MCGEE] PRIMITIVE EGOISM 831 
their groups into centers about which all other things revolve accord- 
ing to the caprice of their all-potent mysteries; they act and think in 
terms of a dominant personality, always reducible to the Ego, and an 
Ego drawn so large as to stand for person, place, time, mode of action, 
and perhaps for raison d’étre—it is Self, Here, Now, Thus, and 
Because. Science shows that the solar system hurtles through space, 
presumably about an unknown center; it showed before that the sun 
is the center of our system; but the heliocentric system was expanded 
out of an antecedent geocentric system, itself the offspring of a demo- 
centric system, which sprang from an earlier ethnocentric system born 
of the primeval egocentric cosmos of inchoate thinking. In higher 
culture the recognized cosmos lies in the background of thought, at 
least among the great majority, but in primitive culture the egocen- 
tric and ethnocentric views are ever-present and always-dominant 
factors of both mentation and action. 
The prominence of self-centred thinking in lowly life is exemplified 
by kinship organization, the universal basis of primitive society. In 
the lowest of the great culture stages, the recognized kinship is 
maternal, and in the next higher (but still prescriptorial) stage it is 
nominally paternal, though increasingly modified by adoption and 
other conventional devices; yet the organization is maintained by 
bonds and interrelations which can not better be illustrated than by 
analogy with the planetary assemblage: Each individual rotates inde- 
pendently, may be attended by satellites, and revolves primarily about 
the head of the family yet ultimately about the patriarch of the group, 
and each exerts a definite attractional influence (albeit proportional to 
individuality —or perhaps intellectuality—rather than mass) on all his 
associates. The relative social positions are expressed and kept in 
mind by habitual conduct and form of speech; each member of a fam- 
ily, each family of a clan, and each clan of a tribe has a fixed place in 
the group to which he or she is kept by thon’s own memory and con- 
strained by the consensus of associates; and among most primitive 
peoples no individual can speak to or of a companion without refer- 
ence to the currently accepted view of his circumscribed cosmos—a 
man can not say ‘* brother,” but must say ‘*my elder brother,” or use 
some other term implying the relative position of several individuals 
to himself, and among each other as reckoned through himself; and in 
many tribes the terms of relationship used by women differ from those 
employed by men. 
The ever-present view of a self-centered cosmos finds expression 
throughout primitive language, as well as in the lowly faith with 
which it is bound up and in the social organization by which it is 
maintained. Primitive speech is essentially associative, abounding in 
numbers and genders, persons and cases, moods and tenses, in a complex 
structure reflecting the egocentric habit of thought. This structure 
