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.
THE MIND'S EYE
Hamlet. My father,—methinks, I see my father.
Horatio. O, where, my lord?
Hamlet. In my mind's eye, Horatio.
I
It is a commonplace taught from nursery to university that we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and feel with our fingers. This is the truth, but not the whole truth. Indispensable as are the sense organs in gaining an acquaintance with the world in which we live, yet they alone do not determine how extensive or how accurate that acquaintance shall be. There is a mind behind the eye and the ear and the finger-tips which guides them in gathering information, and gives value and order to the exercise of the senses. This is particularly true of vision,—the most intellectual of all the senses, the one in which mere acuteness of the sense organ counts least and the training in observation counts most. The eagle's eye sees farther, but our eyes tell us vastly more of what is seen.