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iations which enable man and other animals to interpret sensations without experience. The scarlet paint and wolfskin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon-mask of a medicine man, appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to our instinctive nature. But even in very early societies the recognition of artificial political entities must generally have owed its power of stimulating impulse to associations acquired during life. A child who had been beaten by the herald's rod, or had seen his father bow down before the king, or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or the king, or the stone by association. Recognition often attaches itself to certain special points (whether naturally developed or artificially made) in the thing recognised. Such points then become symbols of the thing as a whole. The evolutionary facts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eating insects a putrid smell is a sufficiently convincing symbol of carrion to induce them to lay their eggs in a flower, and that the black and yellow bands of the wasp if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keep off birds.[11] In early political society most recognition is guided by such symbols. One cannot make a new king, who may be a boy, in all respects like his predecessor, who may have been an old man. But one can tattoo both of them with the same pattern. It is even more easy and less painful to attach a symbol to a king which is not a part of the man himself, a royal staff for instance, which may be decorated and enlarged until it is useless as a staff, but unmistakable as a symbol. The king is then recognised as king because he is the 'staff-bearer' ([Greek: skeptouchos basileus]). Such a staff is very like a name, and there may, perhaps, have been an early Mexican system of sign-writing in which a model of a staff stood for a king. [11] Cf. William James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p. 392:--'The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is the history of our taking advantage of the ways in which they judge of everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill them.' At this point it is already difficult not to intellectualise the whole process. Our own 'common-sense' and the systematised common-sense of the eighteenth-century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tribal man for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded thereby of the original social contract betwee
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