on to them. For proof of the
uniformity of human reasoning, indeed, we have to begin almost from an
animal plane. 'Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food,
subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and
cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is?' And not only
is men's hunger, and their sensitiveness to 'the same summer and winter'
similar: their ways of satisfying hunger, their conduct of the
food-quest, their elementary organizations 'for the sake of maintaining
life', as Aristotle expressed it, exhibit one mental type throughout. In
the domestication of nature's gifts it is the same: in the fashioning of
implements and weapons, the improvisation of clothing and shelter, the
almost instinctive impulse to 'play with fire' which repels other
animals. Style and finish may vary, and do vary widely from one province
of culture to another; but in their last mechanical analysis, a spade is
a spade all the world over, and a celt a celt.

It was the service of the late General Pitt-Rivers in this country, and
of Klemm more laboriously abroad, to establish this aspect of the
'Evolution of Culture' beyond controversy: as it was the work of Boucher
de Perthes, and of Sir John Evans and Sir John Lubbock to proceed in the
reverse direction, from a criterion of utility to a hypothesis of
design, and the conclusion that certain stones, of reputedly prehuman
antiquity, must be the work of human hands, geared to human brains like
ours. Tylor's wider range of observation, conspicuously supplemented by
other work of Lubbock, embraced all human activities in one formula of
comparison, which is indeed as old as Thucydides.[4] We can infer, that
is, something about early stages of an advanced culture from the
present-day practices of savagery.

Yet, across this 'primitive culture', to use a phrase which has become
classical, so reasonable, and therewith so full of uniformities, in its
intimate interplay of hand and tongue with brain, patches of shadow
fall; a chaos of such incredible absurdities and (in the widest sense)
of 'barbarities', that the charitable hypothesis that here and there man
has lost his way and just _stopped thinking_ hardly seems adequate to
account for things, and writers like Levy-Bruhl are provoked to the
pessimist guess that there can be a savage logic which is different from
ours and yet is 'logical' in some