(a) The process of imagination itself, the memory and the picture-thinking of savages, seems to be more vivid, sensuous, stable, more like perception than our own normally is. “The Australians,” says Spencer and Gillen, “have the most wonderful imagination.”[90] They often die of it; and so do Hindoo peasants, Maories, Fijians, Negroes and others, if they know they have been cursed or have broken a taboo. With the Melanesians, says Dr. Coddrington, thinking is like seeing;[91] and Dr. Rivers has confirmed this statement. Hence there is a tendency to accept imaginations as perceptions are accepted; and to believe in the efficacy of rites, because the mere performing of them with an imagined purpose makes their purpose seem to be accomplished. When a man of intense and excited imagination makes an image of an enemy, and stabs it, that his enemy may suffer, his action gratifies the impulse to stab, as if he wounded the enemy himself, and revenge seems to be a present fact. Similar intensity of imagination is found in civilised children—greater than in ordinary adults. Savages, again, seem to dream more vividly and convincingly than is usual amongst ourselves, and are said to be more liable to hallucinations. Physiological conditions of the immature brain (childish or savage), in which excitement does not rapidly spread through many associated neurones, may be the basis of the vividness of imagination, dreaming and hallucination.
(b) But more important than any intensity of picture-thinking to the growth and persistence of imagination-beliefs, is the want of a mental standard, by which they might be discredited. It is true that even at a low level of culture individuals are found for whom common sense constitutes a private standard, and who are sceptics in relation to their tribal beliefs.[92] But such a private standard cannot be communicated, and for the great majority of the tribesmen common sense is no confident guide; and perhaps they are even incapable of effectively comparing their ideas. At any rate, one reason why we believe our memories and not our imaginations is that, whilst in both cases the images (or elements of images) entering into them are derived from experience, in memory the relations of images in place, time and context are also derived directly from experience; whereas in imagination images (or their elements) are reconstructed in relations in which they have never been experienced, by analogies of experience (often distorted) or by condensations the most capricious. Therefore, to make imaginations credible to us, even in play, the relations of experience must be faithfully imitated, as (e. g.) in Robinson Crusoe; or else our emotions must be so strongly excited as to possess our minds with the fiction to the exclusion of all criticism. But with immature minds observation of fact, outside the practical, repetitive, necessary course of life, is not exact and coherent; and, accordingly, their memories are not coherent, especially as to time-relations; so that, by comparison with such memories, irregular imaginations suffer little. There is not enough orderly memory or general knowledge to discredit even absurd imaginations; for so far as observation and memory are disorderly, generalisation, conscious or unconscious, is impossible. Hence not only traditionary myths may be monstrous and arbitrary, but occasional tales of private invention, amongst both children and savages, usually exhibit disconnected transitions and impossible happenings. Yet they satisfy the immature mind.
(c) There are certain other conditions of the immature mind that hinder the comparison of ideas and, therefore, the criticism of beliefs. About every imperative need, such as success in hunting, with its desires and anxieties, rites and ceremonies grow up to gratify imaginatively the desires and relieve the anxieties; and ideas of these observances form relatively isolated systems. To us these ideas usually seem absurd and irrelevant when compared with the savage’s own experiences and his other practices. We see a hunter, for example, endeavour to gain his ends by two distinct series of actions. In one he fasts, enchants his weapons, casts spells upon his expected prey; in the other he carefully prepares his weapons, patiently tracks his prey, warily approaches and slays it. The latter series we approve and appreciate as causation; the former we ridicule as hocus-pocus, contributing objectively nothing to the event (though probably it increases his confidence); and we pity “the heathen in his blindness.” And, indeed, he may be said to be mind-blind; for in observing the rites, his attention is so occupied by means and end, and caught in the circuit in which these ideas revolve, and he is so earnest in carrying out the prescribed actions, that he cannot compare them with the really effective actions, so as to discover their absurdity and irrelevancy. In short, a state of mental dissociation is established for the system of magical ideas. So far does illusion go that he seems to regard the rites as the most important part of his proceedings. But that is not really his deepest conviction: he trusts in Magic and keeps his bowstring dry.
(d) In the case of children we may assume, and in the more backward races of men we may suspect, that the comparison of judgments is difficult, or sometimes even impossible, because of the imperfect development of the cerebral cortex. There must be some structural conditions of the free flow of energy through all organs of the brain, corresponding with the associability and comparability of all ideas. We may doubt if these conditions are complete even in good cultivated minds; since everybody finds one or another study or art especially difficult for him, or the freeing of himself from this or that sort of prejudice especially repugnant. And it is not only deliberate comparison that is hindered in the immaturity of the brain, but also that automatic process (more or less unconscious) of assimilation and discrimination to which (I think) we owe most of the results of abstraction and generalisation that may seem to have required purposive comparison. Such imperfections of structure, greatest at the lowest levels of organisation, and gradually decreasing as ideal rationality is approached, we may call “incoördination”; and, so far as it obtains, the results must be somewhat similar to the discoördination, the breaking down or interruption of organic efficiency, that occurs in hysteria, hypnosis and some forms of insanity. One of the results probably is suggestibility—the tendency to accept what is told, or insinuated, without examination; for freedom from this common liability depends (apart from the contra-suggestible disposition) upon the rapidity and definiteness with which one can compare that which is suggested with present fact or with one’s knowledge and former experience; and this is hindered by incoördination.
Effective incoördination may, however, be merely functional for want of practice in thinking; and it exists often enough in civilised people, because they have not even the desire to be consistent. In either case, whether from defective structure or from the dull inertia of disuse, there will be failure of comparison and, therefore, of criticism, and also (we may suppose) a greater intensity of imagination and of dreaming and a liability to hallucination, such as is said to be frequently the case with immature minds.
§ 6. The Reasoning of Immature Minds
We have seen that many beliefs result from inferences, and that inferences, when logically justifiable, may be considered as grounds (raising some degree of probability); but, when not justifiable, they are only causes of belief and their results are only imagination-beliefs. Since the general nature of reasoning is the same for Socrates and Sambo, we must inquire into the particular nature of the reasoning which leads immature minds into such bewildering mazes of error as we see (for example) in the world-wide prevalence of Magic and Animism.
On the inductive side of knowledge (the obtaining of premises) there is, of course, much imperfect observation and hasty generalisation; but, in spite of these faults, a savage learns by repeated experiences a great many narrow general truths about the physical world, plants, animals and his fellow-men, which constitute his stock of common sense and on the strength of which he lives as a very intelligent animal. We shall find from time to time errors of observation (such as the taking of a dream for reality) and of generalisation (such as the classing of worms with reptiles); but, strictly speaking, this is not reasoning: all reasoning is deductive, and the immature mind’s deductive processes need a fuller analysis.
Our Logic consists of a few universal principles generally accepted, with which any more particular judgment may be compared in order to test its validity. The matter may be superficially acquired in a few hours; but the full comprehension of it implies the widest comparison of types of judgment from all departments of knowledge: Logic being (as I have said) a sort of skeleton of knowledge. Hence in any mind incapable of comparison and criticism—or so far as it is incapable—there must be an absence of Logic. So much effective comparison of experience, however, goes on without our specially attending to it that a man’s logical power bears no proportion to his investigations into the structure of knowledge. One man may be a great student of Logic and a very inefficient reasoner from a want of discipline in the world of fact; another, who has never opened a text-book, may yet show by the definiteness of his judgments and the adequacy of his plans, that he is a sort of incarnate Logic, that his mind works according to reason or (in other words) according to the order of facts. It is the highest manifestation of common sense. Such men occur among backward peoples.
The only universal principles that need be considered here are the Law of Causation and the Form of Substance and Attribute (Mill’s doctrine of Natural Kinds): which may be called the principles of parallel reasoning; because the greater part of ordinary reasoning consists in drawing some inference parallel to one or the other of them, usually in some restricted shape. For example, a restriction of causation is the proposition that “exposure to intense daylight causes sun-burn,” of substance and attribute that “the specific gravity of gold is about 19·5”: whence we infer that if we expose ourselves to sunlight our faces or hands will suffer, or that any piece of gold will be relatively very heavy. But in such cases erroneous inferences are easy: for example, to expect that exposure to London sunshine will cause sunburn; for there the foul atmosphere cuts off the actinic rays: or to expect that a lump of brass will have specific gravity 19·5. A necessary precaution before trusting an inference, therefore, is the ascertaining that the inference deals with the very same sort of case as the premise describes: else there is no complete parallel. And Logicians show in the form of the syllogism this necessary precaution—to use their favourite example in a case of Substance and Attribute: