CHAPTER VI.

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES-INTELLECTUAL.

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IF you watch the management of a child by a mother of small capacity, you may be struck by the inability she betrays to imagine the child's thoughts and feelings. Full of energy which he must expend in some way, and eager to see everything, her little boy is every moment provoking her by his restlessness. The occasion is perhaps a railway journey. Now he strives to look out of the window; and now, when forbidden to do that, climbs on the seats, or meddles with the small luggage. Sit still," "Get down, I tell you,' 'Why can't you be quiet?" are the commands and expostulations she utters from minute to minute-partly, no doubt, to prevent the discomfort of fellow-passengers. But, as you will see at times when no such motive comes into play, she endeavours to repress these childish activities mainly out of regard for what she thinks propriety, and does it without any adequate recognition of the penalties she inflicts. Though she herself lived through this phase of extreme curiosity-this early time when almost every object passed has the charm of novelty, and when the overflowing energies generate a painful irritation if pent up; yet now she cannot believe how keen is the desire for seeing which she balks, and how difficult is the maintenance of that quietude on which she insists. Conceiving her child's consciousness in terms of her own consciousness, and feeling how easy it is to sit still and not look out of the window, she ascribes his behaviour to mere perversity.

I recall this and kindred cases to the reader's mind, for the purpose of exemplifying a necessity and a difficulty. The necessity is that in dealing with other beings and interpreting their actions, we must represent their thoughts and feelings in

terms of our own. The difficulty is that in so representing them we can never be more than partially right, and are frequently very wrong. The conception which any one frames of another's mind, is inevitably more or less after the pattern of his own mind—is automorphic; and in proportion as the mind of which he has to frame a conception differs from his own, his automorphic interpretation is likely to be wide of the truth.

That measuring other person's actions by the standards our own thoughts and feelings furnish, often causes misconstruction, is a remark familiar even to the vulgar. But while among members of the same society, having natures nearly akin, it is seen that automorphic explanations are often erroneous, it is not seen with due clearness how much more erroneous such explanations commonly are, when the actions are those of men of another race, to whom the kinship in nature is comparatively remote. We do, indeed, perceive this, if the interpretations are not our own; and if both the interpreters and the interpreted are mentally alien to us. When, as in early English literature, we find Greek history conceived in terms of feudal institutions, and the heroes of antiquity spoken of as princesses, knights, and squires, it becomes clear that the ideas concerning ancient civilization must have been utterly wrong. When we find Virgil named in religious stories of the middle ages as one among the prophets who visited the cradle of Christ-when an illustrated psalter gives scenes from the life of Christ in which there repeatedly figures a castle with a portcullis-when even the crucifixion is described by Langland in the language of chivalry, so that the man who pierced Christ's side with a spear is considered as a knight who disgraced his knighthood '—when we read of the Crusaders calling themselves "vassals of Christ; " we need no further proof that by carrying their own sentiments and ideas to the interpretation of social arrangements and transactions among the Jews, our ancestors were led into absurd misconceptions. But we do not recognize the fact that in virtue of the same tendency, we are ever framing conceptions which, if not so grotesquely untrue, are yet very wide of the truth. How difficult it is to imagine mental states remote from our own so correctly that we can understand how they issue in

individual actions, and consequently in social actions, an instance will make manifest.

The feeling of vague wonder with which he received his first lessons in the Greek mythology, will most likely be dimly remembered by every reader. If not in words, still inarticulately, there passed through him the thought that faith in such stories was unaccountable. When, afterwards, he read in books of travels details of the amazing superstitions of savages, there was joined with a sense of the absurdity of these superstitions, much astonishment at their acceptance by any human beings, however ignorant or stupid. Such beliefs as that the people of a neighbouring tribe had descended from ducks, that rain fell when certain deities began to spit on the Earth, that the island lived upon had been pulled up from the bottom of the ocean by one of their gods, whose hook got fast when he was fishing-these, and countless beliefs equally laughable, seemed to imply an irrationality near to insanity. He interpreted them automorphically-carrying with him not simply his own faculties developed to a stage of complexity considerably beyond that reached by the faculties of the savage, but also the modes of thinking in which he was brought up, and the stock of information he had acquired. Probably it has never since occurred to him to do otherwise. Even if he now attempts to see things from the savage's point of view, he most likely fails entirely; and if he succeeds at all, it is but partially. Yet only by seeing things as the savage sees them can his ideas be understood, his behaviour accounted for, and the resulting social phenomena explained. These apparently-strange superstitions are quite natural-quite rational, in a certain sense, in their respective times and places. The laws of intellectual action are the same for civilized and uncivilized. The difference between civilized and uncivilized is in complexity of faculty and in amount of knowledge accumulated and generalized. Given, reflective powers developed only to that lower degree in which they are possessed by the aboriginal man-given, his small stock of ideas, collected in a narrow area of space, and not added to by records extending through time-given, his impulsive nature incapable of patient inquiry; and these seemingly-monstrous stories of his become in reality the most feasible explanations he can find of

surrounding things. Yet even after concluding that this must be so, it is not easy to think from the savage's standpoint, clearly enough to follow the effects of his ideas on his acts, through all the relations of life, social and other.

A parallel difficulty stands in the way of rightly conceiving character remote from our own, so as to see how it issues in conduct. We may best recognize our inability in this respect, by observing the converse inability of other races to understand our characters, and the acts they prompt.

"Wonderful are the works of Allah! Behold! That Frank is trudging about when he can, if he pleases, sit still!" 2

In like manner Captain Speke tells us,—

"If I walked up and down the same place to stretch my legs, they [Somali] formed councils of war on my motives, considering I must have some secret designs upon their country, or I would not do it, as no man in his senses could be guilty of working his legs unnecessarily." 3

But while, by instances like these, we are shown that our characters are in a large measure incomprehensible by races remote in nature from us, the correlative fact that we cannot rightly conceive their sentiments and motives is one perpetually overlooked in our sociological interpretations. Feeling, for instance, how natural it is to take an easier course in place of a more laborious course, and to adopt new methods that are proved to be better methods, we are puzzled on finding the Chinese stick to their dim paper-lamps, though they admire our bright argand-lamps, which they do not use if given to them; or on finding that the Hindus prefer their rough primitive tools, after seeing how our improved tools do more work with less effort. And on descending to races yet more remote in civilization, we still oftener discover ourselves wrong when we suppose that under given conditions they will act as we should act.

Here, then, is a subjective difficulty of a serious kind. To understand any fact in social evolution, we have to see it as resulting from the joint actions of individuals having certain natures. We cannot so understand it without understanding their natures; and this, even by care and effort, we are able to do but very imperfectly. Our interpretations must

be automorphic; and yet automorphism perpetually misleads us.

One would hardly suppose, à priori, that untruthfulness would habitually co-exist with credulity. Rather our inference might be that, because of the tendency above enlarged upon, people most given to making false statements must be people most inclined to suspect statements made by others. Yet, somewhat anomalously, as it seems, habitual veracity generally goes with inclination to doubt evidence; and extreme untrustworthiness of assertion often has for its concomitant, readiness to accept the greatest improbabilities on the slenderest testimony. If you compare savage with civilized, or compare the successive stages of civilization with one another, you find untruthfulness and credulity decreasing together; until you reach the modern man of science, who is at once exact in his statements and critical respecting evidence. The converse relation to that seen in the man of science, is even now startlingly presented in the East, where greediness in swallowing fictions goes along with superfluous telling of falsehoods. An Egyptian prides himself in a clever lie, uttered perhaps without motive; and a dyer will even ascribe the failure in fixing one of his colours to the not having been successful in a deception. Yet so great is the readiness to believe improbabilities, that Mr. St. John, in his Two Years' Residence in a Levantine Family, narrates how, when the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments" was being read aloud, and when he hinted that the stories must not be accepted as true, there arose a strong protest against such scepticism: the question being asked,-"Why should a man sit down and write so many lies?

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I point out this union of seemingly-inconsistent traits, not because of the direct bearing it has on the argument, but because of its indirect bearing. For I have here to dwell on the misleading effects of certain mental states which similarly appears unlikely to co-exist, and which yet do habitually coexist. I refer to the belief which, even while I write, I find repeated in the leading journal, that "the deeper a student of history goes, the more does he find man the same in all time; and to the opposite belief embodied in current politics, that