A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



" innate " ideas of his mentality. It is quite inconceiv- 

 able, for example, that even the most rudimentary 

 intelligence that could be called human could fail to 

 discriminate between living things and, let us say, 

 the rocks of the earth. The most primitive intelli- 

 gence, then, must have made a tacit classification of 

 the natural objects about it into the grand divisions 

 of animate and inanimate nature. Doubtless the nas- 

 cent scientist may have imagined life animating many 

 bodies that we should call inanimate such as the sun, 

 wandering planets, the winds, and lightning; and, on 

 the other hand, he may quite likely have relegated 

 such objects as trees to the ranks of the non-living ; but 

 that he recognized a fundamental distinction between, 

 let us say, a wolf and a granite bowlder we cannot well 

 doubt. A step beyond this a step, however, that 

 may have required centuries or millenniums in the 

 taking must have carried man to a plane of intelli- 

 gence from which a primitive Aristotle or Linnaeus was 

 enabled to note differences and resemblances connoting 

 such groups of things as fishes, birds, and furry beasts. 

 This conception, to be sure, is an abstraction of a rela- 

 tively high order. We know that there are savage 

 races to - day whose language contains no word for 

 such an abstraction as bird or tree. We are bound to 

 believe, then, that there were long ages of human 

 progress during which the highest man had attained 

 no such stage of abstraction; but, on the other hand, 

 it is equally little in question that this degree of mental 

 development had been attained long before the opening 

 of our historical period. The primeval man, then, 

 whose scientific knowledge we are attempting to predi- 



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