"Bring forth men-children only,For thy undaunted mettle should composeNothing but males."
"Bring forth men-children only,For thy undaunted mettle should composeNothing but males."
And Macbeth, as cool in the crime as the artful contriver of it, is hysterical and hypnotic, and in the accesses reproduces the acts and words of the tragedy, showing that the author knew that hysterics and somnambulists often repeat the acts and the emotions which mark the climax of their malady.
Hamlet has the folly of doubts and hallucinations, simulates the ravings of a madman, but in his suspicious cunning discovers and anticipates what is contemplated to his harm, is homicidal through fear, and is yet often discreet, and a good lover, save that his love vanishes before the fixed idea.
In Ophelia, disappointed love, the contact with a madman or a pretended one, the death of her father almost under her very eyes, provoke a species of madness which would now be called mental confusion, with vague ideas of persecution, dim recollections of love betrayed and of her father, incoherent and confused expressions ending in automatic suicide. This confirms our conclusions.
Genius has also anticipated an epoch in the use and abuse of lunatics, just because time is canceled for genius, because genius anticipates the future work of centuries. But on this subject the inquiry is pertinent why, while in the complaisant literary world such creationsas the Argenson of Daudet, the Jack of Zola, and the Eliza of Goncourt find, if not an immediate, a kindly and ready acceptance—while all the great artists, even the most ancient ones, have given the type which I assign to the born delinquents to executioners and criminals—the world has refused to accept the existence of the criminal type of insanity in genius, and the relations in criminals between epilepsy and crime which are nevertheless received in romance and the drama. It is because when we are in the presence of true figures, made to move before us under a strong light by the great artists, the consciousness of the truth which lies dormant in all of us, smothered and broken under distortion by the schools, reawakens, and rebels against the conventional forms which they have imposed; all the more so because the charm of art has vastly magnified the lines of the truth, has rendered them more evident, and has thus much diminished the effort required to master them. If, on the other hand, we base our conclusion upon cold statistics and what I should call a skeleton study of the facts, we find the old views rising in confusion with those of sentiment and the artistic sense, and we arrive at nothing.
ByJACOB SCHOENHOF.
Fifty years have elapsed since the adoption of free trade by England. It was hoped that the free entrance of commodities extended to all the world would pave the way to an era of mutual peace and good will. But, judging by the political situation, and taking the armaments as an outward sign of good intentions, the era of peace and good will among nations is certainly far off. To get a trading advantage here and a concession from a semibarbarous country there is still the ambitious striving of the cabinets and the diplomacy of Europe. To give the striving emphasis, industry is taxed to the breaking point and labor to the starving point. Russia exhausts her resources in a railroad through the Siberian waste in her endeavor to obtain an outlet to the sea, which is jealously closed to her at the southwestern end of her dominions by England. The trader of Manchester, fearing for his markets, grows frantic at the prospect of Russian cotton goods being brought to China or to India. The mere acquisition of a port in Manchuria by Russia threatens to seal his doom. But he might look on with complacency. Russia's labor is very dear, capital is dear, wages are on the Asiatic level, famine still stalks through the land, intercommunication is made difficult by the lack of roads, and her wonderful natural resourceslie unimproved because the eyes of greed, like those of the dog crossing the stream, are turned on the coveted piece of meat he sees reflected in the water, and to grasp which he drops the one he holds in his mouth. France bristles with bayonets, and is constantly at pains to increase her naval armaments, about whose seaworthiness her own minister of marine expresses suspicions, in obedience to a nervous restlessness for foreign acquisition. England, after her feat in civilizing savages and barbarians in the customary fashion, shown again at Omdurman, is ready to turn her war dogs on France, because the latter has the temerity to demand a slice of Soudanese territory. Well might she have given as hush-money, or for the mere grace of the action, a few thousand square miles of a country closed to access except by the permission of Great Britain, which has successfully pre-empted every desirable bit of land in sight.
Germany, instead of using her newly liberated energies at home in an endeavor to elevate the miserable condition of her working classes, taxes their bread and meat, never too freely supplied, to increase the size of her armies and the number of her battle ships. The defense and expansion of her colonial empire is her leading thought. A strange paradox: The workingman and the peasant are overburdened with taxes on the necessaries of life, so as to procure markets for a limited quantity of factory products outside of the field secured in open competition.
While professing friendship and brotherly love, they all have their eyes on their neighbor's throat, fearful only lest the other might clutch first.
As we are in danger of being drawn into this vortex, it is well to examine the range of possibilities and see what the trade amounts to, to obtain which the scientific intellect of Europe and America has been strained to its limits to discover new means of destruction for attack and defense unknown to the other brothers in the common bond of civilization.
It is a matter of course that trade among European nations does not come within this circle, nor of European nations with the United States. It does not depend on battle ships. In the annexed tables I have classified the countries in three classes: (1) Independent states; (2) colonies of European countries, populated by people of European stock; and (3) colonies and dependencies of European countries, but of non-European stock.
I have reduced the values of imports and exports of the different countries, published in their own currencies, to American dollars. As the values are paper currencies, silver currencies, or conventional values, and of fluctuating rates, I have in such instances taken a yearly average, which will be found in the footnotes of the tables.
I. Trade of Independent Countries other than of Europe and North America.
Names of Countries.Number of inhabitants.Importations.Thousands of dollars.Exportations.Thousands of dollars.Imports per capita.Dollars.Exports per capita.Dollars.Asia(1895)China[19]383,253128,772107,499.34.28Japan[20]42,27090,68162,4432.141.47All other states27,00030,00082,0001.101.18America.Argentina[21]4,000103,058108,67126.5027.17Brazil[22]16,00096,00097,0006.006.06Chile[23]2,70069,20072,90025.6227.00Peru[24]2,6007,5609,0002.903.30Mexico[25]12,60042,00022,0003.321.76Uruguay[26]80025,00030,00031.2537.50Venezuela[27]2,30017,00022,0007.409.56All other states11,30034,00046,8003.004.14South AfricaIndependent states1,00075,00012,00075.0012.00———————————————Total independent states505,800718,271622,313———————————————Asiatic states452,500249,453201,942American and South African53,300468,818420,371
The year is 1896, and where a different one is taken it is so marked against the country in the table. The figures only represent the direct merchandise trade. All specie and bullion shipments are eliminated from the account.
II. Trade of India and Dependencies and of Colonies and other Possessions of the United Kingdom (Year ending March, 1897).
Names of Colonies and other Possessions.Number of inhabitants.Importations.Thousands of dollars.Exportations.Thousands of dollars.Imports per capita.Dollars.Exports per capita.Dollars.India and its dependencies[28]290,690284,026378,732.971.30Colonies.Cape Colony1,82091,80039,00050.0420.15Natal77818,0006,50023.158.20Gold Coast and other Central African possessions36,70019,00017,000.52.46Canada5,125118,000121,00023.0524.04West Indies3,61430,00025,0008.336.94Australasia and Oceanica4,793204,500210,00042.6543.75———————————————Trade of all countries under British flag343,520765,326797,232———————————————Trade of colonies with white population16,130461,320411,584Trade of Asiatic dependencies290,690284,026378,732
III. Trade of Foreign Possessions of all other Countries than the United Kingdom.
Countries and their Colonial Possessions.Number of inhabitants in thousands.Importations in thousands of dollars.Exportations in thousands of dollars.Imports per capita. Dollars.Exports per capita. Dollars.A.France(1894).Asia21,82116,00025,000.731.14Africa, outside of Algeria and Tunis24,50013,00022,000.53.50America and Oceanica46014,50012,60031.5027.40B.Germany(1897).Africa10,2002,1891,078.21.10New Guinea4007250.18.12C.Italy.Africa4005,6003,000D.Netherlands(1895).East India34,00061,00089,6001.802.63E.Philippines7,60011,00020,0001.502.63
Summary of Statistical Tables of the Trade of Colonies and Dependencies of European States and of Independent States other than of Europe and the United States.
Names of Divisions by Countries, Colonies, and Races.Number of inhabitants in thousands.Importations.Thousands of dollars.Exportations.Thousands of dollars.Inhabitants.Per cent to total.Imports.Per cent to total.Exports.Per cent to total.Totals of tabulations I, II, and III1,584,0991,587,7581,540,858100.0100.0100.0Under British flag343,520765,320797,23236.048.350.0Under all other flags605,180818,779790,52764.051.749.8Peoples of European descent69,430909,020831,9847.357.452.4Peoples of other races879,271675,079755,77492.742.647.6Anglo-Saxon17,130519,300407,5841.832.825.7Latin-American52,300389,700424,4005.524.626.7Asiatic races806,611618,079706,27485.039.044.0African races72,50057,00049,5007.73.63.6States and colonies, wool chief export11,100441,300394,5001.227.824.9
In examining these tables carefully the reader can form an idea as to how the world's trade is divided, and see what the world is arming to its teeth about.
The only Asiatic country about whose trade the possibilities of war may be entertained is China. Japan has shown her teeth and claws. The history of Poland, Port Arthur, or Kiao-tchow is not likely to find repetition on her territory. Only the defenseless tempt the avidity of the civilizing nations. The import trade of China, an empire with one fourth the population of the entire world, is but half as much again as that of Japan, with but one ninth of the population of the Celestial Empire. Japan's trade has trebled within the last dozen years. Her imports of merchandise are over two dollarsper capita. Those of China are thirty-four cents. It will be saidthat China parceled out to modern nations will vastly extend in trading opportunities. So it may. We have, however, national disposition to take into consideration. England has devoted her best efforts to India. After a century spent in bringing the various races to submission, the process of "benevolent assimilation" is helped along by a never-ending flow of capital from England. She has become the teacher and administrator of the people of Hither and Farther India. It is doubtful whether under existing conditions any better government for their three hundred millions could be devised by any outer force. Though England does her utmost, as she understands it, to make the people under her dominion happy and prosperous, although the rule of law and a degree of local independence are established, yet she finds small thanks from her wards. They have their own notions of happiness, and seem to prefer misery of their selection to the advantages of the white man's ordering. The fact is, the brown man and the yellow man have different notions and desires from the white man. No amount of jostling, pushing, and urging will make them take up our views, our tastes, our working methods, except in the due development of time. Our ideas as to necessaries of life and theirs are widely different. Their simple needs are easily supplied from native hands, who understand far better than our potters do the clay they have to deal with. The progress in trade will not be rapid, and will certainly be disappointing to those who expect to see it extend into general lines of merchandise. The import trade of India and its dependencies (1897) is $284,000,000, inclusive of Ceylon and the net trade of the Straits Settlements. This amount, directly catering to the wants of fully three hundred millions of people, is but about one third more than the net import trade of Australasia, with a population of less than five millions of people. Theper-capitaconsumption of imported merchandise of the Asiatic possessions of England is ninety-seven cents; of Australasia, $41.66. I must say here in explanation that the values of importations of merchandise, as published in the English returns and lately reproduced by the Bureau of Statistics of the Treasury Department, Colonial Systems of the World, is $305,000,000, which would make a showing of $63.33per capita. But in the English returns the intercolonial trade figures are included. The Treasury Bureau did not mention this in its publication, and gave thereby a basis for erroneous deductions. I have deducted all the intercolonial trade figures of imports and exports from the returns of each of the Australian colonies, so as to bring the figures to a basis of parity with the accounts of Canada, and other colonies and dependencies where no duplications of this kind are possible. The figures of importations remaining over are reduced by this processto £40,500,000, or about $200,000,000—$41.66per capita. The inhabitants of the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the world number but seventeen million. Their net imports of merchandise are $460,000,000. The seven hundred and thirty millions of Hindu and Mongolian populations import $530,000,000. These are the lands of fabled wealth. Antiquity and the middle ages dreamed of riches inexhaustible in connection with their names. To-day still the popular belief is that the wealth of nations is dependent on the conduct of direct trade with the far East. The country can not be rich whose millions find happiness in a sufficient supply of millet or rice, whatever the wealth of a small favored class may be. But these nations were the teachers of the barbarians whose descendants now populate America and Europe. The disciples have improved on the masters. We have improved the tools which they invented and applied new forces of production. We have cheapened the processes of production. We have quintupled, we have decupled time. But whatever our improvements in the tools, they are still our masters in the work. Any one who would endeavor to substitute the product of our mills in cotton, in silk, in wool, in wood, iron, clay, in lacquer, cloisonné, or enamel, for theirs, and not see at a glance the hopelessness, would indeed prove his incapacity for grasping the situation. Our best producers study with profit the work of China and, chiefly, of Japan, and are grateful for the inspiration they derive from it. But they do not attempt to copy. Neither in color effect nor design could they stand the test of comparison. Five thousand years have been recovered from the sepulcher under which they had been sleeping. But the oldest traces unearthed in the valley of the Euphrates still take us back to the farthest East as the originator of what we cover by the term "civilization." The Mongolian shares the lot of all who have benefited the race.
If we can not expect great openings for our mill products in Asia, Africa is a new field for the civilizing efforts of Europe, and will repay cultivating, perhaps. The negro has neither factories nor workshops. There at least is an unlimited field for trade expansion. Germany, the latest comer, with the zeal of all fresh missionaries, is eagerly taking up her colonizing mission. The result is not very encouraging. There is a fine set of buildings with garden spots and harbor improvements in the settlement at Cameroon, and a well-stocked graveyard of what were once good German boys, victims of the deadly climate and of the expansion fever. So far this is the only net showing to the credit side of the ledger. The territory in Africa covers nearly one million square miles. The possession of such an empire is worth a sacrifice, apparently, and Germany is not parsimonious in this direction. The contribution of the GermanGovernment to the administration fund of the African colonies was $2,194,000 in 1896-'97. This does not include the expense of maintaining the military and naval forces stationed in the African settlements. The annual importations of all the colonies amounted (in 1897) to $2,261,000, inclusive of New Guinea. So it costs the Government more than one dollar to enable its citizens to do a dollar's worth of trade. The population is estimated at 10,200,000. What possibilities stretch out before us, if they could be made to wear shirts or uniforms like the native police force, which has been organized at Cameroon! The extent of the territory, however, precludes the possibility of successfully conducting the missionary effort to induce them to wear clothes. The question also remains open what return could be made, even if the recipients could be brought to appreciate the advantage of a fuller covering of their nakedness than the traditional one.
France is in possession of territories in Africa, the population of which is on a more advanced status. The territories of the Senegal have been under French dominion for a period of two hundred years and more, and trade relations with the Senegal and Soudan have been assiduously cultivated. In Asia, Tonquin and Annam were to open the road to a very active trade with China. She has held undisputed lodgment since 1814 in Pondicherry and other towns in India that remained over to her from her East Indian empire conquered by Dupleix and abandoned by Louis XV's weak policy. Still, with all the tender care and an expenditure for the colonial service, as per budget of 1898, of about 80,000,000 francs, and not counting the colonial expenseêtatof the ministry of war and of the navy, the entire export trade of France to her Asiatic possessions is 35,000,000 francs; to her African dominions, outside of Algiers, 22,000,000 francs; and to her American possessions, with barely five hundred thousand inhabitants, 35,000,000 francs. The territories to which this trade caters have a population of about twenty-two million in Asia and twenty-five million in Africa. If we include the French islands in America and French Guiana, the exports of French merchandise to all her colonies amount to about 95,000,000 francs. If we include the allowance for colonial service from the naval and military budget, France has an expense that exceeds the amount of her colonial export trade. How much better off France would be if she would drop this burden! She could do the same trading and save her money, annually wasted, and her men annually slaughtered to the mania of colonial expansion.
The forty-five millions peopling the French possessions in Asia and tropical Africa consume altogether about $30,000,000 worth of foreign imports. The French share of this is about $11,000,000,or a little over one third—eleven millions of trade against fourteen millions of direct expense. The contributions to the American colonies are but $2,000,000, inclusive of about $1,000,000 to the penal establishment at Cayenne.
Italy's demonstration of the extent to which this madness can carry otherwise sane statesmen is fresh in everybody's memory. Outside of Russia, the poor—meaning the working classes—are in no country of Europe as poor as in Italy. If we take the production per acre in all the cereals as a gauge of interior development, then no European country west of Russia, not excepting Spain, is in a more backward state. Wise statesmanship would have found here a field for cultivation sufficiently large to tax all its energies. The peaceful acquisitions of industry did not satisfy the ambition of the Government. Conquests in equatorial Africa were deemed more essential to the kingdom's material welfare, but lately freed from the deadening grasp of clericalism and absolutism, than the improvement of opportunities lavishly present at home. What she has cultivated at an enormous expense of blood and treasure has borne the ordinary harvest of failure and disaster. The entire import trade of Massowah, to which the whole world contributed, and which is largely a transit trade, amounts to about $5,000,000. The expenditure on account of her Red Sea possessions for the year 1895-'96 is given in the Statesman's Year Book as 123,738,064 lires ($24,000,000). The contribution to the maintenance of this her "white man's burden," from 1882 to 1895, was 303,905,926 lires. At present (1897-'98), after the sobering lesson received in 1896, the net expense is about $3,500,000 (17,000,000 lires).
The three powers—France, Italy, and Germany—point a lesson of unmistakable significance. The figures speak for themselves. No amount of expense can make the African and the Asiatic consume an appreciable amount of European merchandise. No amount of cultivation can make the tropics endurable to the northern man. Labor and exertion on his part under the rays of a deadly sun and a miasma-breeding soil are entirely out of the question. Those who would make the endeavor in the manner of the temperate zone would only succeed the sooner in reaching the end of white man's settlement in the tropics, disease and death.
Many point to the Dutch East India settlements as a successful commercial enterprise. But, taking the best construction given to the story from the trader's point of view, the present satisfactory conditions have been reached after a great deal of disappointment, loss, and bloodshed. A large revenue is acquired from Government sales of colonial produce; still, with all this added to the other revenues from land tax, excise, and other duties, the Government hasa deficiency of over 10,000,000 florins a year in her East India possessions. The budget for 1898 shows an expenseétatof 146,150,164 florins, which is met by a revenue from all sources of but 135,204,203 florins.
This is the richest part of the Malay world, and for centuries has been in the possession of Europe's most enlightened people. The results, if theper-capitaunit of imports and exports is taken as a criterion, are not different from those shown in the account of the Philippines, governed for centuries by Spain. The loss of their colonies is ascribed to the oppressive rule which the Spaniards exercised. The Netherlands, devoting all their efforts to the development of the resources of the islands, at least during the greater part of this century, do not show much better results. The importsper capitaof the Dutch possessions are $1.80, and the exports $2.63. The imports of the Philippines are $1.50 and the exports $2.63per capita.
From this we may be permitted to deduce that the Malay Islands are not likely to prove a more thankful field for cultivation by our traders than to the extent indicated in the trade reports set forth above.
Under the conditions here delineated, it would be inviting all the risks and dangers connected with expansion and colonization, while nothing is to be gained in a commercial sense that can not be realized by the means now in our hands.
All the ends of trade can be attained without territorial expansion. The trade in the hands of peoples under English sovereignty is open to all commerce on equal terms. Not even the sovereign country, except in the recent concessions by Canada, receives a preference. The protection of the British flag is tendered gratis to the colonies and dependencies. The imports of these countries cover about one half of the trade of all the world, outside of Europe and the United States. Though they have but 4.67 per cent of the population, the Anglo-Saxon colonies do sixty-nine per cent of the trade of all the colonies and dependencies of the British Empire.
South and Central America absorb about one fourth—24.6 per cent of imports and 26.7 per cent of exports—of the world's trade here summarized. The colonies peopled by Anglo-Saxon population and the Latin-American states together, though but 7.3 per cent of the inhabitants, do an importing trade of 57.4 per cent of the trade of the world here reviewed. The countries trading under the protection of the British flag and the Latin-American states combined have about seventy-three per cent of that trade among them. All this trade, as well as by far the greatest part of the rest, is incontestablyaccessible to-day on an equal basis to all the world. The key to it lies in the best terms, the best value. The trader and not the admiral governs the field. Prince Heinrich will not succeed better than Admiral von Diederichs in convincing China of the advantages Germany can offer if Mr. Carnegie's rails are cheaper than Mr. Krupp's. A whole fleet of American battle ships will not convince the Asiatics that our cotton goods are as desirable as the English so long as the latter make goods suitable to their markets, and the Americans offer only products calculated to cover the home demands.
The golden rule is a more effective trade opener than the cannon's mouth. Fair and square dealing among nations does not entail expense, but brings in good returns. Our national policy, however, has been one studiously calculated to array the world against us. Like every policy in behalf of a selfish interest, it injures the foreign people against which it is directed far less than the nation which devises it.
The trade of Australasia, Argentina, and Uruguay, and the Cape is based chiefly on wool and hides. The imports of these countries, numbering but eleven million inhabitants, amount to $440,000,000, equaling in amount the trade of China, Japan, Persia, and India, with their seven hundred and fifty million inhabitants. Though but 1.2 per cent of the population of the world (outside of Europe and the United States), their imports are 27.8 per cent of the totals of the figures in the tables. In exports they do about $400,000,000, or 24.9 per cent of the total sum of exports here given. It would be worth cultivating friendly relations with them. They are inhabited by people of European stock, and come nearer to the standard of life of Americans than any of the other nations of the globe. Our latest effort to draw them closer to us was the Dingley tariff, with its duty of eleven cents a pound on greasy wool and of fifteen per cent on raw hides. The action can not be construed as a very friendly one. But neither is the effect as calculated by the wise heads who insisted on the provisions of the wool tariff, the woolen and worsted manufacturers of the East, and the wool raisers of the West. The wool and woolen trade of America has suffered many vicissitudes during the thirty-five years of high tariffs. It has gone through many periods of depression. But it is doubtful whether at any time more disastrous conditions existed than have marked the twelve months ending at this writing (March, 1899).
The situation can be appreciated from the fact that wool, imported prior to the passing of the Dingley tariff, is being reshipped to England, where it is bringing better prices than can be obtained here under the ægis of the protective duty of eleven cents a pound. Threeand a half million pounds were shipped in the seven months ending January 31st.
We should profit by this experience, try to cultivate friendly relations in parts of the world where advantageous trade connections can be established, instead of following theignis fatuusof Asiatic expansion.
ByEDMUND NOBLE.
It is an interesting and suggestive fact in Nature study that at the outset man was thrown utterly upon himself for the very vocabulary of the world-puzzle which presented itself to him for solution. He had not only to unriddle his "inscription in an unknown tongue," but to evolve even the possibility of an explanation out of his inner consciousness. His first theories of the universe were based, not on anything which the cosmos was, independently of him, but upon his own nature and activities as a living animal. This resort to himself as his chief means of interpretation resulted from the very nature of the knowing process; for knowledge of things is never in any absolute sense what things are, but is rather what they are like. When we cognize an object we do it by referring that object to the class of objects which in one or more respects it resembles. And as in this process we draw from the objects most familiar to us the principle of explanation which we need for the less familiar things that have not yet become part of our mental possessions, much depends upon priority in the setting up of mental classes, as well as on the strength of the impression which they make upon the mind. The earliest and deepest class impressions are necessarily those which arise out of man's knowledge of himself—of his body and the parts thereof, of his corporeal activities, and of his feelings and thoughts; next, of the bodies of other men and of their movements; finally, in the order of vividness, of the animate and inanimate objects most nearly related to his life. It is these classes which, by virtue of their priority and strength, naturally acquire dominating influence over all later acquirements, and it is to them that the mind refers the impressions gained from the more remote inorganic world.
Among the simpler illustrations of the effort man makes to assimilate the external system to himself are those with which we are more or less familiar in the domain of language. We find them first in the forms for gender by which, in all inflectional tongues, inanimate objects are to this extent likened to living animals. A similar tendencyis at work in the widespread lingual habit of naming things after parts of the body, as in the case of "door," called the "eye of the house" by the native of Banks' Island; of "son-tree," the term applied by the Siamese to "fruit"; of the Malay's use of the noun "child" for "lock"; of "house-belly," the African Mandingo's equivalent for "in the house"; and of "hair," often used for "leaf" or "feather" in many Melanesian languages.[29]In more modern forms of speech the process is suggested by such expressions as theheadof a bridge, theeyeof a needle, themouthof a river, theneckof an estuary, thetrunkandarmsof a tree, thelungsof a bellows, thebonesof an umbrella, thenoseof a promontory, theearsof a book, thefingersof a clock, thelegsof a table, theveinsof marble, thefootof a mountain. Then there are analogies based on the activities of the human body, for when we describe things as standing, sitting, or lying; as rising, falling, running, or climbing—when we use expressions like "striking clock," "dancing light," "sleeping lake," "yawning precipice," "laughing skies," "babbling brooks," "raging billows," we are applying to the objects named terms originally used to describe our own acts. The sense of hearing, again, is utilized in such expressions astaube Nuss("with nothing in the shell") andtaube Kohlen("those which have burned out"). So the defect of blindness is objectified in thecæcum vallumof Roman speech, inciego, said in Spanish of cheese that "has no eyes," and in theblinder Schussof the Germans, whose more familiarAugenblickeverybody recalls. Not less suggestive are the numerous expressions which project conceptions of life and death into the environment, such as thecaput mortuum(tête morte) of chemistry,eau vive(Quellwasser), "dead water" (turn of the tide),todte Farbeandlebhafte Farbe,vivus lapis(firestone), "quicksand" and "quicksilver," the "dead of night," "dead weight," a "dead level," andtodtes Kapital. Nor must we forget that the reading of vitality into inorganic objects, common enough among savages, has by no means disappeared from civilized races. Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries have shown that out of forty-eight children just attaining school age, twenty believed the moon and stars to be alive, fifteen thought a doll and sixteen thought flowers would suffer pain if burned. One pupil described the crescent moon as "half stuck" or "half buttoned" into the sky; the spluttering of coals in a fire was called "barking" by a girl four years and a half old. Miss Ingelow says that when over two years old, and for about a year after, she had the habit of attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, but even to stones and manufactured articles.
This projection of words originally descriptive of the human bodyor of its activities into the objective world of Nature finds its richest illustrations in poetry,[30]where it may be held to represent less the elaborate artifice of a cultured mind than one of the most primitive tendencies of that mind powerfully swayed by emotion. Yet the process belongs equally to the more prosaic efforts which man puts forth to utilize the objects of his environment in the interests of self-maintenance. One of the earliest of these is seen in the use of words describing parts of the body to facilitate the description of the external world in its numerical aspects. Thus the Chinese use for "two" certain syllables (nyandceul) which originally mean "ears," the Hottentots employing the word for "hand" in the same sense. In middle high German the word for "sheaf" (Schock) signifies sixty, and is applied in that sense to all kinds of objects. The Letts, owing to their habit of throwing fish three at a time, employ the wordmettens, "a throw," in the sense of "three." Among the same people flounders are tied in lots of thirty, whence has arisen the practice of designating thirty by the wordkahlis, meaning "cord." The Quichuas attach the significance of ten to the wordchuncu, "heap." The Gallas word for "half" has been traced to the verbchaba, "to break," and is the equivalent of our own word "fraction." So in a large number of languages the term for hand signifies "five," "two hands" meaning ten, and "man" ("two hands and two feet") twenty.
A like origin must be claimed for the measures of space and weight needed by man in his industrial and commercial activities. The finger, the thumb, the hand, the palm, the forearm, the foot—the extended arms, as in the ancientorgya, and the extended legs, as in the modern yard—have all played a fundamental part in determining the standard measures of the civilized world. To the same class belong the γυη, the extent of field that could be worked by a laborer in one day; thestade, the distance which a good runner could traverse without stopping to take rest; also measures of time, such as the old division of the day based on the length of a man's shadow.
The human body was thus of primary importance as a means of comprehending and coming into relations with the external world. But men also sought to make the environment intelligible to them by projecting into it the images gained from the more general aspects of their life. Such phrases as "pig of iron," "monkey wrench," "battering ram," "lifting crane," remind us of a period in which objects were actually shaped so as to enable the mind to accommodate itself more completely to the thought of their vitality. The Greek sailing vessel, for example, was so constructed—with the body of a bird, with cheeks, eyes, and projecting ears—as to make it seem tothe navigators of the time as almost alive. And the dolphins, eagles, ravens, and dragons which threatened England from the prows of the invading Danish fleet have had their prototypes in almost every nation that has betaken itself to the sea.
Not less suggestive are the more general aspects of the process. Our ancestor called the earth's satellite the "moon," or "measurer," because it served him as a divider of time. The familiar grains of wheat and barley which he harvested became the units of his measures. So the names of his seasons were based on the fall of the leaves, the reappearance of particular stars, or the periodical inundations upon which he depended for his food. The most primitive method in chronology is that which enables man to orient himself in the world of time by associating particular lunations with vicissitudes of weather, with seasonal aspects of vegetation, and with the constantly changing sights and sounds of the animal world. In the calendar of the Crees,[31]for example, we find such designations as "duck-month," "frog-moon," "leaf-moon," "berries-ripe-month," "buffalo-rutting moon," "leaves-entirely-changed," "leaves-in-the-trees," "fish-catching-moon," "moon-that-strikes-the-earth cold," "coldest-moon," "ice-thawing-moon," "eagles-seen-moon." So in the calendars of Central America and Mexico,[32]the months are named variously after the arrival of birds, the blossoming of flowers, the blowing of winds, the return of mosquitoes, and the appearance of fishes. The Greeks constantly used the movements of birds to mark the seasons; the arrival of the swallow and kite were thus noted. Hesiod tells us how the cry of the crane signaled the departure of winter, while the setting of the Pleiades gave notice to the plowman when to begin his work. The Incas[33]called Venus "the hairy," on account of the brightness of her rays, just as the Peruvians named her the "eight-hour torch," or "the twilight lamp," from the time of her shining. One at least of the three portions into which the Greeks divided their night received its name—περὶ λυχνων ἁφάς—from the social custom of lighting the lamps at dusk. For whole races the departure of the sun made night a time of danger, and man did his best to lessen the mystery of the heavens by filling their obscure depths with the figures of animals and heroes, or by likening their shining lines of cosmic cloud to a road or highway for the march of beings celestial and terrestrial. Thus, for the speakers of Sanskrit the Milky Way was "The Path of the Gods"; the Lithuanians dubbed it "The Bird Road"; in Low German it is known as "TheWay of Cows"; the Cymris associated it with the course of the wind; for Scandinavians it was "The Road of Winter"; the Persians viewed it as the route along which the straw carrier drew his burden; to this day the Winnebagoes call it "The Way of the Chiefs."[34]
Science itself is indebted to terms and phrases in which outer realities are assimilated to the circumstances of the life lived by man and by the societies which he forms. Such words as "attraction," "repulsion," "resistance," "nature," "body," "atom," "current," contain obviously anthropomorphic elements. The human origin of the idea conveyed by the term "inertia" may be more or less veiled by unfamiliar Latin elements, yet it is recovered for us again inTrägheit, "idleness," the German form of the word. The phrase "natural selection" contains a teleological element which has more than once been used to throw discredit on the process which it describes. And when one observes how persistently such an anthropopathic expression as "affinity" is still applied to chemical reaction, or with whatnaïvetéthe term "law" is transferred from the realm of human jurisprudence into the domain of natural processes, one ceases to wonder at the constant confusions of outer with inner in which so much of the psychomorphism of the time has had its origin.
It would be strange, then, if, seen in so many of man's efforts to interpret the inanimate things around him, this process of self-projection should not also be valid for the larger relations of his mental activity to the universe. It is but a step, in fact, from the application of anthropomorphic words to the objects and processes of Nature, to the employment regarding such processes of anthropomorphic thought. As the child finds the satisfaction of its fancy in the discovery of some strange face as suggested to him in the decorations of the wall paper which surrounds his sick-bed, or in tracing out from the contours of clothes hung up within range of his vision the preposterous outline or figure of some human likeness or caricature, so the savage, with a deeper purpose born of necessity, traces out from the larger patterns of the moving world about him the organic shapes, embodying will and personality, that are to serve him as explanations of the external power which touches his existence for good or for evil, and which, thus serving him, enable him to come into relations with that power. It is the deepest interests of human life which make this process necessary, and it is of the very nature of the process that the characters thus projected into the environment must always—throughout the history of human ascent, and at every particular stage of it—be closely and definitely correlated with the degree and kind of the self-knowledge which is its source.
The earliest of the animal characters displaying this correlation, and used as a means of understanding the environment, could not well have been other than that of motion. That by the higher mammals, at any rate, moving things, even when inorganic, are generally regarded as alive, is a view rendered probable by a large body of evidence.[35]But when man finally appeared on the scene, a new element came in to complicate the merely animal attitude in which vitality was attributed to inanimate objects in motion. By contemplating the phenomena of his subjective life, and observing analogous phenomena in his fellow-beings—through the consideration of dreams, swoons, even death itself—our ancestor discovered in himself a character deeper than that of vitality; came to recognize that the living creature, animal and human, possesses an inner principle or essence underlying its activities; is not only "alive," but also "animated." At first the conception of vitality was one with the conception of bodily activity; at last man learned to differentiate the movements of the body from an inner essence to which he believed them to be due—learned, in a word, to distinguish between the corporeal existence and the soul. And having effected this first rude division of the characters of soul from the merely physical attributes of life, our ancestor soon projected the new view which he had reached of himself into the objects of his environment. The beneficent influences of Nature, so necessary to his life, he now invested with the good purposes of the better nature within him; in the maleficent forces of the cosmos he read the malignant will of his own angry passions.
But it is not as mere phenomena that these powers, thus finally ensouled and regarded as personal, can be thought about. In the beginning the human mind carries on its mental processes largely with the aid of images—recovered images of something seen, heard, felt, or tasted—and is yet far off from the stage of scientific thought in which abstract concepts take the place of the recovered mental pictures which have been yielded through the senses. Man thus needed concrete images with which to think about the personal powers of the external world, and he naturally found them in the animal and human shapes already familiar to him. Discovering some likeness between a Nature force and some animal, he henceforth associated the two, and recalled the image of the animal as the more concrete means of mental recovery when he wished to think of the abstract Nature power. Or, associating some departed ancestor, relative, hero, or king with the Nature force—an association which would be greatly strengthened by belief in the survival of the soul after death—hegradually confounded the disembodied human power with the soul of the Nature power, and through the law of least effort, used the concrete image of the departed human being to stand in his mental processes for the much more difficult thought of the Nature force. But, whatever the process, animal shapes were obviously needed to reduce the Nature powers to such a degree of concreteness as would make it possible for primitive man to deal with them as objects of thought. And it is not less certain that while, for some races, the earliest shapes thus utilized were those of the lower animals, the final form for all races was that of man himself.
In the anthropomorphic stage, then, there is the same effort to understand the external system by assimilating it to something with which man is already familiar. The worshiped deities may be many or few, numberless as the Nature forces, polytheistic as among the Greeks and Romans, or one as in the monotheism of the Semite. Man likens them to himself, attributes to them not only his outward shape, but also his failings and virtues, making his Pantheon resemble not only the social order, but also the political system under which he happens to live. It is the completeness of this assimilation which made anthropomorphism the most persistent aspect of man's intellectual growth the world has known. Yet the view could linger only as the possession of the intellectually slothful and immature. The inadequacy, the crudeness, of the conception in which Deity was imaged as a gigantic man gradually forced itself upon the attention of the more thoughtful. Increased mental activity, a better acquaintance with natural processes, brought the idea of a power above Nature rather than merely superior to man; and as the human mind passed from the conception of the superhuman to that of the supernatural—as, moreover, the thought of merely local gods gave way to the idea of gods not limited in their functions to particular areas—the anthropomorphic shapes naturally fell away from the powers they could no longer adequately represent.
Then other changes, strictly correlated with man's advancing knowledge of himself, ushered in the latest stage of his attitude toward the external system. For in the same mind which had been compelled to reject crude anthropomorphism, there had been growing the consciousness of man as something more than a mere compound of vitality, consciousness, and will—something more than a set of bodily and mental capacities essential to the work of self-maintenance—the thought that man was the sum of his higher, not of his lower qualities, that henceforth he must be measured by the activities which he carried on in the domain of pure thought. And this recognition of mental attributes as the most worthy, the most exalted characters of human personality, could not fail to impress itself upon the conceptionof deity already undergoing deanthropomorphization. More and more, therefore, in the higher mind of the race, the Divine Being, not only losing his former bodily form, but yielding even the grosser attributes of personality with which he has been invested, becomes for the thought of man a psychical being in the deepest sense of that term. Anthropomorphism, or man-likening, passes away, and in its place comes psychomorphism, or mind-likening.
Two aspects are thus recognizable in the mental interpretation of the environment: on the one hand an aspect which may be called causal, since it seeks the source of the power exerted by Nature forces and objects; on the other, an aspect which is obviously formal, its main significance being that it condenses, so to speak, groups of qualities into a single mental sign. The causal aspect yields, in howsoever simple or complex a form, a theory of the cosmos or of its parts; the formal aspect is no more than a means, ready at hand, in the visible bodies of animals and men for facilitating the use of that theory in processes of thought. Hence we may regard vitalism, animism, psychomorphism as so many stages of man's attitude toward the external system, corresponding with the degree of his power to apprehend the more abstract as distinguished from the more particular and superficial characters of things that come within the range of his knowledge. In the first, he explicitly recognizes vitality, the most obvious character of Nature force; in the second, subsuming vitalism, he raises the soul life to the place of honor; in the third, subsuming both vitalism and animism, he emphasizes in psychomorphism the highest human qualities which his mind enables him to recognize.
The passage from the idea of multiplicity to that of unity is itself an inseparable part of the total process. As at the beginning man reads vitality into the separate objects and forces of Nature, without any thought of their underlying unity, so he regards as discrete, unconnected, objectively unrelated, the multifarious souls with which, in his thought, these various powers of the environment have come to be animated. But in course of time, by an inner necessity of intellectual growth, relations come to be perceived between the forces of Nature, likenesses are recognized between the functions of spirits and deities—between the powers put forth and the results achieved. The result is a process of coalescence which, to describe it in the briefest way, first merges a large number of spirit-evolved gods into a smaller number of relatively independent divinities, forms these into pantheons of gods each subordinated to a superior, and finally unites all beings regarded as divine in the single, all-comprehending, omniscient and omnipotent Deity of monotheism.
In all this advance, moreover, we find that the process illustratedby the changing phases of man's mental attitude toward Nature also holds good of the multifarious acts by which, in what is known as religion, man has sought to realize that attitude in conduct. For, in seeking to adjust himself to the system of Power, man has been forced to conceive of his Pantheon in terms as well of his social arrangements as of the political system under which he happened to be living. The spirit world of a horde of savages could only reflect the indefiniteness and disunion of the nomads whose imagination it satisfied. But as the household made its appearance, as a definite social structure arose, and the straggling tribes began to be united into nations, the gods themselves took on the characters of an analogous transformation. The divine selfishness—the "remota ab nostris rebus"—long ago satirized by the poet Lucretius, obviously correlated with the attitude of man toward man, just as naturally gave way, with the growth of the social sympathies, to the thought of that more active concern in human affairs which is one of the salient characters of the later phases of monotheism. The original indifference of Deity toward ethical issues—a widespread feature of the earlier religious conceptions—could not but pass away with the moral stagnation of the ancient communities out of which it had arisen. So the comparatively new thought of a God definitely identified in his aims and activities with the cause of moral reform is no less obviously a result of the new attitude of man himself toward problems of social improvement; while the persistence with which, in human thought, morals remain associated with religion sufficiently illustrates the extent to which man's view of each has been determined by the self-knowledge which underlies his attitude toward both. Note also, finally, the manifest relation in which our human thought regarding mind and body has always stood toward conceptions of a world-soul, and then the dependence of man's view of the relation of God to the world upon the knowledge of his own planet and of its place in the universe. For as long as our ancestor held the old geocentric theory of the cosmos—regarded the heavens as a set of spheres revolving around a flat earth—the thought of a deity outside the world related to it as a mechanician might be to a cunningly devised piece of clockwork which he had brought into existence, was inevitable. But when the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth century co-operated with the revelations of Galilei to secure the final triumph of the Copernican over the Ptolemaic theory of the world-order, the ancient view of Deity as external to his creation gave place to the essentially modern conception of his immanence.
If now we attentively examine the progress above described, we shall find that the earliest attitude of the human mind toward the external system tends in the latest to repeat itself on a higher planeand with a richer content. Thus vitalism, by the process of unification and intensification, culminates in anthropomorphic monotheism, while animism, through the coalescence of objects and forces at first believed to be separately animated, finally develops into pantheism. These two lines of thought, moreover, tend themselves to converge, or, at any rate, to become interchangeable, since monotheism, by deanthropomorphizing itself, approximates to pantheism, as is well seen in the Christian theologies and ethical religions of the world; while pantheism, by emphasizing the characters of intelligence and will, is sometimes hardly to be distinguished from those modern forms of monotheism which teach the doctrine of immanence. The intellectual outcome of the whole movement, embodying the modern attitude in Nature philosophy, is thus no longer anthropomorphism, but psychomorphism, since it reads into the universe, not the characters which distinguish human beings from the lower animals, but the highest manifestation of the characters recognized to be common to both, namely, psychic characters—the characters, in a word, of mind. For the deepest reaches of human thought, the process of man-likening has thus given way to the process of mind-likening. On the subjective side of mental inquiry we get psychomorphic monotheism, or what may be called theological pantheism; while on the objective side we reach scientific pantheism, or monism. It is true that the psychomorphism of scientific monism is reached by a process different from that which has culminated in the mind-likening of theological pantheism. Yet in both cases there is the same projection of intelligence into the external system as a means of comprehending it. And as the intelligence of atoms implies their vitality, we really return in scientific monism to the vitalistic attitude of the primitive observer of Nature. The salient difference between the two views is this: that while early man subsumed under his concept of vitality only the rudest characters thereof, the terms in the mind of the monist connotes in all their richness the ideas associated with mind.
Enough has now been said to show the basis on which rests the whole superstructure, of man's mental attitude toward the cosmos. Despite all uncertainties regarding the details of the process, we may be assured of its fundamental nature, and are thus compelled to recognize the dependence of the forms of man's mental attitude toward the universe upon his knowledge of himself. It is because his own actions have their source in a personal will that he refers external movements to will. He is conscious of his own acts, and the world around him can not be devoid of a like illumination. Does he himself plan? Nature must also be intelligent. And the highest qualities which he can discover in himself he reads unhesitatingly into the cosmos.
At first sight, then, knowledge may seem inextricably involved in the process here described. If man can not know the external system to which he must adapt himself save by assimilating it to himself—save by interpreting it on the basis of analogies which he discovers between his own body and its activities, and the world with its activities—are we not committed by our very nature as organisms to all the errors which that nature imposes upon us? If, in other words, every effort to view the universe as it is, independently of us, be rendered impossible by the very nature of the knowing process, with what chance of success shall we seek to eliminate those vitalistic and psychomorphic characters which seem to belong to that process as its very warp and woof? In reality our knowledge inflicts upon us no such dilemma. Man is the helpless "measure of the universe" only to the extent that his reasoning processes are undeveloped. That knowledge must always have a subjective element is undoubted, but that man must always mistake the subjective vesture with which things are clothed by the senses for the things themselves is an inference which the whole history of thought negatives. While his life remained simple, primitive man could regard appearances as realities without prejudicing the overplus of utility brought to him by his knowledge. Yet as his relation to the natural surroundings grew in complexity, the importance of the reasoning process, with its veto power over the deliverances of the senses, began to assert itself. At first accepted with little or no demur, these deliverances came more and more to be challenged in the interest of self-maintenance; and finally, by expansion of a germ possessed by the mind in the beginning, there was developed that way of dealing with the testimony of appearances which we call the objective method. The evidence previously accepted had been, though on the whole useful, in large measure misleading. For in appearances men saw and felt mainly what Nature was for them, and only to a minor degree what the external world was for and in itself. The great need of the investigator of Nature is to know what things are independently of man, in order to know how they act on one another, as a means of knowing how they will act on the human organism, and how that organism may react on them in the interest of its own life. The prejudice done by implicit reliance on sense testimony arose out of the fact that it presented objects as largely unrelated to each other—as so much being, rather than as so much doing, acting and interacting, determining and interdetermining. It became the function of reason to develop, out of the material furnished by the senses, a knowledge of the true nature of the system external to man and involving him in its scope which we call universe. In the carrying out of this function the analogical process has remained, but the analogies utilized,from being likenesses between what things seem to be to the senses, have more and more become analogies between propositions made regarding what things do, regarding how things act upon, are related to and determine each other.
Our knowledge of Nature, therefore, illustrates progress from a stage in which external objects are viewed as so much doing—from a stage in which they seem more or less isolated, more or less independent of each other—to a stage in which we know them as acting and interacting, and therefore, by virtue of this action and interaction, as interrelated and interdependent. It was because man had to begin with the thought of the world around him as a series of unconnected aspects that he fell into the error of regarding every object as containing within itself the powers which it put forth; it was by gradually progressing to the knowledge of the external system as a process that he discovered how inextricably the smallest "flower in the crannied wall" is linked to its vastest environment, and how dependent must be the mechanism of the molecule, as well as of the solar system, upon the whole universe Power which we call cosmos.
Thus also is it with man's method of interpreting the external world system. At first unable to fully perceive his own relation to that system, as part of his inability to perceive general cosmic relations, and therefore viewing himself as more or less independent of Nature—as something imposed upon it rather than as something arising out of it—he naturally sought to force it for purposes of explanation into the narrow limits of his knowledge of himself, of his feelings, his thoughts, his institutions. But as he grew in the power to comprehend his place in the system of things—to understand the way in which the objects and forces of the world were related to each other, together with the way in which he, as knowing organism, was related to the universe—he gradually ceased from his vain striving to subject the cosmos to himself, and at last learned not only to subordinate himself to the cosmos, but to trace to it unreservedly the whole method and meaning of his origin as a living, thinking organism. Man in the beginning could be no more than the measure of the universe. That he has come at last, wielding the objective method, to be its measurer, is the culmination of a struggle between false and true ways of interpreting Nature which has had the whole history of human thought for its arena, and for its final triumph the establishment of the objective or scientific method of investigation upon impregnable foundations.