312 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



that a neighbour's gong means dinner, we judge by our own habit or by 

 someone else's, and in this and in more complex instances the method of 

 comparison with models works truly, though, in spite of circumspectness, 

 it often works wrongly. 



Now the primitive mind resembles the civilised in having a fundamental 

 interpretive habit. It resembles it in constructing contexts or larger 

 wholes to fit to its experiences, and it resembles it in using certain models 

 of reality for making these constructions. Science has prospered by cor- 

 puscular constructions : it has succeeded in interpreting the world by supposing 

 bodies to be composed of very minute moving particles. The corpuscle 

 is obviously, in the first instance, a speculatively attenuated gross body 

 — a marble looked at through the wrong end of a telescope. The world 

 of gross bodies, separated from one another and moving in space and time, 

 is obviously the primary model of the corpuscular world constructed by 

 science to provide a context for the world of sounds, colours, and the like 

 — ^the world as it appears to us. The primitive mind differs from the civilised 

 because it constructs a different context for the world as it appears to us and 

 uses different models of reahty for these constructions. Speaking generally 

 and ignoring qualifications which are irrelevant in speaking generally, the 

 primitive has, presumably, the same direct experience of the world as the 

 civiUsed man : he sees, hears, smells, and feels as the latter sees, hears, 

 smells, or feels ; he sleeps, eats, is hungry or thirsty, loves, hates, has pain 

 or pleasure, dreams or dies in the same way. This fundamental core of 

 experience and the fundamental habit of constructing contexts based on 

 models of reality connects all human minds into one great family. So, 

 in a wider sense, a common participation in one fundamental life connects 

 all animals into one great group. Different biological species arise as different 

 manifestations or forms of a common life. So primitive and civilised minds 

 divide into mental species, because they construct their contexts for ex- 

 periences so differently and favour different models of reality. " The Chero- 

 kees give their children a concoction of burs to strengthen their memories ; 

 for as a bur will stick to anything, the mind of a man with a bur inside him 

 will cling to all lands of useful information." ^ The Cherokees, the Aus- 

 tralians who slay with charmed sticks, the Chacos who bury living infants 

 with their mothers, and savages who beheve in the magic of ham-bones, 

 have different minds from civilised men, as lobsters, snakes, and giraffes 

 have different bodies. 



A small boy who delighted in pulling switches thought they were bells 

 which summoned a fairy who put on the electric light. This hypothesis, 

 prompted, perhaps, by reminiscences of Tinker Bell, gratified his sense of 

 fitness or reaUty and, since pulling switches did light rooms, conducted 

 him to success. Events did happen as if a switch were a bell, as if a fairy 

 answered it and as if she sent the light. Erroneous hypotheses can work, 

 though they ultimately fail to meet the growth of demand upon them. 

 The same " as if " appears in all interpretation, whether it be in a primitive 

 belief or in a modern scientific hypothesis. Substances combine together 

 and behave as if they were composed of atoms ; an Australian native dies 

 when a charmed stick is pointed at him as if the stick had been endowed 

 with magical power. This " as if " connects the experiences interpreted 

 with the model which suppUes the method of interpretation. Now the Tinker 

 Bell model was as congenial to primitive men as it is still congenial to the child. 

 The primitive model of causation or effectiveness is human action or thought : 

 all things are explained by reference to the doings of living beings who are 

 either human or obviously modelled on human beings. The animal actors 

 in primitive myths are men, or supermen, in animal form. The primitive 

 mind explains, to put it concisely, by teUing a story. 



1 Carveth Read, The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions, p. 330. 



