THE VALUE OF LIFE 



been made in the recently acquired German colonies; 

 these would have been avoided if we had had a better 

 knowledge of the low psychic life of the natives {cf. the 

 writings of Gobineau and Lubbock). 



The grave errors that have been maintained in 

 psychology for centuries are mostly due to a neglect of 

 the comparative and genetic methods and the narrow 

 employment of self-observation, or the introspective 

 method ; they are also partly due to the fact that meta- 

 physicians generally make their own highly developed 

 mind — a scientifically trained reason — the starting- 

 point of their inquiry, and regard this as representative 

 of the human mind in general, and thus build up their 

 ideal scheme. The gulf between this thoughtful mind 

 of civilized man and the thoughtless animal soul of 

 the savage is enormous — greater than the gulf that 

 separates the latter from the soul of the dog. Kant 

 would have avoided many of the defects of his critical 

 philosophy, and would not have formulated some of his 

 powerful dogmas (such as the immortality of the soul, or 

 the categorical imperative) if he had made a thorough 

 and comparative study of the lower soul of the savage, 

 and phylogenetically deduced the soul of civilized man 

 therefrom. 



The extreme importance of this comparison has only 

 been fully appreciated of late years (by Lubbock, 

 Romanes, etc.). Fritz Schultze (of Dresden) made the 

 first valuable attempt in his interesting Psychology of the 

 Savage (1900) to give us an "evolutionary psychological 

 description of the savage in respect of intelligence, 

 aesthetics, ethics, and religion." At the same time, he 

 gives us " a history of the natural creation of the human 

 imagination, will, and faith." The first book of this 

 important work deals with thought, the second with will, 

 and the third with the religious ideas of the savage, or 

 "the story of the natural evolution of religion " (fetichism, 



391 



