202 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



even in works which have appeared since the great masterpiece of Tylor 

 one seeks in vain for a first chapter even remotely resembling this by 

 Wundt. The twenty-five works most used, in general and in ancient 

 philosophy, show at best a vague tendency to trace the Ionian move- 

 ment to the Greek myths and the sayings of the sages. Most of them 

 begin with the definition of the subject and proceed from that to Thales. 

 There is no doubt that many teachers, since the publication of Tylor's 

 work, have been beginning their courses with some notes on anthropology 

 or ethnopsychology, and therefore this departure will be well received. 

 It seems most desirable that in so markedly psychogenetic an age every 

 textbook dealing with the development of philosophy should begin with 

 primitive culture. Wundt declares that for the province of primitive 

 psychology the work of Tylor (1873), as a first comprehensive collection 

 of the phenomena of the doctrine of the soul among various races, has 

 been epoch-making in the last degree. He speaks with enthusiasm of 

 Fraser's The Golden Bough (1900), and these works together with 

 Wundt's Volkerpsychologie and Sumner's Folkways make a good back- 

 ground for this first chapter of history. 



The subject is fascinating for its own sake, and for its bearing upon 

 psychology, and the science of religion. Recent works on this latter 

 subject show how profoundly the facts of animism have shaken the 

 ontological assumptions of the crude materialistic dogmatism of the 

 1 870's. The insistent repetition of the greatest of all the tr uths of psychic 

 origins, namely, that the world was beseelt, that the water Thales wrote of 

 was not H 2 at all, but the same that gleams in trout pools for small 

 boys, has gone far to shake the alleged view of common-sense, that is, 

 modern common-sense, that "chalk is chalk and cheese is cheese." 

 When every textbook in the history of philosophy begins with a chapter 

 of this kind we shall be on the highway to a more hopeful conclusion. 



Wundt of course anticipates the objections of students, who will 

 argue that in this chapter he steps over the border of philosophy into the 

 dim and mysterious forest of the early myths. But like most of his 

 readers he is probably not discomposed by this. If he promotes a truer 

 and deeper view of the real development of the subject, Americans at 

 least will not quarrel with him over the arbitrary definitions of words. 



