Primitivism

“ As soon as we become conscious of an association between a habit and a certain group of ideas, we are led to explain the habit by its present associations, which probably differ from the associations prevailing at the time when the habit was established.
We will now turn to a consideration of analogous phenomena in primitive life. Here the dislike of that which deviates from the custom of the land is even more strongly marked than in our civilization. If it is not the custom to sleep in a house with feet turned towards the fire, a violation of this custom is dreaded and avoided. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Thus an important change from primitive culture to civilization seems to consist in the gradual elimination of what might be called the social associations of sense-impressions and of activities, for which intellectual associations are gradually substituted. This process is accompanied by a loss of conservatism, which, however, does not extend over the field of habitual activities that do not come into consciousness, and only to a slight extent over those generalizations which are the foundation of all knowledge imparted in the course of education. ”

“ Cultures Indicate the Mental Development of the Race.—As the art and industry to-day represent the mental processes of man, so did these primitive cultures show the inventive skill and adaptive power in the beginnings of progress. Perhaps instinct, emotion, and necessity figured more conspicuously in the early period than reflective thought, while in modern times we have more design and more planning, both in invention and construction. Also the primitive social order was more an unconscious development, and lacked purpose and directing power in comparison with present life. ”

“ The same phenomenon which led us to the conclusion that primitive races of our times are not given an opportunity to develop their abilities, prevents us from judging their innate faculty.
It seems advantageous to direct our attention first of all to this difficulty. If it can be shown that certain mental traits are common to all members of mankind that are on a primitive stage of civilization, no matter what their racial affinities may be, the conclusion will gain much in strength, that these traits are primarily social, or based on physical characteristics due to social environment. ”

“ Ages before the time which the limitations of our knowledge force us to speak of as the dawn of history, man had reached a high stage of development. As a social being, he had developed all the elements of a primitive civilization. If, for convenience of classification, we speak of his state as savage, or barbaric, we use terms which, after all, are relative, and which do not shut off our primitive ancestors from a tolerably close association with our own ideals. ”

“ But archaic ideas, drifted on into modern folk-lore and poetry, still bring to our view an apparent connexion between the primitive doctrine and the surviving custom.
As the social development of the world goes on, the weightiest thoughts and actions may dwindle to mere survival. Original meaning dies out gradually, each generation leaves fewer and fewer to bear it in mind, till it falls out of popular memory, and in after-days ethnography has to attempt, more or less successfully, to restore it by piecing 111together lines of isolated or forgotten facts. ”

“ And again, if we decide the question on the basis of any assumption against the non-primitive, we must, in all consistency, exclude, as has already been said, all higher ethical emotion and the love of art and science; none of these can be pronounced primitive. Possibly we might define hunger, thirst, sexual appetite, and the desire for a comfortable degree of warmth, as the most primitive human needs; and these, indeed, are soon satisfied; but the man who has no needs beyond these can not represent the social ideal. ”

“ It is certain, on the contrary, that far-reaching changes in all directions have taken place among primitive races, so that we can never unhesitatingly decide which of their present conditions and opinions have preserved the original past, having remained petrified, as it were, and which represent a distortion and change of the original. It is due to this that one meets the many disputes among authors as to what proportion of the peculiarities of a primitive culture is to be taken as a primary, and what as a later and secondary manifestation. ”

“ The chief difficulty encountered in the solution of this problem has been pointed out before. It is the uncertainty as to which of the characteristics of primitive man are causes of the low stage of culture, and which are caused by it; or which of the psychological characteristics 105are hereditary, and would not be wiped out by the effects of civilization. The fundamental difficulty of collecting satisfactory observations lies in the fact that no large groups of primitive man are brought nowadays into conditions of real equality with whites. ”

“ This is the reason why, in all stages of culture, customary actions are made the subject of secondary explanations that have nothing to do with their historical origin, but which are inferences based upon the general knowledge possessed by the people. 226I think the existence of such secondary interpretations of customary actions is one of the most important anthropological phenomena, and we have seen that it is hardly less common in our own society than in more primitive societies. It is a common observation that we desire or act first, and then try to justify our desires and our actions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And accordingly, in interpreting the long history of technological evolution, we take what we conceive ourselves now to be as normative and essential. We project back into the lives of primitive man, of our own racial ancestors, or of our grandfathers, the habits and requirements which we acknowledge in ourselves today and we conceive the men of the past to have been driven forward on the ways288 of progress by the identical discontent that would presumably beset ourselves if we were to be suddenly carried back to their scale and manner of existence. ”

“ Besides this, the tendency of human multiplication is such, that the most highly cultured families tend to disappear, while others which have been less subjected to the influences regulating the life of the most cultured class take their place. Therefore it is much less likely that advance is hereditary than that it is transmitted by means of education.
120In illustrating the improving effects of civilization through transmission, much weight is generally laid upon cases of relapse of individuals belonging to primitive races who have been educated. ”

“ Thus, the correspondence of the prehistoric with that which is to-day primitive indicates a high degree of permanence on the part of primitive culture. But, even apart from this consideration, it is apparent that we must really seek primitive man in the inhabited world of the present, since it is here alone that we can gain a relatively accurate knowledge of his characteristics. Our information concerning primitive man, therefore, must be derived from ethnology. We must not seek him under the earth, but on the earth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ After we have thus seen that a large number of traditional elements enter into the reasoning of primitive man and of civilized man as well, we are better prepared to understand some of the more special typical differences in the thought of primitive man and of civilized man.
A trait of primitive life that early attracted the attention of investigators is the occurrence of close associations between mental activities that appear to us as entirely disparate. In primitive life, religion and science ”

“ The essential result of this inquiry is the conclusion that the origin of customs of primitive man must not be looked for in rational processes. Most investigators who have tried to clear up the history of customs and taboos express the view that their origin lies in speculations on the relations between man and nature; that to primitive man the world is filled with agencies of superhuman power, which may harm man at the slightest provocation, and that attempts to avoid conflict with these powers dictate the innumerable superstitious regulations. ”

“ It must be understood that the knowledge of primitive man, as we are about to outline it, is inferential. We cannot trace the development of these principles, much less can we say who discovered them. Some of them, as already suggested, are man's heritage from non-human ancestors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This peculiarity of association is also another expression of the conservatism of primitive culture and the changeability of many features of our civilization. We tried to show that the resistance to change is largely due to emotional sources, and that in primitive culture emotional 240associations are the prevailing type: hence resistance against the new. In our civilization, on the other hand, many actions are performed merely as means to a rational end. ”

“ On the whole, such associations between groups of ideas apparently unrelated are rare in civilized life. That they once existed is shown by historical evidence as well as by survivals in which the old ideas have perished, although the outer form remains. In primitive culture these associations occur in great numbers. ”

“ If the higher social forms were potentially involved in the lower, and had grown out of them by the working of natural laws, then the first and most important step of the investigation must be into the nature, capacities, and limitations of the primitive man, and the character of the primitive elements of society which grew out of, and were determined by, the attributes of the primitive man. ”

“ The second source is the custom of primitive or uncivilized nations of recent times: this is comparative library science. The modern idea of evolution implies that these primitive peoples are simply cases of arrested or retarded development—they, having branched off from a common stock at an early stage of development or else having only slowly developed in parallel natural lines. Their customs therefore, it is alleged, truly represent early mankind when it was at a like stage of development. ”

“ Moreover, it should be particularly noticed that, in starting our discussion with primitive man, as we naturally must, the term 'primitive' is to be taken relatively, as representing the lowest grade of culture, particularly of mental culture. There is no specific ethnological characteristic that distinguishes this primitive stage from those that are more advanced; it is only by reference to a number of psychological traits, such as are indicative of the typically original, that we may determine that which is primitive. ”