1 6 NATURE STUDIES. 



races in low stages of culture, and, generally, it may- 

 be said that the modern savage is, as the primitive 

 savage was, in a state of " fog " concerning the nature 

 and relation of what is in the mind to what is outside 

 it. In this he may perchance command the sympathy 

 of the modern philosopher, there being this important 

 difference between the two, that while the philosopher 

 speculates upon the nature of the connexion between 

 his mind and the external world, and confesses that 

 "his knowledge of matter is restricted to those 

 feelings of which he assumes it to be the cause/' the 

 savage has no capacity for such , thought at all. He 

 has nothing in his slender stock of words corre- 

 sponding to the terms " objective " and " subjective ; " 

 that stock has 110 substantive verb " to be " as, 

 indeed, few of the languages of the world have ever 

 had. He cannot distinguish between an idea and an 

 object, an illusion and a reality, a substance and its 

 image or shadow ; and under bodily ailment, indiges- 

 tion born of gorging, or delirium caused by starving, 

 gives shape and substance, a " local habitation and a 

 name/' to "airy nothings/' spectres of diseased or 

 morbid imagination. Misled by superficial resem- 

 blances, he jumps at the most absurd conclusions ; 

 ignorant of the necessary relation between cause and 

 effect, he is " carried about with every wind of " 

 fancy ; nor has he the capacity, which is the measure 

 of intellectual growth, to strip the special of its 

 accidents, and sink it in the general. 



For example, he gives a different name to the tails 



