The whole ritual of social and political organisation among savages, therefore, illustrates the process of creating artificial and easily recognisable political likenesses. If the chief is to be recognised as a chief he must, like the ghost of Patroclus, 'be exceedingly like unto himself.' He must live in the same house, wear the same clothes, and do the same things year by year; and his successor must imitate him. If a marriage or an act of sale is to be recognised as a contract, it must be carried out in the customary place and with the customary gestures. In some few cases the thing thus artificially brought into existence and made recognisable still produces its impulsive effect by acting on those biologically inherited associations which enable man and other animals to interpret sensations without experience. The scarlet paint and wolfskin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon-mask of a medicine man, appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to our instinctive nature. But even in very early societies the recognition of artificial political entities must generally have owed its power of stimulating impulse to associations acquired during life. A child who had been beaten by the herald's rod, or had seen his father bow down before the king, or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or the king, or the stone by association.
Recognition often attaches itself to certain special points (whether naturally developed or artificially made) in the thing recognised. Such points then become symbols of the thing as a whole. The evolutionary facts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eating insects a putrid smell is a sufficiently convincing symbol of carrion to induce them to lay their eggs in a flower, and that the black and yellow bands of the wasp if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keep off birds.[[11]] In early political society most recognition is guided by such symbols. One cannot make a new king, who may be a boy, in all respects like his predecessor, who may have been an old man. But one can tattoo both of them with the same pattern. It is even more easy and less painful to attach a symbol to a king which is not a part of the man himself, a royal staff for instance, which may be decorated and enlarged until it is useless as a staff, but unmistakable as a symbol. The king is then recognised as king because he is the 'staff-bearer' ( σκηπτοῠχοσ βασιλεύσ). Such a staff is very like a name, and there may, perhaps, have been an early Mexican system of sign-writing in which a model of a staff stood for a king.
At this point it is already difficult not to intellectualise the whole process. Our own 'common-sense' and the systematised common-sense of the eighteenth-century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tribal man for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded thereby of the original social contract between ruler and ruled, or of the pleasure and pain which experience had shown to be derived from royal leadership and royal punishments, and that he therefore decided by a process of reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king.
When the symbol by which our impulse is stimulated is actual language, it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional association with the full process of logical inference. Because one of the effects of those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us a process of deliberate logical thought we tend to ignore all their other effects. Nothing is easier than to make a description of the logical use of language, the breaking up by abstraction of a bundle of sensations—one's memory, for instance, of a royal person; the selection of a single quality—kingship, for instance—shared by other such bundles of sensations, the giving to that quality the name king, and the use of the name to enable us to repeat the process of abstraction. When we are consciously trying to reason correctly by the use of language all this does occur, just as it would occur if we had not evolved the use of voice-language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid logic of colours and models and pictures. But any text-book of psychology will explain why it errs, both by excess and defect, if taken as a description of that which actually happens when language is used for the purpose of stimulating us to action.
Indeed the 'brass-instrument psychologists,' who do such admirable work in their laboratories, have invented an experiment on the effect of significant words which every one may try for himself. Let him get a friend to write in large letters on cards a series of common political terms, nations, parties, principles, and so on. Let him then sit before a watch recording tenths of seconds, turn up the cards, and practise observation of the associations which successively enter his consciousness. The first associations revealed will be automatic and obviously 'illogical.' If the word be 'England' the white and black marks on the paper will, if the experimenter is a 'visualiser,' produce at once a picture of some kind accompanied by a vague and half conscious emotional reaction of affection, perhaps, or anxiety, or the remembrance of puzzled thought. If the experimenter is 'audile,' the marks will first call up a vivid sound image with which a like emotional reaction may be associated. I am a 'visualiser,' and the picture in my case was a blurred triangular outline. Other 'visualisers' have described to me the picture of a red flag, or of a green field (seen from a railway carriage), as automatically called up by the word England. After the automatic picture or sound image and its purely automatic emotional accompaniment comes the 'meaning' of the word, the things one knows about England, which are presented to the memory by a process semi-automatic at first, but requiring before it is exhausted a severe effort. The question as to what images and feelings shall appear at each stage is, of course, settled by all the thoughts and events of our past life, but they appear, in the earlier moments at least of the experiment, before we have time consciously to reflect or choose.
A corresponding process may be set up by other symbols besides language. If in the experiment the hats belonging to members of a family be substituted for the written cards, the rest of the process will go on—the automatic 'image,' automatically accompanied by emotional association, being succeeded in the course of a second or so by the voluntary realisation of 'meaning,' and finally by a deliberate effort of recollection and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a born poet and partly perhaps because his excessive use of tobacco put his brain occasionally a little out of focus, was extraordinarily accurate in his account of those separate mental states which for most men are merged into one by memory. A song, for instance, in the 'Princess,' describes the succession which I have been discussing:—
'Thy voice is heard through rolling drums,
That beat to battle where he stands.
Thy face across his fancy comes,