3IO SCIENCE PROGRESS 



of possibility as the real estimates of the past. Helpful animals are promi- 

 nent personages in the fairy world, and they can often help more efifectively 

 than human beings. Gold Coast natives to this day think that animals 

 can talk and understand human speech. Every Gold Coast man has some 

 animal — it may be a crocodile, a python, a squirrel or even a mouse — which 

 is his brother and helper .^ The pagan tribes of Borneo have secret helpers 

 who reveal themselves under animal forms in dreams.* A beast in the fairy- 

 tale is an enchanted prince who recovers his shape. Belief in metamorphosis 

 is a fixed, universal, and dominating beUef among primitive peoples which 

 has left its impress upon the old legends of the world. Early men's estimates 

 of the animal sharply divided their mental life from ours. They traced 

 their descent to animals, they ascribed to them supernatural powers, they 

 feared their magic and they were protected by them. The first chapter of 

 Genesis draws one dividing line in the development of thought. The creation 

 of man is there carefully separated from the creation of lower animals and 

 his superiority is explicitly affirmed. This marks a reversal of estimate. 

 Durkheim notes that the humbler natural objects, including animals, are the 

 first to be divinised ^ and, according to Wundt, in the totemic age of human 

 history the relation of animal to man was the reverse of that relation as 

 it is estimated to-day.* The vanished reputation of the animal survives 

 in one great personage of myth. The dragon, who may be taken as one 

 personage with many appearances, embodies the original impression of dread, 

 magical power, and eminency which the animal made upon the primitive 

 mind. 



Since the mind is an organised system, a difference at one point implies 

 differences at others : a Bolshevist and a believer in the Divine Right of 

 Kings have difierent minds. Men who thought of the animal as primitive 

 men thought of it must have thought of the world differently from us. They 

 and we form different mental species, as lobsters and swallows form different 

 biological species. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales the poet collects into 

 one company many different people, as Noah collected many different animals 

 into one ark. Blake says of these characters : " Some of the names or titles 

 are altered by time ; but the characters themselves remain unaltered ; 

 and consequently they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal 

 human life beyond which nature never steps." Tliis obscures one truth by 

 over-emphasis on another. "As one age falls another rises different to 

 mortal sight," but scarcely " to immortals only the same." The " same 

 characters " are " repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals, 

 and in man," but is it true that " nothing new ever occurs in identical 

 existence " ? ^ 



There are mental species as there are biological species, and as evolution 

 has spread many different animal forms through nature, so it has spread many 

 different forms of mind through human Hfe. There is underlying connection 

 and even underlying identity — Blake strikes one truth, though he somewhat 

 obscures another. There is a fundamental unity which connects living 

 species together through evolution, and there is a fundamental unity which 

 evolves all men's minds as essentially one family. The unity of human 

 thought has many aspects ; of these aspects one fundamental method of 

 mind is here selected for discussion. 



In an Australian camp some native men were enraged at another. They 



^ Cardinall, The Native Tribes of the Northern Territories of the Gold 

 Coast, pp. 37-9. 



2 Hose and McDougall, The Pagan Tribes of Borneo. 



3 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Swain's trans., bk. i, ch. iii. 

 * Elements of Folk Psychology, Schaub's trans,. Preface. 



5 Prose Fragments. 



