Primitive man

“ The difference in the mode of thought of primitive man and that of civilized man seems to consist largely in the difference of character of the traditional material with which the new perception associates itself. ”

“ If all these were necessary, then there was no civilization prior to the 20th century. Prof. J. Arthur Thompson, of Aberdeen, an evolutionist, says: “Modern research is leading us away from the picture of primitive man as brutish, dull, lascivious and bellicose. There is more justification for regarding primitive man as clever, kindly, adventurous and inventive.” ”

“ I suppose the primitive man is one who owes more to nature than to the forces of civilization. What we seek in him are the primal and original traits, unmixed with the sophistications of society, and unimpaired by the refinements of an artificial culture. He would retain the primitive instincts, which are cultivated out of the ordinary, commonplace man. I should expect to find him, by reason of an unrelinquished kinship, enjoying a special communion with nature, —admitted to its mysteries, understanding its moods, and able to predict its vagaries. ”

“ The writers seem to forget that primitive man began life, like ourselves, as babies. Moreover, primitive man in many respects resembled children. In fact, just as intra-uterine life is an epitome of our race’s evolution from the primitive monad to the first savage, our early years on earth may be supposed to resemble that of primitive man himself. ”

“ When you have emerged from your first world experience, you will begin to see why this long and painful struggle on the evolutionary worlds occurs, and as you go forward in the Paradise path, you will increasingly understand the wisdom of these apparently strange doings. But notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of the early ages of human emergence, the performances of primitive man represent a splendid, even a heroic, chapter in the annals of an evolutionary world of time and space. ”

“ Why, that is just like Primitive Man, and how unlike Us! It has taken a long time to transform Primitive Man into Us, but if we start soon enough we may eradicate the primitive things before they have done much harm. ”

“ I think these considerations illustrate that the differences between civilized man and primitive man are in many cases more apparent than real; that the social conditions, on account of their peculiar characteristics, easily convey the impression that the mind of primitive man acts in a way quite different from ours, while in reality the fundamental traits of the mind are the same. ”

“ The primitive man lives in a vastly different world, where all the forces about him are mysterious and uncontrollable, and where nature seems as wild, as romantic, and as unpredictable as his own changing moods. ”

“ Is it then surprising that primitive man should be able to draw inferences which to the stranger appear marvelous, from the merest specks in the far distance or from the faintest sounds, odors, or tracks in the jungle? Such behavior serves only to attest the extraordinary powers of observation in primitive man with respect to things which are of use and hence of interest to him. ”

“ It has only been during comparatively recent times that the importance of primitive beliefs and practices, from the standpoint of mental evolution, has been appreciated. Formerly, primitive man was regarded merely as a curiosity, and not as an individual from whom anything of any value whatever was to be learned. ”

“ We may express this general observation also by saying that primitive man views each action not only as adapted to its main object, each thought related to its main end, as we should perceive them, but that he associates them with other ideas, often of a religious or at least of a symbolic nature. Thus he gives them a higher significance than they seem to us to deserve. ”

“ We have seen that the traditional material with which man operates determines the particular type of explanatory idea that associates itself with the emotional state of mind. Primitive man generally bases these explanations of his customs on concepts that are intimately related to his general views of the constitution of the world. Some mythological idea may be considered the basis of a custom or of the avoidance of certain actions, or the custom may be given a symbolic significance, or it may merely be connected with the fear of ill luck. ”

“ The development of social life is quite otherwise. It would be foreign to our purpose to retrace its successive phases; let us confine ourselves to the question of origin. What was primitive man? On this point much has been written by way of argument and conjecture. ”

“ Therefore, if the process of mental evolution was interrupted between the anthropoid apes and primitive man during the pre-historic period of which we have no record, it must again have been resumed with primitive man, after which it must have continued as uninterruptedly in the human species as it previously did in the animal species. ”

“ We found them quite common in primitive life, and noticed the 250great variety of ideas and activities that were thus brought into contact so as to produce a number of peculiar concepts and activities. Other peculiar associations are not due to strong emotional causes, but to all of them is common the tendency of taking on rationalistic explanations of varied character. The change from primitive to civilized society includes a lessening of the number of the emotional associations, and an improvement of the traditional material that enters into our habitual mental operations. ”

“ It is an impression obtained by many travellers, and also based upon experiences gained in our own country, that primitive man of all races, and the less educated of our own race, 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. ”

“ To the mind of primitive man, only his own associations can be rational. Ours must appear to him just as heterogeneous as his to us, because the bond between the phenomena of the world, as it appears after the elimination of their emotional associations, which is being established with increasing knowledge, does not exist for him, while we can no longer feel the subjective associations that govern his mind. ”

“ Nor do the comparisons of the child with primitive man imply that he must pass through all the activities of savage races, but that the development of his faculties, the tendencies of his desires, the state of his ignorance, all illustrate the history of the development of the race. Primitive man may be understood by a study of the child, and, conversely, the child may be illustrated by primitive man. ”

“ Before the earliest developments of science, primitive man found himself, as a result of his imagination, in a state of domesticity in the world, analogous to that to which he had himself reduced certain animals ”

“ We have seen that primitive man read his surroundings in the light of his own consciousness. Everywhere he saw the evidence of will and anger, desire and caprice. The world was the theater of personal agents not so dissimilar to himself. ”

“ The primitive man could see that his own actions were prompted by desire and guided by intelligence, and he supposed the same to be the case with the sun and the wind, the frost and the lightning. All the forces of outward nature, so far as they came into visible contact with his life, he personified as great beings which were to be contended with or placated. ”

“ We know the contrast between modern man and primitive man, and we are convinced that in the past, at least, progress has been a reality. That degeneration may set in is an awful possibility—involution rather than evolution—but even if going back became for a time the rule, we cannot give up the hope that the race would recover itself and begin afresh to go forward. ”

“ It seems hardly necessary here to mention the analogy between these activities on the part of children and those of primitive man. There is perhaps not a single trait here mentioned that could not also be found among savages. The awakening of the sense of self in primitive man through long ages, is probably duplicated in a somewhat telescopic fashion by each child. ”

“ Therefore the fundamental difficulty for the rise of primitive people—namely, that an individual who has risen to the level of the higher civilization is still looked upon as belonging to an inferior race—did not prevail. ”

“ The feeling with which primitive man walks the earth must accordingly be, for the most part, apprehension; and what he meets, beyond the well-conned ways of his tribe and habitat, can be nothing but formidable spirits. ”

“ After we have thus found that the alleged specific differences between civilized and primitive man, so far as they are inferred from complex psychic responses, can be reduced to the same fundamental psychical forms, we have the right to decline as unprofitable a discussion of the hereditary mental traits of various branches of the white race. ”

“ From our point of view, the striking features of primitive culture are the great number of associations of entirely heterogeneous groups of phenomena, such as natural phenomena and individual emotion, social groupings and religious concepts, decorative art and symbolic interpretation. These tend to disappear with the approach to our present civilization, although a careful analysis reveals the persistence of many, and the tendency of each automatic action to establish its own associations according to the mental relations in which it regularly occurs. ”

“ With them primitive man was little removed from the brute beasts, devoid of knowledge, art, and language—a creature in a small degree above; and in a great degree below, the anthropoid apes, from whom it is claimed he has descended by evolution. Is there any proof of this primitive inferiority, or savagery, as opposed to civilization? ”

“ We saw that the oft-repeated claim that he has no power to inhibit impulses, no power of attention, no originality of thought, no power of clear reasoning, could not be maintained; and that all these faculties are common to primitive man and to civilized man, although they are excited on different occasions. This led us to a brief consideration of the question whether the hereditary mental faculty was improved by civilization, an opinion that did not seem plausible to us. ”

“ How did primitive man come by his ideas? When he saw the effects of a power, he could only make guesses at the cause; he could only speak of it by some such terms as he would use concerning a human agent. ”

“ We may recognize a difference in the degree of improvidence caused by the difference of social status, but not a specific difference between lower and higher types of man.
Related to the lack of power of inhibition is another trait which has been ascribed to primitive man of all races,—his inability of concentration when any demand is made upon the more complex faculties of the intellect. ”

“ From this fact, it may be gathered how mistaken the idea may be which looks upon primitive man, or the man of the stone epoch as a being essentially different from the men of the present day. The phrase fossil man, we must again repeat, should be expunged from the vocabulary of science; we should thus harmonise better with established facts, and should also do away with a misunderstanding which is highly detrimental to the investigations into the origin of man. ”

“ That all these concepts are not “original” in the sense of representing the ideation of really primitive man, is abundantly proved by two facts.
The first is that fully a third of the whole number might be dispensed with, and yet leave no important blank in the already limited resources of the list for the purposes either of communication or reflection. To yawn, to spew, to vomit, to sweat, and so on, are not forms of activity of any such [272] vital importance to the needs of a primitive community, as to demand priority of naming by any aboriginal framers of language. ”

“ Primitive man, when conversing with his fellow-man, is not in the habit of discussing abstract ideas. His interests centre around the occupations of his daily life; and where philosophic problems are touched upon, they appear either in relation to definite individuals or in the more 150or less anthropomorphic forms of religious beliefs. Discourses on qualities without connection with the object to which the qualities belong, or of activities or states disconnected from the idea of the actor or the subject being in a certain state, will hardly occur in primitive speech. ”

“ If primitive man reacted to the phenomena that stimulated his reflection with the formation of conceptions of the soul, and then transferred these to objects of the outer world, his attitude will be judged to be quite natural and in no way mysterious. ”