MCGEE] FEAR IN PRIMITIVE LIFE 843 
tending to develop into algorithmic processes; and that the mechanical 
arrangements employed to represent the numerical combinations 
tended to develop into geometric forms and symbols—the several proc- 
esses being characterized by the method of reckoning from an ill- 
defined unity counted but once in each combination. 
GERMS OF THE NUMBER-CONCEPT 
The course of intellectual development defined by the three pre- 
scriptorial number-systems (2-3, 4-5, 6-7) naturally leads interest 
toward the inception of the number idea among lower men—some- 
thing which must always remain obscure, save as illumined by analo- 
gies with lowest men and higher animals. Now, the more intelligent 
fera! animals and the lowest known savages are fairly comparable in 
their capacity for counting; they are also alike in another respect of 
such consequence as to shape the character of both—their lives (as 
Ernest Seton-Thompson so well shows for the animals) are lived in the 
shadow of tragedies unto often early and always tragic death. This 
great fact of inevitable tragedy overlays all other facts woven in the 
web of nascent mind; the most firmly fixed habit of lowly life is that 
of eternal vigilance; the everpresent thought is that of ever-present 
danger; the dominant motive is that of mortal fear. 
No line of intellectual development can be fairly traced without full 
recognition of the ceaseless terrors of feral life; and the primeval 
interpretations of environment by animals and men alike manifestly 
reflect their tragic experiences: The fear-born cunning of the fox 
engenders that care for a way of escape without which he ventures on 
no advance; his every intuition is molded by living realization of a 
two-side universe—the danger side in yan, the safety side in rear— 
with self as the all-important center; and only religious adherence to 
experience-shaped instincts enables him to survive and permits his 
tribe to increase. The ‘sagacious crow, even in semidomestication, 
constantly betrays his notion of a two-side cosmos in frequent back- 
ward lances as he surveys the novel or forbidden field in front; and 
he is an arrant mystic, crazed with abject terror by night, replete with 
flippant joy by day, and given to the formless fetishism of hoarding 
uncanny things in well-hidden shrines.‘. In like manner nearly all 
animals, from the fiercest carnivores to the timidest herbivores, mani- 
fest constant realization of three overshadowing factors in nature as 
they know it—factors expressed by Danger, Safety, Self, i. e., by 
Death and Life to Self, or in general terms, the evil of the largely 
unknown and the good of the fully known coordinated in the vaguely 
defined subject of the badness and the goodness; and the chief social 
activities of animal mates and parents are exercised in gathering their 


1Wild Animals I have Known, by Ernest Seton-Thompson, 1898, pp. 72. 83. 
