We have now seen the ways of life which have been developed by four primitive peoples in their efforts to conceive and live the good life, a life which would satisfy their nature and its needs. We have seen the states of affairs which they regard as good and the rules which they regard as right, and the judgements which they pass on their own and other people's conduct. We have seen their ideals of personal development, of social welfare and of intergroup relations, and the conditions which they think must be satisfied by individuals and groups if these ideals are to be realised. We have seen the institutions in which they have embodied their rules and ideals, and the way in which the institutions of each are related to form a more or less unified way of life, in which they mutually support one another. It is their conception of this way of life in which their ideals are concretely embodied which calls forth their supreme loyalty. It is to them the ultimate source of moral obligation. What it seems to require they regard as a duty. What seems to be inconsistent with it, however strong its appeal, they regard as wrong. All their judgements of rightness and goodness are passed in the light of it.

Now I have been assuming that the moral judgements of these people are deliverances of the moral consciousness and that they are therefore part of the data of ethics, part of what has to be taken into account in formulating and testing ethical theories. In other words, I have been assuming that the primitive moral consciousness is the same as, and proceeds on the same principle or principles as, our own. But is this assumption really justified? Even if it is agreed that the ways of life in the light of which these people pass their moral judgements embody their conception of what is required to satisfy their nature and its needs, is that nature and are those needs the same as ours? Are these peoples, in fact, trying to do the same thing or to realise the same ideal as we are? Are the constitution and powers of the minds of those who developed these forms of life and find them good the same as our own? Only if this is the case are we justified in claiming that the moral judgements which they pass in the light of them are expressions of the moral consciousness as we understand the term, and therefore relevant to our ethical enquiries. And this is the case unless either the needs, desires and interests which constitute the contents of the self, or the ways of integrating them demanded by the nature of the self, or the self's powers to conceive and meet these demands, are different in the case of the primitives and ourselves. So far as I am aware, no one has suggested that the desiring nature of the self, which has its roots in the instincts which man shares with the lower animals, differs from one people to another. It is in the control, direction and integration of this material that the differences between different peoples are to be found, and it is the demand for this integration which makes man a moral being. Are, then, the ways in which the demand for this integration operates, the factors from which it arises and the powers required to meet it, thought and imagination, reason and self-consciousness, in principle the same among all peoples? And if they are the same, are they sufficiently developed among primitives to enable them to form the concepts and to grasp the relations and rules and principles which we use in our moral judgements?

When we compare with one another and with our own the ways of life of the peoples whom we have been considering, the moral judgements which they pass, the states of affairs which they regard as good, the rules which they consider right, the ideals which they try to realise, and so on, we find striking resemblances between them; but the differences between them are no less significant; and they seem to apply not merely to details but to ideals and rules and scales of value. It is easy to explain the resemblances, if we accept the assumption that the nature and needs of the peoples who developed the ways of life and pass the moral judgements are the same. But how, on this assumption, can we account for the differences not only in the actual conduct of the different peoples but in their judgements on conduct, in the things they regard as right and the ideals they regard as good? Can these differences be explained without denying the identity either of the constitution or of the powers of the minds of the peoples concerned with our own, i.e. without denying the assumption on which my argument in these lectures is based? This is the question which we have now to consider.

Three possible explanations have been offered for the differences between the ways of life of different peoples. The first tries to account for them by reference to differences in the natural environment of the peoples concerned. I think we may reject it as totally inadequate. Not that the natural environment, through the opportunities it affords and the limits it imposes, is unimportant in its influence on certain aspects of a way of life; but people in similar physical conditions are found with quite different beliefs and values, and people in quite different natural environments are found with the same institutions and ideals. The other two explanations which have been suggested are (1) differences in the mental make-up or in the powers of different peoples, and (2) differences in their history and experience, leading to differences in the social heritages which are passed on and modified from generation to generation.

These explanations, of course, are not mutually exclusive. The differences in the ways of life of different peoples might be due to differences partly in their nature and partly in their nurture, or differences in social heritages might themselves be traceable to differences in the natural endowment of the peoples concerned. I want, therefore, to examine the view that there are inborn differences of constitutions or powers between the minds of different peoples, and especially between the primitive and the civilised mind. If this view proves untenable, we shall be driven to look for the main cause of the differences in their moral judgements and rules and ideals to differences in their social heritage, the results of their history and experience.

Of those who hold that there are differences of innate endowment between primitive and civilised peoples, some take the view that the differences relate to the constitution of their minds or the principles according to which their minds work, others that they relate only to the scope and range of their mental powers. Differences of scope and range of mental powers are to be found among members of the same people or civilisation, but the principles according to which their minds work are the same. For example, all the members of a group of people may be able to solve simple problems in the same way, while only some of them can solve more advanced problems, which require the individual to hold before his mind at once and as an integrated whole a wide range of facts; and some may be able not only to solve very advanced problems, but to discover new principles; while others may be able to understand and apply such principles but could not discover them for themselves. The differences between such minds are usually regarded as differences of degree, but it is important to note that this term covers both the difference between those who can make original contributions to a subject and those who can assimilate these contributions, though they could not themselves have made them, and also the difference between those who can and those who cannot recognise the higher contribution, when it is pointed out to them. The distinction between these two sorts of differences of degree is important for an understanding of the view that the primitive mind is inferior to or less developed than the civilised mind, but as those who advocate this view do not draw the distinction it is often difficult to discover what precisely they mean to assert. In any civilisation, the number of people who can make original contributions is very small. The majority of the inhabitants of any country take over and use a social heritage which they themselves could not have discovered or invented. If, therefore, the view we are considering merely asserts that primitives could not discover the higher civilisation for themselves, the difference between their powers and those of the average member of civilised societies which it presupposes may not be very significant. The difference is much greater if the view is interpreted to mean that primitive minds are so inferior that they could not take over and use the higher civilisation which others have developed.

As distinct from those who hold that there are greater or less differences of degree between the primitive and the civilised mind, others take the view that there is a difference of kind or principle between them, that there are fundamental differences in the laws according to which they operate. By this is meant the sort of difference we would get if the minds of different persons operated in such a way that one combined without any sense of incongruity things which appeared to the other to be incompatible or that one could not distinguish between things which appeared different to the other. Such minds would not, except by accident, arrive at the same conclusions, and one would not understand the processes of the other. Each might act according to principles, but the principles being different, the results would be different. Such minds would be just different and one would not be better or worse, or more or less developed than the other. They could not be put at different stages on the same scale.

Thus we have three possible views of the nature of the primitive mind and its relation to the civilised mind, all of which have been advocated during the present century and perhaps still have their advocates: (1) that the fundamental constitution or structure of the two is different, that they operate according to different laws or principles; (2) that the two are fundamentally of the same kind and obey the same laws, but that they differ in their degree of development, the primitive mind being more immature and still at a stage through which the civilised mind passed centuries or millennia ago, and incapable in the lifetime of any individual of reaching the level of the civilised mind; and (3) that the innate endowment of the two minds is the same, or at any rate that there is no significant difference discoverable between them, and that the differences which we find in their contents and products are due to differences in the social heritage into which they entered, that is, to differences of opportunity and training and social environment.

The third view, or something like it, is held by practically all social anthropologists who have had first-hand and lengthy experience of primitive peoples. I might, therefore, be content to quote their testimony and pass on, fortifying myself with the declaration recently (10th December 1948) adopted unanimously by the representatives of more than fifty nations and now embodied in the Declaration of Human Rights, that “all men1 are endowed with reason and conscience”. But the issue is so fundamental for my argument in these lectures that I propose to deal with it in some detail. For if the primitive and the civilised mind operate according to different principles or if there is such a difference of degree between them that the primitive mind cannot grasp our moral ideas and conceptions, the consideration of their ways of life will throw no light on the nature of morality as we understand the term. It is, as we have seen, on the basis of such an alleged deficiency in mental powers that one prominent school of contemporary ethical theorists explains the failure of certain peoples to recognise what these theorists describe as self-evident moral intuitions. Such people, they contend, have not “reached sufficient mental maturity”.2

Moreover, though the inferiority of the primitive mind has been rejected by the experts, the belief still persists in many quarters that it is, that in fact it must be, inferior to ours. This belief seems at times to be an article of faith rather than a reasoned conclusion. We see it in the attitude of the South African to the Bantu, of the American to the Negro, and generally in the attitude of the whites to the simpler peoples. The belief not only in the superiority of Western civilisation, but in the minds or mental powers of those who are its present carriers, is so pleasing to the vanity and arrogance of white men that many of the reasons given for it are put forward, not so much as evidence in support of it to be critically examined, but as explanations of an undoubted fact.3 Even if the racial theories of the interwar years about the innate superiority of certain peoples have now found their way to the place where they rightly belong, the lay mind is still far from discarding the myth of the white man's superiority; and much of what has been written and spoken during and since the war makes it plain that men's ideas are still confused about the relative contributions of biological and social heredity to the ways of life of particular peoples.

A consideration of the nature of the primitive mind and its relation to our own should also help us to appreciate the difficulty of entering into the mind of the primitive and the effort of sympathy and imagination required to see his world as he sees it. In this connection it is essential to distinguish between the mental powers and processes of the individual mind and the social heritage to which he has been heir, and which profoundly influences the contents and products of the adult mind; for even if the mental processes of primitive minds are the same as ours, the social heritage which supplies their premises certainly is not. It is now generally recognised by sociologists that it requires patience and caution and sympathetic insight to put oneself in the position, and to appreciate the point of view, of a member of another class or nation, even if they share the common background of the same civilisation; and the sorry state of our industrial and international affairs bears striking testimony to the fact. The effort required is naturally much greater when no such common background exists. If the consideration of the different views about primitive mentality will help us to appreciate the difficulty of understanding and interpreting the beliefs and practices of primitives and enable us to guard against the many pitfalls to be avoided in trying to enter into their point of view, it will have been worth while.

Nor is the nature of primitive mentality merely a matter of theoretical interest; in recent years, as the result of the increasing contacts between peoples and the efforts of advanced nations to administer native territories and educate their inhabitants, it has become a matter of urgent practical importance. Consequently, there has been a good deal of research into the subject and there is now a considerable literature on it. Nevertheless, it is by no means easy to discover the constitution and powers of the primitive mind and to decide between the different views about its relation to the civilised mind which I stated above. The main reason for this is that we cannot isolate the innate endowment of a mind and consider it by itself. Many of the elements of the human mind are neither fully present nor finally fixed at birth, and therefore to discover their nature we have to consider how they develop. But during their development the individual is exposed to the influences of his social environment. His group never for a moment leaves him alone. Accordingly the developed mind is the joint-product of the innate endowment of the individual and of the social influences to which he has been subjected; and in this joint-product it is difficult to distinguish the contributions of the different factors. These joint-products—the concrete contents of the adult mind—do undoubtedly differ from primitive to primitive, from primitive to civilised, and from civilisation to civilisation. But we must distinguish between these joint-products and the institutions, customs, beliefs and values in which they find expression on the one hand, and, on the other, the constitution, capacities and processes of the individual mind. The difficulty is that we do not find the latter except as they function and express themselves through the former; and the differences in the ways in which they do so may be due either to differences in the make-up or capacities of the minds or to the influences of the social medium in which they have developed and by which they have been moulded.

Accordingly, in trying to decide between the different views about the nature of the primitive mind and its relation to the civilised, we have to proceed indirectly through examining their characteristic products. In doing this two lines are open to us. The one is to produce positive evidence that the constitution and powers of primitive minds are much the same as our own. The positive evidence available consists mainly of (a) the practically unanimous testimony of field workers (too numerous to mention) that this is so, and their achievements in understanding and explaining the customs and institutions and beliefs of primitive peoples on these assumptions; (b) the oft-reported ability of the field worker who immerses himself in the culture of a primitive people not only to understand but to forecast how the natives will react to particular situations; and (c) the capacities shown by natives, and especially by native children, when they are educated and trained by white men. There are also certain general considerations which render it highly improbable that there are fundamental innate differences between the different branches of the human family or that, even if such differences existed, they would provide an explanation of the differences which we find in their ways of life. To mention just one such consideration. Radical changes in the ideals and values, beliefs and institutions of particular peoples have taken place in a much shorter time than would be necessary for changes in their hereditary endowment to establish themselves. The impressive and rapid progress and decline of the civilisations of particular peoples do not leave sufficient time for innate factors to operate. The other method of procedure open to us is to examine the evidence put forward in support of the view that the primitive mind is different from our own. If we can show that this evidence is not sufficient to warrant the conclusion, we seem justified in accepting the other and more natural view for which there is positive support. I propose to begin with the second method and let the positive evidence on which the first method relies emerge in the course of the argument.

Let us begin with the more extreme view, that held by Lévy-Bruhl4 and his school, that the primitive mind works according to different principles or laws from the civilised. According to this view, the primitive mind is neither inferior nor superior to the civilised, but just different. It may help us to understand Lévy-Bruhl's position and to appreciate the very considerable contributions which he made to our understanding of primitive mentality, if we recall the sort of explanation generally offered at the end of last century of primitive beliefs and customs. These explanations were given in terms of the highly rationalistic psychology still current in many quarters at that time. Anthropologists, therefore, tended to account for the beliefs of primitives in terms of the rational and conscious processes of individual minds, and to ignore the importance of the social factor in determining them, that is the importance of the social heritage which had not been deliberately planned but had grown up piecemeal as the result of the contributions of many individuals, each of whom understood only a small part of the whole social structure and perhaps even less of the effects of his contribution on the whole. The individualistic and intellectualistic bias of the early English School of Anthropology, against which Lévy-Bruhl was mainly arguing, is, I believe, sometimes exaggerated, but in general it did tend to represent animism and totemism and other primitive beliefs as not only reasonable under the conditions of primitive life and knowledge, but also as arrived at by conscious reasoning.5 It regarded them as in fact the simplest explanation which a mind, moved by intellectual curiosity, could give of the experiences and facts at the disposal of the primitive.

Now Lévy-Bruhl rightly rejects this over-rationalistic interpretation of the characteristic beliefs of primitive man. He points to the complexity of primitive language, and he might have added of primitive social organisation, as evidence that rational simplicity is not a characteristic of the primitive mind or indeed of the untrained mind anywhere. The structure of their languages, their systems of numeration, their elementary powers of analysis and abstraction, and their distaste of reasoning, show that even if they had the powers of reflection and reasoning necessary to formulate schemes of philosophy of the kind which Tylor and Frazer, for example, attributed to them, they certainly had not exercised them. But while rejecting this highly intellectualistic psychology as a description of the mental processes of primitive man, Lévy-Bruhl seems to accept it as a satisfactory account of those of the civilised. As a result, he seems to be contrasting the average primitive mind with that of the civilised scientist and philosopher in their most critical and rational moments. It is not surprising, therefore, that he distinguishes sharply between the two types, and contends that the processes of the one cannot be understood or expressed in terms of those of the other. There is between them, he thinks, a difference not of degree but of kind. The mental operations of the primitive, he holds,6 are not an inferior variety of our own. The differences between the characteristic products of their minds and ours are due not to defects of understanding, to incapacity or inaptitude for reasoning on their part,7 but to their methods of thinking.

The most significant differences between their methods of thinking and ours are that they ignore the teaching of experience and disregard the laws of contradiction and causality, the laws which are the basis of the thinking of civilised adults. It is not that the primitive mind deliberately violates these laws, but that it completely ignores them, and that it is equally satisfied with processes of thinking which do, and with processes which do not, comply with their requirements. In Lévy-Bruhl's own terminology, the primitive mind is not anti-logical or alogical, but pre-logical.8 The principle according to which it works Lévy-Bruhl calls “the law of participation”, a law whose functioning is determined by “collective representations” or conceptions, which are of social origin, common to all members of the social group, transmitted from generation to generation, and so impressed on the individual by his group that they arouse intense emotional and volitional activity and determine his thinking and feeling in relation to the objects to which they refer.9 These collective representations are not, strictly speaking, representations at all, that is, they are not ideas or concepts which result from the observation or the merely cognitive or intellectual processes of the individual.10 They are the reactions of the total personality in its emotional and volitional as well as its cognitive aspects, and the former rather than the latter are the more prominent and decisive factors; nor is there any clear distinction drawn between the different aspects. When, e.g., the Australian native believes that he is identical with his totem and says that he is an emu or a witchetty grub, or that the symbols which represent the totem in his religious ritual or the individuals who personify it in his ceremonies are identical with the totem or with himself, he does not arrive at this conclusion as the result of observation and experience, nor by rational and intellectual processes. He lives and feels his identity with them and their identity with one another. For him all of them give rise to the same emotions, and these emotions are social in origin, communicated to the individual from his social environment. The things which arouse the same emotion are regarded as identical. They ‘participate’ in one another through ‘an invisible mystic bond’. All the things which are united in this way form parts of the same collective representation. Therefore for the primitive any one of them can take the place of any other, and so, in complete disregard of the law of contradiction, he says that the one is the other. Similarly, when the primitive says that crow is thunder, that the child who is born but not ceremonially named is alive and not alive, that the man who has died but has not received his second burial is dead and not yet dead, that a particular rock was a woman and had children, and so on, his mind is operating according to the law of participation and disregards the law of contradiction which dominates our thinking.

Lévy-Bruhl examines almost every aspect of primitive life and thought, their beliefs about life and death, nature and the supernatural, their languages, their systems of numeration, their magical rites in connection with hunting and fishing, illness and war, to show the essentially mystic character of their mentality, the fact that they think of things not as they appear to sense, but as the vehicles of mystic properties. Nothing, he contends, is perceived by the primitive as it is by us; for though he perceives with the same senses as we do, he perceives with a different mind.11 Now it is the mind which determines the interpretation which we put upon what we observe, and as the primitive mind is determined by collective representations, according to which the operative forces are mystic and invisible, it pays little regard to objective or causal connections, and experience cannot undeceive it.12 In short, the primitive mind is lacking in analysis, insensible to contradiction, impervious to experience, and prevented from functioning freely by intense emotions aroused by objects interpreted through collective representations.13 And, therefore, Lévy-Bruhl concludes: It is useless to try and explain the institutions and customs and beliefs of undeveloped peoples by starting from the psychological and intellectual analysis of’the human mind’ as we know it. No interpretation will be satisfactory unless it has for its starting point the pre-logical and mystic mentality underlying the various forms of activity in primitives.”14

Now the mass of evidence in support of his thesis which Lévy-Bruhl collected from all parts of the primitive world is very impressive, and it throws an important light on the nature of the primitive mind. It conclusively demonstrates the importance of the social factor in determining many primitive beliefs and practices; and it shows that the mental processes of primitives are not so intellectual as some earlier anthropologists thought. It is true, as he himself points out,15 that the evidence on which he relied was mainly collected by untrained observers; and the more accurate observation of trained field workers has since shown that the pressure of the social group on the individual is not nearly so overwhelming as Lévy-Bruhl suggests.16 Instances of individuals outstanding as thinkers, or men of affairs who left their mark on the culture of their people, are given even by some of the authorities quoted by Lévy-Bruhl himself, and many more have been brought to light by the more recent researches of Radin and Malinowski, Mead and Hogbin and many others. All these show that the role of the individual in primitive societies is much greater, and that in many of them the individual has much more freedom than Lévy-Bruhl suggests, and that in none of them is he merely the automatic vehicle of social forces. Indeed Radin17 produces impressive evidence in support of the view that the proportion of thinkers and philosophers, poets and prophets is probably not much less among primitives than among civilised.

Despite the modifications which recent researches have made in the evidence available to Lévy-Bruhl when he formulated his theory, the main facts regarding primitive beliefs and institutions from which he drew his conclusion remain unquestioned. What we have to ask, therefore, is whether these facts warrant his conclusion that the primitives disregard the laws of contradiction and causality, and the teaching of experience, or that their minds act according to principles different from our own.

Before directly attacking this question, I want to note two facts which serve to make the contrast between the primitive and civilised mind less sharp than the above account would suggest. These facts are admitted, somewhat grudgingly no doubt, by Lévy-Bruhl himself, but it is doubtful if he recognises all their implications.

(1) There are spheres of life in which the primitive mind is not dominated by collective representations and in which his mental processes do not obey the law of participation. In these spheres he observes as accurately, appreciates objective connections as clearly and learns by experience as certainly as we do. In the construction of his tools, the cultivation of the soil and the growth of crops, in the processes involved in fishing and hunting, in building a house or making a canoe, the primitive is as objective as anyone could desire. Here he is guided by the teaching of experience and his thought and his actions do not ignore the laws of contradiction or causality, and he builds up empirical concepts in the same way as we do.18 “In such activities”, Lévy-Bruhl admits, “the primitive . . . will usually feel, argue and act as we should expect him to do.”19 In short, in dealing with such matters, the primitive mind is as logical and as rational as our own. It is true, however, that he sees the objects and situations with which he is concerned even in such activities against a background of invisible forces of which he also takes account. It is in relation to the latter that Lévy-Bruhl regards his mental processes as pre-logical. Nevertheless, even according to Lévy-Bruhl, we find in the primitive mind logical as well as pre-logical activities.

(2) Lévy-Bruhl also admits that there are pre-logical elements in the minds of most civilised adults. He finds some of these in folk-lore20 and in superstitious beliefs in relation to such matters as hunting, fishing and fighting,21 but especially in moral and religious beliefs and customs,22 and he might have added, in political convictions. In these spheres we find beliefs which have not been arrived at by the intellectual processes of the individual who holds them, beliefs which the individual has accepted from his society, and which he has not subjected to the critical scrutiny of reason. They are in fact what Lévy-Bruhl calls collective representations and man's thinking in relation to them obeys the law of participation.

Now if there are logical and pre-logical elements in both the primitive and the civilised mind, the difference between logical and pre-logical can scarcely be regarded as a criterion for distinguishing the two types of mentality. This is a line of argument used by Durkheim and other members of the French School of Sociology, who are as emphatic as Lévy-Bruhl about the importance of collective representations but hold that they help to determine the beliefs and attitudes of all men, primitive and civilised alike. But Lévy-Bruhl tends to minimise and underestimate the logical element in primitive mentality and the part played by collective representations in the workings of the normal civilised mind. He admits that complete rationality is a desideratum rather than a fact in the working of the civilised mind;23 but he still thinks of it in terms of the intellectualistic psychology which he rejects as a description of the primitive mind. If, as is now almost universally agreed, this rationalistic psychology is inapplicable even to the civilised mind, the fact that the mental processes of primitives do not comply with it does not prove that they are pre-logical or, in principle, different from those of more advanced peoples.

Moreover, Lévy-Bruhl tends to identify the rational with the consciously reasoned and to regard as pre-logical, if not irrational, all beliefs and conclusions which are not arrived at by the individual who entertains them as the result of such reasoning.24 But beliefs, whether entertained by the primitive or the civilised, may be rational in the sense of complying with logical principles, though they may not have been arrived at by conscious reasoning. It is perfectly true, as Lévy-Bruhl contends, that the primitive does not arrive at his animism and totemism by consciously reasoned processes. He does not first have a clear idea of himself or his mental processes and of his bodily activities as due to the operation of these processes on the one hand, and of natural events and processes as inanimate on the other, and then proceed consciously to interpret the latter, on the analogy of the former, as due to the activities of minds or spirits. But neither is this the way in which the civilised man arrives at such beliefs as, e.g., that other men have minds like his own. He recognises them as like himself and attributes to them experiences like his own before he reflects on, or introspectively observes, the nature of his own mental activities or the relation between them and the bodily behaviour in which they find expression. Similarly the primitive, with his less reflective and more undifferentiated experience, in his interactions, not only with men and animals but also with natural objects and events, especially those which profoundly affect his welfare, interprets them in the light of his own experience and regards many of their processes as being the results of wishes and desires, thoughts and purposes, such as he finds in himself. He does not first recognise natural events as inanimate or dead, and then by a conscious process of reasoning attribute to them the sort of processes which he discovers in his own mind. Rather, he has not yet drawn so clear a distinction as we do between men and animals and natural events, nor between the outward and visible behaviour, whether of his own body or natural happenings, and the invisible mental processes which he experiences in his own case and attributes to others. Even for the civilised adult, the process of divesting nature and natural events of all traces of such animism and regarding it merely as matter in motion, or whatever the present scientific equivalent of matter in motion is, is the result of a long discipline which requires a considerable effort of thought. Much of what we call the common-sense attitude to nature has many activist and personalistic elements in it.

If Lévy-Bruhl had merely contended that primitive mental-itv is pre-scientific, as Hoernlé25 suggests that he should have done, we could certainly accept his view, but we should have to add that some of the thinking of all, and perhaps all of the thinking of many, civilised adults is pre-scientific, that scientific thinking is of quite recent origin, that there is no evidence that its appearance is due to a change in the constitution or powers of the mind, and that it differs from pre-scientific thinking, not in the principles on which it proceeds, but in the greater care, exactness and systematic thoroughness with which it is carried out.

It is necessary also to distinguish between the magico-religious beliefs of the primitive regarding man and nature, such as totemism and animism, and the conclusions which he draws from them—in other words, between his premises and his processes of reasoning. The premises no doubt contain much ignorance and superstition, accepted on authority from his social environment, but the evidence suggests that the processes are logical and rational and differ in no way from our own. This is shown by the fact that anthropologists who steep themselves in the native atmosphere and way of life will not only understand but also anticipate the conclusion at which the primitive will arrive in any given case.26

Moreover, it is not the primitive alone who responds to objects and situations with all the powers of his mind, and not merely with the intellectual and cognitive side of it. As we have already noted the civilised mind does so too, much more frequently than Lévy-Bruhl admits. He sees objects, not as they are to bare cognition but as having a significance which his own emotional and volitional reactions to them have led him to read into them. Much of this emotionally charged significance is of social origin, and the individual responds emotionally to it before he thinks rationally about it, if he ever does so at all. This is specially true of situations where his life and livelihood or those of his group are, or are believed to be, at stake. A flag, a certain colour of shirt, a form of greeting, or a few bars of a song, may become as deeply charged with significance and may arouse as profound an emotional and volitional reaction as any of the symbolic objects of primitive ritual. The colossal scale on which such ‘collective representations’ flourished in the interwar years, even among people who were regarded by themselves and others as cultured and civilised, is only an outstanding example of a phenomenon which is always with us, and which shows the extent to which collective representations are apt to dominate our minds. It is true that in our critical moments we distinguish between connections which are based on causal and logical principles and those which are based on emotional reactions. But in the ordinary life and thought of the average man, whether primitive or civilised, the distinction between them is often blurred.

We conclude, therefore, that logical thinking, recognition of objective connections and respect for the teaching of experience are to be found in the primitive as well as the civilised mind, that collective representations and connections based on emotional association are common among civilised as well as primitives, and that beliefs, whether arrived at by the individual for himself or accepted by him from his society, may be rational, that is, based on logical principles and objective or causal connections, though the individual who entertains them has not arrived at them for himself by consciously reasoned processes. What we have to consider, then, is whether the actual beliefs of primitives which are quoted in such rich profusion by Lévy-Bruhl, show that they in fact ignore the laws of causality and contradiction and the teaching of experience.

Take first the law of causality. We have already seen that in relation to the mundane affairs of life the primitive observes objective causal connections and acts upon them. Moreover, Lévy-Bruhl himself admits,27 and many other observers have noted, that for the primitive there is no such thing as an accident or uncaused event. In view of this, it is difficult to assert that they ignore or contradict the law of causality. What is true is that they do not regard what we call the natural or apparent causes of events as their real causes. It is not so much that they ignore natural causes as that they seldom seem to them a sufficient explanation. They find the real causes in the invisible powers which they believe reside in or operate through the visible happenings, just as they and we find the causes of our own bodily activities in the volitions and desires which operate through them. Thus they do not deny or ignore the principle of causality but they find the real causes in factors which do not appear to sense. On this state of affairs it is worth while making two observations. (1) Emphasis on natural causation is quite modern. In earlier times it was largely neglected by many whose mental powers were undoubtedly the same as our own. (2) Our experience is not confined to sense and the real operative causes which we first and most directly experience are invisible, namely the operation of our own minds.

Do primitives, then, ignore or deny the law of contradiction? Some of the evidence which Lévy-Bruhl gives in support of this conclusion seems to rest on a confusion between the different or the contrary, and the contradictory. When, for example, the primitive regards the unnamed infant as born and not yet born, or the man who has died and not yet had his second burial as dead and not dead, the apparent contradiction is due to neglect of the difference between physical and ceremonial birth and death. When this distinction is borne in mind, we realise that the view of the primitive is no more a denial of the law of contradiction than the assertion of the man who says on different occasions that man is mortal and that man is immortal, mortal as regards his physical organism, immortal as regards his soul. The primitive does not state explicitly the conditions under which he makes his statements, but neither does the civilised man always do so. They both make them in the light of the conditions which seem to them important at the time. When the primitive asserts that the man who has not had his second burial is not yet dead, it is the ceremonial death that seems to him important; while to us in the same circumstances physical death may seem the only relevant consideration. Given his beliefs about life and death, however, his mind does not operate on a different principle from ours.

Take again the primitive's identification of things which seem to us radically different, like a man and his totem. This does not mean that for him a man and an emu, for example, are in all respects identical, for he never confuses the two. It means only that the respect in which they are identical seems to him an important one. In no proposition does the copula assert the complete identity of the subject and predicate, otherwise the mere mention of the subject would be sufficient and the predicate would add nothing to it. In considering the totemism of the Australian Aborigines,28 we saw that there are different kinds of totemic groups and that, therefore, the bond of identity between the members of the group and between them and their totem is not always the same. This fact was not recognised by Lévy-Bruhl nor by the observers on whose work he relied.

To give an adequate explanation of such statements as are quoted by Lévy-Bruhl in this connection it would be necessary to consider each separately, but we can say in general that the ordinary primitive (as distinct from the occasional thinker among them) is not much interested in the abstract qualities of the objects or individuals concerned. He is interested rather in the way they behave, and especially in their effects on himself and his group. If, therefore, two things act in the same way or produce the same emotional reaction in himself and his fellows, he tends to regard them as so far identical. Indeed Aldrich29 suggests that “acts the same” would be a better rendering than “is” or “is identical with” of what the aborigines mean when they say that a man is an emu or that a churinga is an ancestor;30 and Sommerfelt,31 who does not seem to have been aware of Aldrich's suggestion, arrives at the same conclusion on linguistic grounds. Sommerfelt points out that many primitive languages are constructed on the basis of forms of classification different from ours. In one group of languages, which includes that spoken by the Central Australian natives, there are no words for qualities. The people who speak these languages, being interested in how things behave rather than in their formal qualities, do not classify entities into substances and attributes or things and qualities. Their verbs convey what we call the qualities of things; that is, the qualities a thing has are the ways in which it behaves. “A language constructed on such lines”, he points out, “is quite sufficient for all the needs of the people concerned.”32 Accordingly, when they say what we translate as “an emu is, or acts in the same way as, a man or a churinga”, they are not in any way contradicting the laws of our thinking; they are merely putting things in a different way or in terms of a different principle of classification from that used by us. But while the two ways of putting the matter are different, the one does not contradict the other, nor does the difference show that the minds of those who use the different forms act according to different laws of thought.

Or take the primitive's continued belief in the efficacy of magic despite the mass of empirical evidence that the desired results do not follow its application, which is quoted as evidence that the primitive ignores the teaching of experience. Does it, in fact, prove that he is impervious to experience or that his mind works differently from ours? Apart from the fact that such beliefs were common among our recent ancestors and that vestiges of them are still to be found among us, it is not difficult to see why they are not easily disproved by experience. The fact is that most experiences seem to confirm them, and those which are inconsistent with them can be plausibly explained away. For consider: good harvests, a safe return to port, and good health are the normal conditions of affairs. Bad harvests, shipwrecks, epidemics and fatal accidents are the exceptions. Every year the magic of the crops is performed, and in most years the harvest is good. On every canoe that goes to sea appropriate rites are performed, and almost all of them return safe to port. Persons who fall ill are magically treated, and most of them are restored to health.

But what about the exceptions? It is true, as has often been pointed out,33 that untrained observers tend to note favourable rather than unfavourable instances. As Bacon says, “Men mark when they hit, not when they miss”. And for the exceptions which are observed there are various quite plausible explanations. There may have been some flaw in reciting the spell or performing the ceremony. The magician or other persons concerned may not have complied strictly with the food or other taboos which are essential to the success of the magical rites; or an enemy may have used a more powerful magic to counteract the results which would otherwise have surely followed.34 For there are different kinds of magic and they vary in strength. And as the exercise of black magic is always secret, it provides an easy explanation for occurrences which are not understood.

When a belief can explain anything which happens equally well, it cannot be disproved by experience, for no experience is inconsistent with it. Such is the case with the belief in magic. Most experiences seem to confirm it, and no experience can disprove it. That is, at any rate, part of the explanation for its continuance, and it does not suggest any difference of principle between the primitive and the civilised mind. The other part of the explanation is to be found in the important functions which, as we have seen,35 the belief in magic performs in the lives of primitives, especially the function of inspiring them with hope and confidence in the face of dangers and difficulties.

Most of the other beliefs and practices quoted by Lévy-Bruhl can, I think, be explained along somewhat similar lines. It is true that there are many of them whose origins we do not know: they are shrouded in the mists of antiquity. The key to them has been lost, and attempts to explain them are speculative and uncertain. But we can understand the functions which they fulfil in the lives of those who entertain them and the reasons why they continue to accept them. It is also true that the accounts given by primitives often contradict the accounts which we should give of the same facts or events. In that sense, their beliefs contradict the facts or the teaching of experience; but, so far as this is true, it means that their beliefs are false, not that the minds of those who entertain them are differently constituted from ours. It may also be admitted that, though they are not devoid of intellectual curiosity and although they demand an explanation of every phenomenon and a cause for every event, the curiosity of primitives is usually easily satisfied. They do not carry the process of explanation far, or work out its implications in relation to the rest of their experience. In this respect, however, they are not greatly different from many civilised adults. Neither type of mind will rest content in the presence of a recognised contradiction, but both often entertain mutually contradictory beliefs. But there is nothing in these circumstances, or in the facts relied on by Lévy-Bruhl, which proves that the primitive disregards the law of contradiction or causality or the teaching of experience, or that his mental processes follow different laws from our own.36

No social anthropologist with whose writing I am acquainted and who had first-hand experience of primitives accepts Lévy-Bruhl's main conclusions without reservation. It is true that a few of them quote his views with approval, but they do so to emphasise the great gulf between the beliefs entertained by the adult primitive and the adult civilised mind. Such approval as they give seems based on a confusion between the beliefs or conclusions of the primitive mind and its mental processes. For they all explicitly deny that it works according to different laws from our own.

In this lecture I have been concerned only with Lévy-Bruhl's conclusion that the primitive mind is pre-logical; but while rejecting this conclusion I do not wish to belittle his considerable contributions to our understanding of the primitive mind. He demonstrated clearly, though perhaps with pardonable exaggeration, the need, for the understanding of the primitive mind, of taking account of the social factor which had been largely neglected by earlier anthropologists. He proved conclusively that rational simplicity is not specially characteristic of the primitive mind, and that its processes are less intellectual and reflective than most of his predecessors assumed. He emphasised that the differences between the primitive mind and our own are not due to lack of capacity or aptitude, and that it cannot be regarded as a more rudimentary or childish form of our own mind. And his account brings clearly to light the need for great care and caution and imaginative sympathy, if we are to understand its beliefs and practices. These are significant contributions to the study of the primitive mind, but they are all quite consistent with its constitution being the same as that of our own.37