AND PERSONALITY 



beneficient spirit and did his lessons, or that it erred and he 

 failed ? Might he not believe that when it was a good spirit, 

 it made him brave and truthful and when it was a bad 

 spirit he was a coward, a cheat, and a liar? He could believe 

 that a good spirit gave him the attributes of love and 

 affection, that it stood by and found for him a wife, that 

 it led him through the trials of bringing up a family, that 

 it taught him industry and thrift, and that when he died it 

 took its flight. If I were a jungle man today and were not 

 aware that I have a brain, I would willingly acknowledge 

 a spirit and attribute to it all the movements of my life. 



It is significant that in the moral codes of man no function 

 assigned to the spirit is not clearly the function of the brain. 

 Therefore the idea of the spirit found so often among the 

 faiths and beliefs of native people is a natural error of 

 confusing a functioning brain with a spirit. A functioning 

 brain accounts for the action patterns of man and animals 

 just as completely as the mechanism of an adding machine 

 accounts for the mathematical patterns that it performs. 



The difference between the brain of man and that of the 

 lower animals is not in the structure itself but in the further 

 development in man of that part of the brain which exercises 

 memory, reason, and imagination. The dog, the lion, the 

 elephant, the ape, and the simple native have identical 

 mechanisms, with varying degrees of development. This 

 variation is expressed in the "life line." 



It is this dominating mechanism, this thinking brain, 

 which gives man his language, his science, his invention, his 

 law and his religion, his hopes and his passions, his libraries 

 and his laboratories, his schools and his universities. This 

 mechanism, composed of nothing more remarkable than 

 lipoids, proteins, and electrolytes, has been invested with 

 mystery since early man. 



In our experience in Tanganyika among the various 

 highly disciplined tribes of Africa, there seemed to be a 



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