148 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



civilization from which only a descent was possible. Man- 

 kind thus tends naturally to believe that great attainment, 

 even if fabulous peace has passed away, is their own work, 

 and the work of their immediate ancestors. It follows 

 that there is a natural prejudice against admitting that, in 

 all human powers and attributes of brain, man's remote 

 ancestors were his equals, even though they lacked his 

 present knowledge. To get rid of such predispositions is 

 part of the task of science, if it would solve the problem as 

 to the factors which were at work at the time of man's 

 greatest cranial plasticity. 



While it is not difficult to believe that Mousterian man 

 possessed an average cerebral capacity more than equal to 

 that found now, some find it hard to credit such brains 

 with imagination and powers of logical thought. Yet Fraser 

 has shown that many who are called the lowest savages 

 reason with perfect logic, even if they argue from un- 

 examined and illicit premisses. It ill befits the average 

 man of the present day to cast a stone at them, since 

 the subjection of his own major premisses to critical 

 examination invariably causes him much uneasiness. 

 Even the greatest are at times subject to the same 

 weakness. Ancient man was always reasoning and, 

 sincepure logic has nothing to do with the truth or false- 

 hood of propositions, but only with their agreement, there 

 is no reason to suppose that a school logic of merit might 

 not have been composed from a study of the ratio- 

 cinative processes of the earliest modern type of brain 

 known to us. We may, indeed, analyse further, and in 

 so doing discover that logic is to be found in even lower 

 human types, or in the animals themselves. A cat who 

 smells a mouse, and takes means to catch it, is using 

 direct inference. Moreover, in considering the evolution 



