The Mind in the Making The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform

ived from the Greeks; many more of them would prove to come directly from the Middle Ages; while certain others in our stock were unknown until natural science began to develop

of sexual conduct are predominantly mediaeval in their presuppositions; our notions of electricity and disease germs are, of course, recent in orig

nduct, and his relations to God and his fellows are far more ancient and far less critical than those which

ts of mankind compressed into the compass of a single lifetime. Let us assume that a single generation of men have in fifty years managed to accumulate all that now passes for civilization. They would have to start, as all individuals do, absolutely u

nths our generation would have been living under the blessings of Christianity; the printing press would be but a fortnight old and they would not have had the steam engine for quite a week. For two or three days they would have been hastening about the globe in steamships and railroad trains, and only yesterday would they have come upon the magical possibilities of electricity. Within the last few hours they would have learned to sail in the air and beneath the waters, and have forthwith applied their newest discoveries to the prosecution of a magnificent war on the scale befitting their high ideals and new resources. This is not so strange, for only a week ago they were burning and burying alive those w

f the human mind when there was as yet no writing, no organized industry or mechanical arts, no money, no important specialization of function except between the sexes, no s

ons which have come down to us, even in their crudest forms (eoliths), are very far from representing the earliest achievements of man in the accumulation of culture. Those dim, remote cycles must have bee

ught, and began, as we have seen, in a state of ignorance beyond anything we can readily conceive. He lived naked and speechless in the woods, or wandered over the plains without artificial shelter or any way of cooking his food. He subsisted on raw fruit, berries, roots, insects, and such animals as he could strike down or pick up dead. His mind must have correspond

latively highly developed traditional culture, with elaborate languages, myths, and well-established artificial customs, which it probably took hundreds of thousands of years t

t in any case it is certain, as many anthropologists have pointed out, that customs, savage ideas, and primitive sentiments have continued to form an important part of our own culture down even to the present day. We are met thus with the necessity of reckoning with this inveterate element in our present thought and customs. Much of the data that we

s were not based on individuality, but rather on the "virtue" which objects had-that is, their potency to do things. Only later did the animistic belief in the personalities of men, animals, an

ntled". Now, whether or no there are such things as spirits, Berlin and London have no souls, and Uncle Sam is as mythical as the great god Pan. Sometimes this regression to the savage is harmless, but when a newspaper states that "Germany is as militaristic as ever", on the ground that some insolent Prussian lieutenant says that German armies wi

another history had men been dreamless. For it was not merely his shadow and his reflection in the water that led man to imagine souls

nt who was not necessarily bound to it, who could desert it from time to time durin

ecent times, since Plato, let us say, other reasons have been urged for believing in the soul and its immortality, but the idea appears to

re from them filled him with dread. Sometimes the prohibition might have some reasonable justification, sometimes it might seem wholly absurd and even a great nuisance, but that made no difference in its binding force. For example, pork was taboo among the ancient Hebrews-n

pediency of his principle, introduces into his thinking and conduct an irrational, mystical element similar to that which characterized savage prohibitions. Principles unintelligently urged make a great deal of trouble in the free consideration of social readjustment, for they a

compromise and adjustment impossible; for "moral" is a word on somewhat the same plane as "sacred", and has much the same qualities and similar effects on thinking. In dealing with the relations of the sexes the terms "pure" and "impure" introduce mystic and irrational moods alien to clear analysis and reasonable readjustments. Those who have studied the characteristics of savage life are always struck by its deadly conservatism, its needless restraints on the freedom of the individual, and its hopeless routine. Man, like plants and animals in general, tends to go on from generation to generation, living as nearly as may be the life of his forbears. Changes have to be forced upon him by hard experience, and he is ever prone to find excuses for slipping back into older habits, for these are likely to be simpler, less critical, more spontaneous-more closely akin, in

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nsorship and restraints which they impose in their own interests on his natural impulses must surely have a permanent influence on the notions he continues to have as an adult in regard to his "superiors" and the

with delightful humor the effects of our under

r presence It seems to be made out now that even monkeys are not imitative in that sense and that man himself has no general inclination to do over what he sees being done. Pray, if you

uld be dead in six months. They would have no language to express their thoughts, and no thoughts but vague reverie. They could not read notices, or drive motors or horses. They would wander about, led by the inarticulate cries of a few naturally dominant individuals, drowning themselves, as thirst came on, in hundreds at the riverside landing places, looting those shops where the smell of decaying food attra

Science Quarterly, December, 1920. He

t all. Yet he is forced sadly to confess that man continues all too often to operate on an animal or "space-binding" plan of life. His aim and outlook are, however, essentially the same as those of the present writer. His method of approach will appea

removed in time. The tales told to children still are reminiscences of the mythical explanations which our savage ancestors advanced to explain the arriv

the evils wrought by religion by the fear of treading on "the unho

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an old man who was a Hellene. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no

ks than to exaggerate it, and we do not always remember the very short time they