28o ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



terminology has been hammered out should be given 

 names out of man's existing vocabulary. That is 

 inevitable : but there is an even more fundamental 

 process at work. It seems as if the human mind 

 works, on its most primitive levels, by means of image- 

 formation, and that emotions and concepts for which 

 no simple image exist may call up symbolic images 

 by association, and indeed often dress themselves in 

 these new clothes before they present themselves 

 to consciousness. Some such process appears to take 

 place in dreams (including day-dreams !) and possibly 

 in the ordinary thought-processes of savages. More 

 advanced modes of thought substitute the currency 

 of an arbitrary token such as a word or a formula 

 for the barter of images and concrete symbols ; the 

 freshness and vividness of the image is lost, but more 

 efficient and speedier working is attained. How- 

 ever, in most of us the concrete image-using mode 

 of thought is a relief from the apparently less natural 

 and more artificial (though more efficient) operations 

 of reason, and we relapse into it, wholly or partially, 

 more often than we realize. 



This unconscious irrational tendency to symbolism, 

 together with the other tendency to project ideas 

 properly attaching to the subjective world into ex- 

 ternal objects and processes — these between them 

 account for much of the modes of expression so far 

 found for religious belief; and, since the majority 

 of human beings have a profound distaste for sustained 



