Primitive thought

“ 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 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. ”

“ If, even to-day, we are continually discovering new species, which have hitherto escaped observation, let us reflect how many of them must have escaped men who judged things merely from their first appearance! It is superfluous to add that the primitive classes and the most general notions must necessarily have escaped their notice also. How, for instance, could they have understood or thought of the words matter, spirit, substance, mode, figure, motion, when even our philosophers, who have so long been making use of them, have themselves the greatest difficulty in understanding them ”

“ Everything appeared to him in an anthropomorphic form of thought; and thus the first primitive concepts regarding the world came into being, in which the stone, the mountain, the heavenly orbs, were viewed as animate anthropomorphic beings endowed with will-power, and willing to help man or threatening to endanger him. The observation of the activities of man’s own body and of his mind led to the formulation of the idea of a soul independent of the body; and with increasing knowledge and with increasing philosophic thought, religion and science grew out of these simple beginnings. ”

“ Until we can figure to ourselves with approximate truth the primitive system of thought, we cannot fully understand primitive conduct; and, rightly to conceive the primitive system of thought, we must compare the systems found in many societies, helping ourselves, by observing its developed forms, to verify our conclusions respecting its undeveloped form. ”

“ When we consider our problem from a purely psychological point of view, we have to follow out the same lines of thought which we pursued in our discussion of the anatomical problem. We must try to enumerate clearly the typical differences between the human mind and the animal mind, which must serve as the background of our discussions. In the treatment of the psychic differences between civilized man and primitive man, we must distinguish the two problems of differences in cultural state of members of the same race, and differences in characteristics of different races ”

“ If we may take the now established omnipotence of thought among primitive races as a proof of their narcism, we may venture to compare the various evolutionary stages of man’s conception of the universe with the stages of the libidinous evolution of the individual. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The instruction given to the child of primitive man is not based on centuries of experimentation, but consists of the crude experience of generations. When a new experience enters the mind of primitive man, the same process which we observe among civilized man brings about an entirely different series of associations, and therefore results in a different type of explanation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Is not this simply going back to that old anthropomorphism of primitive philosophy, according to which imagination was childishly led to conceive, behind any phenomenon inexplicable by ignorance, a will, a force, like that we are conscious of within ourselves? ”

“ 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. ”

“ This, no occasional or hypothetical action of the mind, is inextricably bound in with that primitive mental state where man recognizes in every detail of his world the operation of personal life and will. ”

“ 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. ”

“ DON'T you think the primitive is just simply too fascinating for anything? We've all got it in us, you know, and it seems like nowadays the more cultured and advanced one is the more likely the primitive is to break out on one. ”

“ The primitive does indeed put something of historical record and something of his best interpretation of mysterious natural phenomena into his legendary lore, but there is something else, we are led to believe, that takes precedence over all other considerations in the mind of the primitive (as well as in the minds of all of the rest of us) and that is getting on in the world, a pragmatic outlook. ”

“ From his instinctive sympathy with nature, he often credits vegetable organism with “instinctive judgment.” “Observation teaches us that a tree is given powerful instincts, which would almost appear to amount to judgment in some cases, to provide for its own wants and necessities.”
Here our study must cease. When the primitive man comes into literature, he is no longer primitive. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hence the primitive man has little experience which cultivates the consciousness of what we call truth. How closely allied this it to the consciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is implied even in language. ”

“ Did we not thoughtlessly accept as innate the conceptions slowly elaborated during civilization and acquired insensibly during our early days, we should at once see that these ideas which the primitive man forms are inevitably formed. The laws of mental association necessitate these primitive notions of transmutation, of metamorphosis, of duality ”

“ To explain in early periods is to fancy and to take a fancy for a perception. The world of the primitive man is constructed not only from vague conjectures and hasty analogies but from his hopes and fears, and bears the impress of his emotional nature. ”

“ The sources to which scientific men have gone in their attempts to reconstruct that primitive mentality are very various. Recently the science of psycho-analysis, which analyzes the way in which the egotistic and passionate impulses of the child are restrained, suppressed, modified or overlaid, to adapt them to the needs of social life, seems to have thrown a considerable amount of light upon the history of primitive society ”

“ The toys with which he plays, or the objects of every sort which affect his senses, he regards as living beings like himself. Now the primitive thinks like a child. Consequently, he also is inclined to endow all things, even inanimate ones, with a nature analogous to his own. ”

“ If you can imagine how vast and mysterious the world of nature looked to primitive man and how he felt about all moving things, animals, clouds, winds, flowing water, swaying trees, and creeping vines, you can understand how he came to believe that there were spirits dwelling in such things and that these indwelling spirits had power to work him good or evil. ”

“ The case becomes stronger and at the same time changes its aspect, when traits favored by primitive human life are brought into operation to account for the vast medley of impulses and feelings which in great part we have shared and then outgrown. ”

“ But there may be found lurking in its depths many truths as yet undiscovered by science. Perhaps the dreams of primitive man may suggest to the present-day scientist new possibilities.—What primitive man has done in fancy present-day man can do in reality. ”

“ The belief that they persist is, in all men except a few philosophers, logically primitive, but it is not psychologically primitive; psychologically, it arises only through our having seen those tables and chairs, trees and mountains. ”

“ 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 ”

“ As a fantastic but still natural product of the primitive mind, there may thus appear the idea of an invisible connection, which binds together all things similar and draws them to each other. Vaguely and dimly even savages may have been able to anticipate in some measure those imposing thoughts which received an organised and consistent statement in the doctrine of universal ideas. But to primitive man these “ideas” must appear as concrete objects and beings, exercising their influence on phenomena in a quite material manner. ”

“ Only by abstraction and by the investiture of our abstractions with a life of their own do we arrive at a theory of thought, feeling, and will, as separate entities, or parts; in the mental process itself, they are indissolubly united.
We have seen that thought acquires new directions with the evolution of the individual, that pleasure and pain attach themselves to new objects, and that will is directed to new ends. ”

“ Nevertheless, we must here do our best to conceive the surrounding world as it appeared to the primitive man, that we may be able the better to interpret deductively the evidence available for induction. And, though we are incapable of reaching the conception by a direct process, we may make some approach to it by an indirect process. Guided by the doctrine of evolution in general, and by the more special doctrine of mental evolution, we may help ourselves to delineate primitive ideas in some of their leading traits. ”

“ The general analogies which we have indicated are such as one would have reason to expect. The history of both the healthy and unhealthy mental evolution of the race is in many respects the history of the individual; in order to understand these analogies it is necessary to understand the mental development of primitive man. Recent studies have given us much valuable information in this direction. In primitive usages we find the expression of early man’s deepest longings and desires, and so a dynamic interpretation of such motives is possible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For myself, I am perfectly satisfied that, being part of the history of primitive people, it would be foolish to ignore them from an evolutionary point of view, which constitutes their chief importance ”

“ Again, by tracing the gradual genesis of some of those ideas which we now accept as "self-evident"—such, for example, as that of the "Uniformity of Nature"—we are able to recognize them as the expressions of certain intellectual tendencies, which have progressively augmented in force in successive generations, and now manifest themselves as mental instincts that penetrate and direct our ordinary course of thought. ”

“ They are doctrines answering in the most forcible way to the plain evidence of men’s senses, as interpreted by a fairly consistent and rational primitive philosophy. So well, indeed, does primitive animism account for the facts of nature, that it has held its place into the higher levels of education. Though classic and mediæval philosophy modified it much, and modern philosophy has handled it yet more unsparingly, it has so far retained the traces of its original character, that heirlooms of primitive ages may be claimed in the existing psychology of the civilized world. ”

“ Here is a great principle, which gains weighty confirmation from the fact that precocious dements reproduce forms and figures which present the closest analogy to those of primitive humanity, not only in their thoughts but also in their drawings. ”