150 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



able to think in the logic of feelings ; but can never rise to 

 any ideas of higher abstraction than those which the logic of 

 feelings supplies. The uneducated deaf-mutes have the same 

 notions of right and wrong, cause and effect, and so on, as we 

 have already seen that animals and idiots possess. They 

 always think in the most concrete forms, as shown by their 

 telling us (when educated) that so long as they were unedu- 

 cated they always thought in pictures. Moreover, that they 

 cannot attain to ideas of even the lowest degree of abstraction, 

 is shown by the fact that in no one instance have I been able 

 to find evidence of a deaf-mute who, prior to education, had 

 evolved for himself any form of supernaturalism. And this, 

 I think, is remarkable, not only because we might fairly 

 suppose that some rude form of fetishism, or ghost-worship, 

 would not be too abstract a system for the unaided mind of 

 a civilized man to elaborate ; but also because the mind in 

 this case is not wholly unaided. On the contrary, the friends 

 of the deaf-mute usually do their utmost to communicate to 

 his mind some idea of whatever form of religion they may 

 happen to possess. Yet it is uniformly found that, in the 

 absence of language, no idea of this kind can be communi- 

 cated. For instance, the Rev. S. Smith tells me that one of 

 his pupils, previous to education, supposed the Bible to have 

 been printed by a printing-press in the sky, which was worked 

 by printers of enormous strength — this being the only inter- 

 pretation the deaf-mute could assign to the gestures whereby 

 his parents had sought to make him understand, that they 

 believed the Bible to contain a revelation from a God of 

 power who lives in heaven. Similarly, Mr. Graham Bell 

 informs me of another, though similar case, in which the deaf- 

 mute supposed the object of going to church to be that of 

 doing obeisance to the clergy." 



To the same effect Mr. Tylor says, in the passage already 

 quoted, that deaf-mutes cannot form ideas of any save the 

 lowest degree of abstraction, and further on he gives some 

 interesting illustrations of the fact. Thus, for instance, a deaf- 

 mute who had been educated said that before his instruction 



