284 
other facts taken from the grammars of 
primitive people, which will make it clear 
that all grammar presupposes abstractions. 
The three personal pronouns—I, thou, and 
he—occur in all human languages. The 
underlying idea .of these pronouns is the 
clear distinction between the self as speaker, 
the person or object spoken to, and 
that spoken of. We also find that nouns 
are classified in a great many ways in dif- 
ferent languages. While all the older 
Indo-Huropean languages classify nouns 
according to sex, other languages classify 
nouns as animate or inanimate, or as 
human and not human, ete. Activities 
are also classified in many different ways. 
It is at once clear that every classification 
of this kind involves the formation of an 
abstract idea. The processes of abstrac- 
tion are the same in all languages, and they 
do not need any further discussion, except 
in so far as we may be inclined to value 
differently the systems of classification and 
the results of abstraction. 
The question whether the power to in- 
hibit impulses is the same in all races of 
man is not so easily answered. It is an 
impression obtained by many travelers, 
and also based upon experiences gained in 
our own country, that primitive man and 
the less educated have in common a lack 
of control of emotions, that they give way 
more readily to an impulse than civilized 
man and the highly educated. I believe 
that this conception is based largely upon 
the neglect to consider the occasions on 
which a strong control of impulses is de- 
manded in various forms of society. What 
I mean will become clear when [ call your 
attention to the often described power of 
endurance exhibited by Indian captives 
who undergo torture at the hands of their 
enemies. When we want to gain a true 
estimate of the power of primitive man to 
control impulses, we must not compare 
the control required on certain occasions 
SCIENCE. 
[N.S. Vou. XIII. No. 321. 
among ourselves with the control exerted 
by primitive man on the same occasions. 
If, for instance, our social etiquette forbids 
the expression of feelings of personal dis- 
comfort and of anxiety, we must remember 
that personal etiquette among _ primi- 
tive man may not require any inhibition of 
the same kind. We must rather look for 
those occasions on which inhibition is re- 
quired by the customs of primitive man. 
Such are, for instance, the numerous cases 
of taboo, that is, of prohibitions of the use 
of certain foods, or of the performance of 
certain kinds of work, which sometimes re- 
quire a considerable amount of self-control. 
When an Hskimo community is on the 
point of starvation, and their religious 
proscriptions forbid them to make use of 
the seals that are basking on the ice, the 
amount of self-control of the whole com- 
munity, which restrains them from killing 
these seals, is certainly very great. Cases 
of this kind are very numerous, and prove 
that primitive man has the ability to con- 
trol his impulses, but that this control is 
exerted on occasions which depend upon 
the character of the social life of the peo- 
ple, and which do not coincide with the 
occasions on which we expect and require 
control of impulses. 
The third point in which the mind of 
primitive man seems to differ from that of 
civilized man is in its power of choosing be- 
tween perceptions and actions according to 
their value. On this power rests the whole 
domain of art and of ethics. An object or 
an action becomes of artistic value only 
when it is chosen from among other percep- 
tions or other actions on account of its 
beauty. An action becomes moral only 
when it is chosen from among other pos- 
sible actions on account of its ethical value. 
No matter how crude the standards of prim- 
“itive man may be in regard to these two 
points, we recognize that all of them pos- 
sess an art, and that all of them possess 
