s are the outcome. The
evidence of these facts and phenomena is to be found scattered up and
down the pages of writers of every age, creed and country. On hardly any
subject have men of such different degrees of learning, such various and
opposite prejudices, left us their testimony--testimony from the nature
of the subject more than ordinarily liable to be affected by prejudice,
and by the limitations of each witness's powers of observation and
opportunities of ascertaining the truth. But after all deductions for
prejudice, mistake, inaccuracy and every other shortcoming, there is
left a strong, an invincible consensus of testimony, honest, independent
and full of undesigned corroborations, to the development of the mind of
all races in the lower culture along the lines here indicated. Nay,
more; the numerous remains of archaic institutions, as well as of
beliefs among the most advanced nations, prove that they too have passed
through the very same stages in which we find the most backward still
lingering--stages which the less enlightened classes even of our own
countrymen at the present day are loth to quit. And the further we
penetrate in these investigations, the more frequent and striking are
the coincidences between the mental phenomena already described which
are still manifested by savage peoples, and those of which the evidence
has not yet disappeared from our own midst.

Nor need we be surprised at this, for the root whence all these
phenomena spring is the predominance of imagination over reason in the
uncivilized. Man, while his experience is limited to a small tract of
earth, and his life is divided between a struggle with nature and his
fellow-man for the permission and the means to live, on the one hand,
and seasons of idleness, empty perforce of every opportunity and every
desire for improving his condition, on the other, cannot acquire the
materials of a real knowledge of his physical environment. His only data
for interpreting the world and the objects it contains, so far as he is
acquainted with them, are his own consciousness and his own emotions.
Upon these his drafts are unbounded; and if he have any curiosity about
the origin and government of things, his hypotheses take the shape of
tales in which the actors, whatever form they bear, are essentially
himself in motive and deed, but magnified and distorted to meet his
wishes or his fears, or the conditions of the problem as presented to
his limite