Note 27 — Chapter I · RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.

Add that when an animal or primitive man has recognized that a certain object possesses a particular attribute, he often finds it difficult to recognize that simply analogous objects possess the same attribute. I was one day making a kitten run after a wooden ball as a dog would do; the ball struck it and hurt it; it cried out and I petted it and then wanted to begin playing once more; it would run willingly even after large stones when I threw them, but obstinately refused to run after the ball. So that it evidently conceived that the ball alone possessed the attribute of power to injure it; the kitten looked upon the ball, no doubt, with an evil eye, regarded it perhaps as an evil being who was unwilling to play; by a fault of generalization the kitten created for itself a sort of fetich which it did not adore indeed, but which it feared, and fear is a step toward adoration.

Mr. Spencer himself admits in savages a certain inaptitude for generalization. This opinion, paradoxical as it may seem, is perhaps an important truth. If primitive intelligences, as M. Taine among others remarked, are especially prompt at noticing the superficial resemblances of things, that fact is not always a mark of genuine perspicacity, for the resemblance perceived between two sensations may be explicable less as an intelligent generalization than as a sort of confusion of the sensations themselves; if sensations are analogous or indistinct, they may naturally be mistaken for each other without any exercise whatsoever of intelligence. Thence the comparative insignificance of many examples taken from the case of language. True generalization seems to consist, more than anything else, in the reduction of facts to law; that is to say, in a conscious abstraction of differences, in a conscious recognition of the fundamental determinism which binds things up together and which precisely eludes both savages and animals.

Note finally that the majority of animals and of savages, when they have once been deceived, are slow to recover from their error, are for a long time distrustful toward the object which has deceived them. A dog, coming home one evening, perceived an empty cask in an unusual place. He was extremely frightened and barked for a long time; it was only by day that he dared approach near the object of his alarm, and he examined and moved about it, and finally, like the frog in La Fontaine’s fable, recognized that the thing was inoffensive. If the cask in question had disappeared during the night, the dog would evidently have remembered it as a redoubtable being seen the evening before in the yard. A monkey, which I left in the room with a cardboard sheep one entire day, proved unable to the end entirely to satisfy itself that the sheep was inanimate. I believe, however, that this persuasion was ultimately achieved, for the monkey began finally to pluck the sheep’s wool and to treat it something too familiarly. But nature seldom permits us equally extended tête-à-tête with objects that alarm us.

Messrs. Spencer and Müller will call our attention to the fact, it is true, that cardboard sheep, no more than hand-organs or watches, exist in rerum natura. We reply that nature supplies primitive man with things much more astonishing: with rocks, and forests which can talk (the echo), with springs of hot water, with intermittent fountains. Mr. Fergusson (Tree and Serpent Worship) relates that in India he saw with his own eyes a tree which saluted the rising and setting sun, by lifting or lowering its boughs. Temples had formerly been reared in its neighbourhood. People came from all sides to see the marvellous tree. This tree was an old date-palm, half decayed, which hung above the road; in order to pass below it, it had been held back by a rope; but during this operation the fibres which composed the trunk were twisted like the threads in a rope. These fibres contracted toward midday in the heat of the sun; the tree untwisted and rose. It relaxed under the dew at evening and once more bowed down. (See M. Girard de Rialle, Mythologie comparée, t. i.)