eee a, ee 
i 
1898-99. | PRIMITIVE NATURE STUDY. 315 
the true, the good, the beautiful. Notall herself has she revealed to one 
age, to one people, but every race and every tribe can rightly say : “In 
Nature’s infinite book of secrets a little I can read.” 
It is claimed too that primitive man is logical neither in his methods 
nor in his ideas, that as his body is often a collection of abnormal or 
brutish land-marks of far-reaching travel, so his mind is an arena where 
lawless thoughts and purposeless ideas struggle fiercely for unmeaning 
and insignificant mastery. Only the other day, Dr. Friedmann, a Ger- 
man student of the history of our race, made bold to say : 
“The state of primitive thought is nothing more nor less than 
insanity, and has its parallel only in our asylums for mental diseases” 
( Sczence, N.S., Vol. IV., p. 352),—a view held to some extent by Tanzi, 
in his essay on “ Folk-lore in Mental Pathology.” (Rzv. ai Filos. Scz., 
Vol. 1X.) 
This doctrine, too, we must reject as a libel upon humanity. Its 
advocates miss all the significance of the “ golden mean.” Reasoning 
by analogy, confusion of the real and the ideal, are to-day far too 
common and much too human to be regarded as evidences of an 
unsound mind. That the whole earth was ever populated by lunatics is 
a theory, which the arts, the inventions, the languages, the institutions 
of even the lowest races render absolutely untenable. No mere 
psycopath laid the foundations of astronomy, invented the boomerang, 
or changed the wild, rude grass into the all-bountiful maize. 
Our scientific concepts of the universe may differ from the naive 
philosophy of primitive man. The head of the race may have changed 
but the heart is in essence just the same. The words of Mrs. Stevenson, 
written of the Zunis, will stand for myriads of savage and barbarous 
tribes of the present and of the past. 
‘The natural impulse of the human mind is to seek for truth and to 
account for the phenomena of nature, and thus philosophy grows. 
Mythologic philosophy is the fruit of the struggle for knowledge of 
cause. The reasoning of aboriginal people is by analogy, for at this 
stage of culture science is yet unborn. So the philosopher of early 
times is the myth-maker. The philosophy of primitive peoples is the 
progenitor of natural religion, and religion is invented through long 
processes of analogic reasoning. The Zunian belongs to this stage of 
culture. He is conscious of the earth he treads upon, but he does not 
know its form ; he knows something of what the earth contains beneath 
its surface, of the rivers, the mountains, the sun, moon and all celestial 
