The child of the forest picks out and pursues with marvellous acuteness the trails of animals. He outwits and overreaches his foes with surpassing cunning. He is perfectly at home in the sphere of his peculiar experience. But confront him with an unwonted phenomenon; place him face to face with a technical product of modern civilisation, and he will lapse into impotency and helplessness. Here are facts which he does not comprehend. If he endeavors to grasp their meaning, he misinterprets them. He fancies the moon, when eclipsed, to be tormented by an evil spirit. To his mind a puffing locomotive is a living monster. The letter accompanying a commission with which he is entrusted, having once revealed his thievishness, is in his imagination a conscious being, which he must hide beneath a stone, before venturing to commit a fresh trespass. Arithmetic to him is like the art of the geomancers in the Arabian Nights,—an art which is able to accomplish every imaginable impossibility. And, like Voltaire's ingénu, when placed in our social world, he plays, as we think, the maddest pranks.
With the man who has made the achievements of modern science and civilisation his own, the case is quite different. He sees the moon pass temporarily into the shadow of the earth. He feels in his thoughts the water growing hot in the boiler of the locomotive; he feels also the increase of the tension which pushes the piston forward. Where he is not able to trace the direct relation of things he has recourse to his yard-stick and table of logarithms, which aid and facilitate his thought without predominating over it. Such opinions as he cannot concur in, are at least known to him, and he knows how to meet them in argument.
Now, wherein does the difference between these two men consist? The train of thought habitually employed by the first one does not correspond to the facts that he sees. He is surprised and nonplussed at every step. But the thoughts of the second man follow and anticipate events, his thoughts have become adapted or accommodated to the larger field of observation and activity in which he is located; he conceives things as they are. The Indian's sphere of experience, however, is quite different; his bodily organs of sense are in constant activity; he is ever intensely alert and on the watch for his foes; or, his entire attention and energy are engaged in procuring sustenance. Now, how can such a creature project his mind into futurity, foresee or prophesy? This is not possible until our fellow-beings have, in a measure, relieved us of our concern for existence. It is then that we acquire freedom for observation, and not infrequently too that narrowness of thought which society helps and teaches us to disregard.
If we move for a time within a fixed circle of phenomena which recur with unvarying uniformity, our thoughts gradually adapt themselves to our environment; our ideas reflect unconsciously our surroundings. The stone we hold in our hand, when dropped, not only falls to the ground in reality; it also falls in our thoughts. Iron-filings dart towards a magnet in imagination as well as in fact, and, when thrown into a fire, they grew hot in conception as well.
The impulse to complete mentally a phenomenon that has been only partially observed, has not its origin in the phenomenon itself; of this fact, we are fully sensible. And we well know that it does not lie within the sphere of our volition. It seems to confront us rather as a power and a law imposed from without and controlling both thought and facts.
The fact that we are able by the help of this law to prophesy and forecast, merely proves a sameness or uniformity of environment sufficient to effect a mental adaptation of this kind. A necessity of fulfilment, however, is not contained in this compulsory principle which controls our thoughts; nor is it in any way determined by the possibility of prediction. We are always obliged, in fact, to await the completion of what has been predicted. Errors and departures are constantly discernible, and are slight only in provinces of great rigid constancy, as in astronomy.
In cases where our thoughts follow the connexion of events with ease, and in instances where we positively forefeel the course of a phenomenon, it is natural to fancy that the latter is determined by and must conform to our thoughts. But the belief in that mysterious agency called causality, which holds thought and event in unison, is violently shaken when a person first enters a province of inquiry in which he has previously had no experience. Take for instance the strange interaction of electric currents and magnets, or the reciprocal action of currents, which seem to defy all the resources of mechanical science. Let him be confronted with such phenomena and he will immediately feel himself forsaken by his power of prediction; he will bring nothing with him into this strange field of events but the hope of soon being able to adapt his ideas to the new conditions there presented.
A person constructs from a bone the remaining anatomy of an animal; or from the visible part of a half-concealed wing of a butterfly he infers and reconstructs the part concealed. He does so with a feeling of highest confidence in the accuracy of his results; and in these processes we find nothing preternatural or transcendent. But when physicists adapt their thoughts to conform to the dynamical course of events in time, we invariably surround their investigations with a metaphysical halo; yet these latter adaptations bear quite the same character as the former, and our only reason for investing them with a metaphysical garb, perhaps, is their high practical value.[76]