Interpretation of savage mind.

teristic of say snake, butterfly, elephant, oyster and robin in support of a statement?And yet the peoples mentioned present widely remote cultural resources, varied environments and distinctive institutions.What is the scientific value of a proposition thus arrived at?In the second place, this haphazard, uncontrollable selection yields only static facts-facts which lack the dynamic quality necessary to a genetic consideration.The following is a summary of Mr. Spencer's characterizations of primitive man, emotional and intellectual:He is explosive and chaotic in feeling, improvident, childishly mirthful, intolerant of restraint, with but small flow of altruistic feeling, 1 attentive to meaningless detail and incapable of selecting the facts from which conclusions may be drawn, with feeble grasp ot thought, incapable of rational surprise, incurious, lacking in ingenuity and constructive imagination. 2Even the one quality which is stated positively, namely, keenness of perception, is interpreted in a purely negative way, as a character antagonistic to reflective development."In proportion as the mental energies go out in restless perception, they cannot go out in deliberate thought." 3 And this from a sensationalist in psychology!Such descriptions as these also bear out my first point.Mr. Spencer himself admits frequent and marked discrepancies (c.g., pp.56, 59, 62, 65, etc.), and it would not be difficult to bring together a considerable mass of proof-texts to support the exact opposite of each of his assertions.But my point here is that present civilized mind is virtually taken as a standard, and savage mind is measured off on this fixed scale.It is no wonder that the outcome is negative ; that primitive mind is described in terms of ' lack,' ' absence': its traits are incapacities.Qualities defined in such fashion are surely useless in suggesting, to say nothing of determining, progress, and are correspondingly infertile for genetic psychology, which is interested in becoming, growth, development.