FROM MYTH TO SCIENCE 309 



as of our primitive brothers to-day, often seem to us as strange, uncouth, and 

 alien as the strange beasts which once peopled the earth. 



Though the " phenomena which early societies present us with " are 

 difficult to understand at first, Maine thinks they become " few enough and 

 simple enough " to patient thought,^ but Sir James Frazer insists that 

 " the savage does not understand the thoughts of civilised man, and few 

 civihsed men understand the thoughts of the savage." ^ Now this mental 

 separation between primitive and civilised men may be compared to the 

 biological separation which divides species of animals like the elephant and 

 the ant. The philosopher Reid thought that the differences between 

 human minds were greater than any other differences between members 

 of the same species : all swallows, or even all queen, worker, or drone bees, 

 are more alike than men are alike mentally .^ He might have gone further 

 and suggested that men are divided into mental species as the animal world 

 is divided into biological species. For if we consider the mental differ- 

 ences between men who, widely speaking, are on the same level of civilisa- 

 tion and the mental differences between men on different levels we must 

 agree with Marett that " human nature, whether savage or civilised, is subject 

 to perpetual transformation." * Evolution first expended its creative 

 impetus on a variety of biological forms — producing, for example, mammals 

 with their skeletons inside and animals who, like crabs, have their skeletons 

 outside. This " perpetual transformation " was transferred from the body 

 to the mind when man appeared and divided him into mental species as 

 his animal predecessors had been divided into biological species. The 

 modern young lady who startles her Victorian grandmother is a latest product 

 of the continuous alteration which, as the generations pass, strews mental 

 types along the route of life as biological types were strewn in the past. 

 Lecky remarks that civilisation usually destroys opinions by making them 

 obsolete.^ History preserves these obsolete opinions as a museum pre- 

 serves extinct animals, to remind us that there are mental as well as biological 

 species. The men who tortured witches and the judges who condemned 

 them were mentally different from their successors who relegated witch- 

 craft to the limbo of superstitions. As biological difference intensifies with 

 retreat down the scale of life, so mental contrasts are sharper between 

 primitive and civilised man than between successive generations or centuries. 

 When we enter the primitive world we live with men and women who are 

 different from ourselves, as different in thought, deed, in custom, as they 

 were in speech. 



We enter this primitive world through the portal of the fairy-tale. Fairy- 

 tales, excluding modern stories, are selections from the myths and legends 

 which contain beliefs and habits of life once prevalent. They may be compared 

 to modern novels, though the resemblance is not complete. A modern 

 novel combines incidents, behefs, customs, fashions, and estimates of life 

 which are characteristic of its period into a dramatic form or story. It 

 may not be direct transcript, it may twist realities into dramatic form, but 

 it reveals the life of its time. The fairy-tale does the same thing. Now the 

 personages of the fairy-tale do not think or act as we do, and so different 

 are they from us that they seem to live in a different world. The fairy-tale 

 seems merely to devise entertainment because it treats our incredibilities 

 as credible. But primitive people still among us guarantee its estimates 



^ Ancient Law, 4th ed., pp. 119-20. 



2 Quoted by Cardinall : Preface to The Natives of the Northern Terri- 

 tories of the Gold Coast. 



^ An Inquiry into the Human Mind, ch. i, §i. 



* Psychology and Folk-lore, p. 14. 



* Rise and Development of Rationalism in Europe. 



