Note 20.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

We may go further still. Where the observer puts aside his prejudices, where he is animated by true sympathy—not the false and mawkish sympathy that too often takes its place—where he is able to communicate with the natives in their own tongue, there is notwithstanding very often a difficulty in following their ideas. We have been told of the Andaman Islanders that “with these, as with other savages, it is vain to expect them to understand the logical conclusions to which their beliefs tend.”20.1 That may be because they have never thought them out. In the majority of cases it would probably be juster to say that their logic follows a different course, their ideas run in different channels, from ours. After conceding everything that has been said with perfect truth as to their vagueness, their indolence of mind on subjects not concerned with their daily life, and their dislike of intellectual effort, there remains the fact that they are human; they do reason, albeit after their own fashion. Language among the higher races has been trained and tortured during many centuries to express the highest thoughts of the highest thinkers; and how inadequate an instrument has it often been found! It must therefore not surprise us if the thought of races in the lower culture occasionally surpasses a language not yet exercised and adapted to the complicated processes of ideation and ratiocination. Thus not merely is it difficult or impossible to translate native words by English equivalents, as I have already pointed out: the native finds it not easy to translate his thoughts into his own tongue. When he has struggled with more or less success to effect this, his course of thought is so widely different from ours that we can hardly believe in its coherence.