49 2 Animal Life and Intelligence, 



highly complex interpretation of nature and theory of 

 things. The interpretation may seem bizarre and incon- 

 gruous enough to m, full of fetishism and strange super- 

 stitions, but it is an interpretation ; to the savage it 

 presents no incongruity ; to him the incongruity is in the 

 oddly assorted beliefs of the missionary. His system of 

 ideas is, in fact, one of the many possible systems to 

 which mental evolution may give rise. 



For what we call systems of thoughts, interpretations 

 of nature, theories of things, are so many genera and 

 species which have resulted from this later phase of meta- 

 kinetic evolution. Our methods are at present too coarse, 

 our powers too limited, to enable us to determine these 

 species from their kinetic aspect. The brains of Kaffir and 

 Boer, of ploughboy and merchant, of materialist and idealist, 

 are too subtly wrought to enable us to trace the systems of 

 kineses which were the concomitants of their scheme of 

 beliefs. But we can learn something of the genera and 

 species from their metakinetie aspect as symbolized through 

 language and other bodily activities. They fall into certain 

 groups, fetishistic, spiritualistic, materialistic, idealistic, 

 monistic, and so on, and within these groups there are sub- 

 divisions. This is not the place to consider them or discuss 

 their characteristics. What I wish to note about them is 

 that, diverse as they seem and are, each is a coherent pro- 

 duct of mental evolution. In each, all that is incongruous 

 to itself has been or is being eliminated. 



There are some people, however, who are surprised at 

 the incongruity of interpretations of nature among each 

 other. Fetishism, they say, has been proved to be utterly 

 false. It constitutes a hideous and grotesque delirium. 

 How can that which is utterly and completely false to 

 nature have had a natural evolution ? Now, for the elite of 

 the Aryan race, whose systems of ideas have been moulded 

 in accordance with the conceptions of modern science, no 

 doubt the fetishism of the poor savage seems sufficiently 

 incongruous and grotesque. So, too, does the system of 

 ideas of the Right Rev. Bishop of - - appear no doubt, 



