VIII
By way of conclusion it may be helpful to consider certain general truths in the field of anthropology and mental evolution, upon which the illustrations we have been considering have a bearing. We have seen what a widely extended genus the analogical argument compasses; and yet, if we were to include under this head certain closely allied and yet distinguishable forms of thought, it would be much wider still. I refer particularly to the use of metaphor and symbolism, which, like the children's make-believe with their dolls or fairies, is none the less on the boundary line between the real and the fictitious. Myth equally readily passes from the unconscious to the conscious stage, and much of what is plausibly interpreted as an argument by analogy, seems equally well an intentional use of symbolism and myth. That savages, at least in all but the lower stages, appreciate the use of myth is beyond all doubt. Primitive ceremonials, as also primitive explanations of the changes of nature, are full of symbolisms, which involve the same mental habit, whose products in the domain of analogy have been portrayed. This mythological instinct, Mr. Tylor well says, "belongs to that great doctrine of analogy from which we have gained so much of our apprehension of the world around us. Distrusted as it now is by severer science for its misleading results, analogy is to us still a chief means of discovery and illustration, while in earlier grades of education its influence was all but paramount. Analogies which are but fancies to us were to men of past ages reality. They could see the flame licking its yet undevoured prey with tongues of fire, or the serpent gliding along the sword from hilt to point; they could see a live creature gnawing within their bodies in the pangs of hunger; they heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs answering in the echo, and the chariot of the heaven god rattling in thunder over the solid firmament. Men to whom these were living thoughts had no need of the schoolmaster and his rules of composition, his injunctions to use metaphor cautiously and to take care to make all similes consistent."
The principle that what was once the serious occupation of men becomes in more advanced stages of culture the play of children, or is reduced from seriousness to mere amusement, finds illustrations in the mental as in the material world. The drum, once the serious terrifying instrument of the savage warrior, and the rattle, once the powerful emblem of the medicine man, have become the common toys of children. The bow and arrow are used for skill and sport only. In a similar way the formidable and trusted argument by analogy finds its proper field in riddles and puns. When we put the question, "Why is this object like the other?" we understand that some out-of-the-way and accidental resemblance is asked for, some not very close analogy, that provokes amusement but not belief; in many cases the resemblance is in the name only and degenerates into a pun. In such exercises of fancy we are employing the same faculties that our ancestors used in arriving at the customs and beliefs that we have been considering. The laws governing the progress of industrial arts, of mechanical inventions and social institutions seem thus to find equally ready application to the evolution of habits and customs in the mental world.
From another, and that also a comparative anthropological point of view, the natural history of analogy illustrates, though imperfectly, the evolutionary bond that unites the development of the race from primitive culture to civilization, from infantile helplessness to adult power, and again the dissolution of these processes in disease or their atavistic retention in less progressive strata of society. Significant, even though sporadic, parallelisms have been pointed out in the use of analogy by savages and by children; and far more completely can it be shown that superstitions and pseudo-sciences, folk-lore traditions and popular beliefs show the survival of these same analogical habits of mind, which may be viewed in part as reversions to outgrown conditions of thought, in part as the cropping out, in pathological form, of retarding tendencies which the course of evolution may have repressed but not wholly destroyed. For there is hardly a form of modern superstition, there is hardly a custom sanctioned by the unwritten tradition of the people, but what can be closely duplicated among the customs and beliefs of the untutored savage.
All this impresses us with the enduring qualities of man's barbaric past, the permanent though latent effect of his complete adaptation for thousands of years to a low intellectual environment. "The intrusion of the scientific method," Mr. Clodd aptly comments, "in its application to man's whole nature, disturbed that equilibrium. But this, as yet, only within the narrow area of the highest culture." The earlier and more fundamental psychological factor of humanity is feeling and not thought, or more accurately an incipient rationality, thoroughly suffused with emotional motives; and primitive analogies proceed by a feeling of analogical fitness, and not by an intellectual justification. "The exercise of feeling has been active from the beginning of his history, while thought, speaking comparatively, has but recently had free play.... Man wondered long chiliads before he reasoned, because feeling travels along the line of least resistance, while thought, or the challenge by inquiry, with its assumption that there may be two sides to a question, must pursue a path obstructed by the dominance of taboo and custom, by the force of imitation, and by the strength of prejudice, passion, and fear."
The survey of the argument by analogy brings home the conviction that there are forms of mental action, psychological tendencies or thought-habits, characteristic of undeveloped stages of human mentality; that these appear in versatile and instructive variety; and, more important still, that they furnish glimpses of the workings of a great progressive law, visible in the shifting of importance attached to the argument by analogy, and in its gradual subordination to, and ultimate retirement in favor of the sturdy principles of inductive logic. We are thus led to appreciate the means by which error is converted into truth, the slow and painful steps by which the logic of the sciences is unfolded and mastered. When Lord Chesterfield relates that the people expected a fatal issue of the king's illness, because the oldest lion in the tower, of about the same age as the king, had just died, he cannot help commenting upon the wildness and caprice of the human mind; but Mr. Tylor more judiciously remarks, "Indeed the thought was neither wild nor capricious; it was simply such an argument by analogy as the educated world has at length painfully learned to be worthless, but which it is not too much to declare would to this day carry considerable weight to the minds of four-fifths of the human race." Analogy has doubtless lost the prestige of olden time; but the remains of effete and misleading forms of thought, upheld by a feeling of their analogical plausibility, continue to survive, and may at any time, when cloaked in a modern garb, regain their former efficiency, and feed the contagion of some new fad or pseudo-science; while superstition, like poverty, we shall always have with us, so long as there are social and intellectual distinctions amongst men. In the light of the natural history survey of analogy, these phenomena appear in their true significance, testifying at once to the inherent progress, despite reversions, and to the underlying unity of constitution and purpose, through which these phenomena acquire their deeper and more human interest.