from a mill and snow falling from the 

 clouds, concluded that snow was ground out of a mill in the sky. A 

 more poetical notion was that of a little fellow who thought the soft, 

 feathery snow-flakes in the winter were the falling blossoms of unknown 

 orchards in the sky, of which hailstones in summer were the icy fruit. 

 Some suppose thunder and lightning to be the discharge of firearms in 

 the sky, a notion the converse of that of the Aztecs, who believed the 

 Spaniards were gods armed with thunder and lightning. 



Thus it is that human nature repeats itself, and that deaf-mute 

 children left, by their inability to profit by the experience of their 

 elders, in a prolonged infancy exemplify, in their efi'orts to account for 

 the phenomena of nature, many of the fancies that prevailed in the in- 

 fancy of society. 



But if this primitive mind fails to grasp the idea of a Great First 

 Cause, it is equally clear that ethical distinctions are also lacking ; and 

 this belief is supported by good authority among those who have intimate 

 acquaintance with this peculiar class. Abb6 Sicard says of the deaf- 

 mute : " As to morals, he does not suspect their existence. The moral 

 world has no being for him, and virtues and vices are without reality." 

 " The deaf and dumb," says Herr Eschke, of Berlin, an eminent teach- 

 er, " live only for themselves. They acknowledge no social bond, they 



