The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions

by Carveth Read

Major premise	—	All men are mortal;
Minor premise	—	Socrates is a man;
⁂ Conclusion	—	Socrates is mortal.

The conclusion Socrates is Mortal is parallel to the major premise All men are mortal; and that it deals with the very same sort of case is secured by the minor premise, Socrates is a man. Whoever reasons must see to it that this premise is true. But the savage has never noticed that necessity; and thence come most of his errors.

The syllogism (it is now admitted) does not describe the way in which we reason, but is only a form which gives some help in testing the validity of reasoning if one should ever think of doing such a thing. In practice we do not think first of the major premise, then of the minor premise and lastly of the conclusion. As a rule we do not think of either premise at all: the “conclusion” comes first to mind. In certain circumstances of association, because of our hopes or our fears, it occurs to us that “Socrates is mortal.” If some one should doubt this judgment and ask for proof, we might think of the major premise, and then put it into words for the first time—“All men die;” even then it might not seem necessary to add that “Socrates is a man.” But although we may not have been at the time aware of these premises until we were asked for them, their presence in the mind in some way was necessary to determine the inference: the major premise was there as latent memory of one or more cases of people who had died; the minor premise was represented by the assimilation of the case of Socrates to those cases of mortal men. The former experiences have left an engram, which serves as a mould into which subsequent experience may run, and which conceivably may determine subsequent judgments even though the former experiences can no longer be remembered.

The phrase “form of thought” is most used for premises of high generality, such as the axioms of mathematics, causation, substance and attribute, space in three dimensions; and, undoubtedly, these are forms which determine the lines of all thinking to which they are relevant; but they would be useless, if there were not, under them, forms established in very concrete material by the repetition of simple experiences and ordinary events (or even by single impressive events), such as “men are mortal,” “water quenches fire,” which determine the lines of common-sense judgments. If there has been an experiential judgment—X is related to Y, when X again appears it is expected to be related to Y.

Amongst savages also, of course, experience settles in their minds such forms of thought; both the most general ones, which they never formulate but which necessarily control their thoughts, and many particular ones concerning the experience of daily life; which last control the details of their thoughts, and for practical purposes are true; but which, through ignorance of the minor premise, are allowed to assimilate many judgments of a very different nature. Thus, X being known to be related to Y, they are apt to infer that things that are like X, or which they suppose to be like X, are also in the same way related to Y; and this is disastrous. In civilised life, most occupations are so mechanical, and the general tradition is so positive, that there is little encouragement to think nonsense; so that the average man reasons tolerably about simple matters without having heard of the minor premise; but the savage’s life is much less regular, and less fully occupied, and the tradition is full of magic and ghosts. Accordingly, he is always ready to think about magic and ghosts; and since his thoughts about such things can only run in the mould of his experiences (with some playroom for amplification, distortion and condensation), whilst he is also ignorant of the function of the minor premise, he seems to draw often from a very sound major premise a very absurd conclusion. For the minor premise is an invention of Logicians (perhaps their greatest): it does not occur to cursory, but only to critical thought.

For example, a savage judges that to put a lock of a man’s hair in the fire injures and may destroy him: how comes he to think so? He has learnt by experience that for a man to put his hand in the fire, or to fall into it, hurts him; and this supplies the mould in which his inference about the lock of hair is cast. Similarly, he is apt to judge that to throw a man’s image into the fire hurts him and may destroy him; and this clearly rests upon the same experience. His reasoning assumes the minor premise that (for the purpose of his revenge) a separated part of a man, or his image, is the same as the man himself; and this assumption is made explicit in the famous maxims of Magic, that in rites, whatever has been in contact with a man—or that any likeness of a man—may be substituted for him. But the generalisation of these maxims is left for an advanced stage of culture; the savage, who acts as if he held them, has never thought of, much less formulated them. They are derived, by later thought, entirely from an analysis of his conduct in magic. What the causes are that determine him to act as if he accepted the maxims of Magic will presently be discussed.[93]

There are certain other reasonings implied in savage practices, where the error lies not so much in the minor premise as in the minor term, thus: It is matter of experience that a sense of personal power and elation is produced by dancing and singing; and (perhaps without remembering such experience) a savage infers that magical power is increased by the same means. Or, again, it is matter of experience that men eat and use solid food and weapons; and a savage infers that ghosts eat ghostly food and use ghostly weapons; that is to say, that where food and spears are left at a tomb and remain untouched, the ghost has taken to himself the soul of these things which was his proper share. Now granting that there are such things as magical powers and ghosts, the reasoning that identifies them respectively with physical power and with men is, for the purpose of the inference, not unplausible; with a liberal examiner the minor premises might pass. But if magical powers and ghosts do not exist, the minor terms are imaginary.[94] In short, all these reasonings turn upon imaginations. The experiential major premises are true enough, but the minor premises are illusory, and as it is a maxim with Logicians that the force of reasoning follows the weaker premise, the conclusion is illusory. It is not in perception but in imagination that a part is the same as the whole, or that a likeness is the same as the thing itself; that magic controls events and that ghosts haunt their sepulchres.

These reasonings are fallacious imitations of parallel inferences according to cause and effect; but there are others of a kind peculiar to imagination: I mean reasonings by analogy—as when a Zulu, courting the dusky fair, chews a piece of wood, in the expectation that, as the wood is reduced to pulp, her heart, too, will be softened. These processes are not parallel; there is no resemblance between a lady’s heart and a piece of wood, nor between mastication and court-ship; but the relation involved, the softening process, is felt to be the same in both connections and, therefore, the cases on the whole are thought to be the same. Many rites and observances depend upon such analogies—for this is the strict sense of analogy, “like relations of unlike terms”; and they have a leading part in the formation of myths in which natural events are represented as personal relations—Apollo chasing the Dawn, and so forth. And I formerly thought that such arguments as the foregoing, in which the actions of ghosts are identified with those of men, or the sufferings of a part are equated with those of the whole, were examples of analogical reasoning; for certainly, the terms involved are different: a ghost, or an image, or a nail-paring is not the same as a man. But, on reflection, I see that though these terms are really different, that has nothing to do with the psychology of the matter, for they are conceived by the savage to be the same; and, therefore, the inference is conceived as parallel to the experiential ground (even though this remain latent in consciousness).