Note 22.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

The objects of thought, alike among savages and among ourselves, fall into categories. Many of these categories manifest themselves in the very fibre of language. A familiar illustration is the curious distinctions of grammatical gender, so different even in different languages sprung from a common stock, and those comparatively simple, as are the Aryan tongues of civilization. When we refer to the languages of the lower culture, with their minute distinctions of number and person, of action, tense, and all sorts of relations of time and place, we are overwhelmed by their complexity and puzzled by the oddness of their grouping. Categories of another kind become visible when we attempt to push our explorations further into savage thought. The counting of kinship and the difficulties attending the attempt to translate words expressive of religious ideas have already been mentioned. In the totemism of Australia the totems are classes of animals or other objects not merely united by some mystic bond to one or other class of tribesmen; they are related to other objects of human environment in such a way that the whole universe is shared among them. To us these relationships are strange and inexplicable; they form categories that we do not understand. To the native these categories are familiar by immemorial association; they have become part of the texture of his mind; and thereby they have acquired emotional values, from the bonds of which he can hardly deliver himself. So it seems that the West African Bantu comprise their entire social system, every activity of their mental and physical life, and every aspect of the external universe under a limited number of categories wholly alien to our modes of thought. Hints of them are perhaps to be found in the various classes of Bantu nouns that have not yet been fully explained by philologists. In any case the classification of these nouns is probably no arbitrary association of purely formal significance. It is based on some archaic experience, which has grouped together various objects often to us utterly dissimilar: the connecting links escape us.22.1 Among other peoples in parts of the earth remote from one another categories have been discovered associating and dissociating acts and modes of feeling, and apportioning their environment in unexpected ways. Such categories must react on mentality to an extent that we can hardly measure. They form part of the traditional presuppositions of thought. They are the framework in which ideas are grouped. We, who have gradually elaborated and established through generations of increasing discovery and invention a habit of regarding everything from a more or less scientific standpoint, have acquired a series of presuppositions of an entirely different character. To the educated classes of Europe and America they in their turn have become traditional. They are the axioms from which we argue. Every new experience must be fitted into the framework thus supplied, otherwise we cannot logically interpret it. At the best we may make for it what has been wittily called a watertight compartment. Men of the lower culture brought suddenly into contact with civilization and civilized ideas experience a corresponding difficulty. Missionaries are often in despair over their converts’ relapses. These relapses are occasioned not merely by the difference of moral atmosphere, but quite as much by the intellectual abyss between savagery and civilization. Christianity and heathenism—the new and the old—are jumbled together in the convert’s mind. His traditional modes of thought are as little changed as his outward environment, and the new ideas are incongruous with them. The result is chaos. So the civilized enquirer into savage belief is constantly brought up in what seems a blind alley. He cannot find the way out, not because there is not a logical issue, but because the landscape is unfamiliar. He attempts to adapt the thoughts of the savage, so far as he has seized them, to his own totally different mental framework; and they are refractory. Not until the effort is abandoned, and patient, unprejudiced search has discovered the true pattern of the puzzle, will it be solved.