ound; or that the
tears shed by human victims, sacrificed to mother earth, will bring down
showers upon the land. Mr. Tylor cites Lord Chesterfield's remark, "that
the king had been ill, and that people generally expected the illness
to be fatal, because the oldest lion in the Tower, about the king's age,
had just died. 'So wild and capricious is the human mind,'" observes
the elegant letter-writer. But indeed, as Mr. Tylor justly remarks, "the
thought was neither wild nor capricious; it was simply such an argument
from analogy as the educated world has at length painfully learned to be
worthless, but which, it is not too much to declare, would to this
day carry considerable weight to the minds of four fifths of the human
race." Upon such symbolism are based most of the practices of divination
and the great pseudo-science of astrology. "It is an old story, that
when two brothers were once taken ill together, Hippokrates, the
physician, concluded from the coincidence that they were twins, but
Poseidonios, the astrologer, considered rather that they were born under
the same constellation; we may add that either argument would be thought
reasonable by a savage." So when a Maori fortress is attacked, the
besiegers and besieged look to see if Venus is near the moon. The moon
represents the fortress; and if it appears below the companion planet,
the besiegers will carry the day, otherwise they will be repulsed.
Equally primitive and childlike was Rousseau's train of thought on the
memorable day at Les Charmettes when, being distressed with doubts as to
the safety of his soul, he sought to determine the point by throwing a
stone at a tree. "Hit, sign of salvation; miss, sign of damnation!"
The tree being a large one and very near at hand, the result of the
experiment was reassuring, and the young philosopher walked away without
further misgivings concerning this momentous question. [158]

When the savage, whose highest intellectual efforts result only in
speculations of this childlike character, is confronted with the
phenomena of dreams, it is easy to see what he will make of them.
His practical knowledge of psychology is too limited to admit of his
distinguishing between the solidity of waking experience and what we may
call the unsubstantialness of the dream. He may, indeed, have learned
that the dream is not to be relied on for telling the truth; the Zulu,
for example, has even reached the perverse triumph of critical logic