The simplest normal human mind now to be found anywhere has its philosophy of life that, more or less crudely, attempts a solution of the great problems of fact and existence. For example, in all the history of modern anthropology no tribe of people however low has been discovered which has not had some sort of religion. Many attempts have been made to reconstruct the mind of our earliest progenitors and make out the stages through which have been evolved thoughts of life, magic, medicine, religion, and philosophy. Too many of these attempts have been philosophical speculations based on few and often doubtful facts.
It is only since anthropologists have advanced the view, noted above, that the mental constitution of man is essentially the same in every age and under every condition, that the importance of a careful, scientific study of existing customs, mythology, language, and archeology, as an aid to the retracing of the steps of psychic evolution, has been recognized. Since the adoption of this view there have been a few scientific men and women who have put themselves in a position to form an intimate acquaintance with the facts in these fields. It is in the main upon such studies and upon the further light to be gained from the modern "child study" movement that our conceptions of the naive thought of the race should be based. The outline which follows is based upon such authority.
It has been determined to the satisfaction of every competent authority that no artificial boundaries can be set up between the mind of man and that of the animal. There are stages of human thought so elemental as not to be capable of distinction from that of the animal. So nearly as we can determine, the consciousness of the animal is a nebulous, undifferentiated jumble of subject and object, of sensation and the thing sensed.
According to Bogoras (10a), Clodd (20a), and many other authorities, such a state is to be found among low primitive tribes today. Environment and social intercourse have developed from this elemental state all the complex states of our now highly specialized consciousness. It is difficult to make out definite steps in such development, because the simplest conceptions remain and have the higher superimposed upon them. It is even possible that they develop side by side. In spite of this difficulty there is practical agreement upon some such development as we shall now trace.
The most elemental stage may be termed the subjective in which the objects and activities of the universe were not differentiated. The perception of motion and of the resistance to motion repeated again and again in the experience of the individual led to a vague idea of life, in its earliest form little distinguished from motion itself. In this stage there was no conception of spirit. The object was self-active. The perception of motion suggested the invisible which aroused the emotion of fear which to Hobbes and to many since his day was the "natural seed of religion." The terrors of the storm, the resistance which his will met in all the objects and beings about him, the injuries which he received when he fell upon some object or it upon him, led man to a view which differs slightly and is, possibly, an advance upon the one just mentioned.
Miracles of Healing
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
By Charles W. Waddle (1909)
Primitive Christian Worship
Hereditary genius
