Bracken stopped and filled his pipe slowly. He remained silent so long that Bingham cautiously prompted him.

"Er-are we-" he asked-"are we to understand that the fair Mercedes is the present Mrs. Bracken?"

Bracken shook his head sadly. "No," he said, in a choking voice. "No. Mercedes was right. We had tempted fortune.

"I cannot describe what happened very clearly. It remains but a confused nightmare in my mind. Some time after midnight I fell into a troubled sleep, but awoke to hear a dull rumble, growing louder and louder with every minute. Ileaped from my bed, suspecting an earthquake, and ran to the window. The streets were full of excited crowds.

"The next moment my door burst open and my faithful servant, Antonio, came in, white as a sheet. 'Señor,' he whispered, 'you must fly at once! Your life is not safe! The Yankee war-ships are bombarding the city!"

Bracken straightened himself with an effort. "That, gentlemen, was the first day of May in the year eighteen-ninetyeight. My servant was right. Dewey had slipped past the mines and was shelling the forts.

"I suppose that I should not complain, for what was my loss compared to my country's gain? But it was hardhard. For three days, disguised as a Chinese coolie, I hid in the rice fields. On the fourth I reached the American lines.

"Three weeks later I stood on the quarterdeck of the Olympia, watching the fading shores of Manila. All around me the officers were laughing and joking; below me the sailors were cheering.

Alone on that historic ship I stood in sadness. We passed Cavite; we passed Corregidor. We entered the China Sea and I took one last look at the receding land which still contained all I held dear. I never saw her again."

In spite of ourselves we sat with bowed heads and in silence as Bracken finished his tale. Not one of us laughed, not even the major. Little Willy Warren seemed the least affected.

"Well," he said, as he rose, "I guess I'll see who's in the club."

A moment later Bracken rose, too, murmuring something about dinner. I honestly think the chap was touched by his own recital. Bingham and Major Vickery and I were left and even then none of us laughed. At last, as the tension seemed to relax, the major began to speak gruffly.

"Do you know," he said, "I haven't heard one of those old-time islanders spin a yarn in ten years. We used to have dozens of them at the English club the first time I went to the islandsEnglishmen mostly, old planters and merchants. I've heard them sit by the hour and string the newcomers, but none of them was ever better than this chap. I couldn't quite make him out at first, but as soon as he spoke of house snakes I knew what was coming."

The major looked with a grin toward the stairs, where he saw Willy Warren looking down into the pool room. He nodded with his head.

"That young fellow there-I think he was completely taken in, don't you?" Bingham and I both looked away before we replied.

"Yes," I said, slowly, "I think that he was.'

of

their age, we should find that some of them were very, very old, going back to primitive man; others were derived from the Greeks; many more of them would prove to come directly from the Middle Ages; while certain others in our stock were unknown until natural science began to develop in a new form about three hundred years ago. The idea that man has a soul or double which survives the death of the body is very ancient indeed and is accepted by most savages. Such confidence as we have in the liberal arts, metaphysics, and formal logic goes back to the Greek thinkers; our religious ideas and our standards of sexual conduct are predominantly medieval in their presuppositions; our notions of electricity and disease germs are, of course, recent in origin, the result of painful and prolonged research which involved the rejection of a vast number of older notions sanctioned by immemorial acceptance. In general, those ideas which are still almost universally accepted in regard to man's nature, his proper conduct, and his relations to God and his fellows are far more ancient and far less critical than those which have to do with the movement of the stars, the stratification of the rocks and the life of plants and animals.

Each age has contributed its particular part to our current intellectual heritage to the making of the mind. For the mind, in the sense of our knowledge and intelligence and the directions in which we apply them, has a long history

this series the four foundations of our modern mind were pointed out: (1) the animal mind with its curiosity and its impulse to fumble and grope and experiment, which, with the animal body, lies at the very base of our intelligence and of the whole history of mankind; (2) the child mind (for we are children at our most impressionable age) with its infantile misapprehensions, prejudices, and lack of adult perspective, and its native longings struggling against the censorship of the elders; (3) the savage mind, which is the only one man has had during the greater part of his existence on earth; (4) the traditional civilized mind, beginning with the Greeks and coming down with various modifications to our own day. It is on these four foundations, on these accumulations of the race and our own personal past, that we must, as was pointed out, build an intelligence appropriate to our newest knowledge and our present conditions.

The question was also raised in the preceding article why our thinking on matters which have to do with the adjustment of human relations is so befogged, in contrast to the unrivaled achievements of our age in penetrating the obscure workings of both animate and inanimate nature. Some of the reasons were pointed out which help partially, at least, to explain why we deal so unintelligently with human affairs and so ingeniously with Hertzian waves and ultra-microscopic bacteria; and why we have left the scientist, inventor, and

engineer free to alter our environment without at the same time making appropriate readjustments in our social, economic, and political convictions and ideals. For this is just what has happened. We vainly strive to deal with new things and new conditions without the new ideas and point of view essential to their comprehension, clinging to old ideas which are grossly out of gear with our existing environment, and which often represent only so many obstacles to clear and forward thinking.

It was also suggested that to a historical student who turns his attention to the history of human thought, it will seem that in no way are we more likely to see where our troubles lie and to discover a way out than by reviewing the strange way in which we have come to have our present degree of intelligence and knowledge. History, by tracing the process by which our minds have accumulated and by showing us the "real" reasons for many of our current beliefs, can clear the ground for the same kind of scientific thought in relation to human affairs which has worked such progress in the natural sciences. We can thus help to spread what Wells calls the "veracity, self-detachment, and selfabnegating vigor of criticism," which lie back of the scientific discoveries of the last three centuries, to the study and adjustment of man's dealings with man.

"savage" or

In speaking of the "savage "primitive" mind we are, of course, using a very clumsy expression. We shall employ the term, nevertheless, to indicate the characteristics of the human mind when there were as yet no writing, no books, no considerable organized industry or mechanical arts, no money, no important specialization of function beyond the distribution of work between the sexes; no settled life in large communities. The period so described covers all but about five thousand of the half million to a million years that man has existed on the earth. Only very recently did he transcend the stage of a

savage hunter and become a settled barbarian with huts and fields and woven garments. It was about ten thousand years ago that agriculture, the raising of crops, and the domestication of animals seem to have appeared in western Europe. Although there are no chronicles to tell us the story of those long centuries, some inferences can be made from the increasing artfulness and variety of the flint weapons and tools which we find. But the stone weapons which have come down to us, even in their crudest forms (eoliths), are very far from representing the earliest achievements of man in the accumulation of culture. Those dim, remote cycles must have been full of great, but inconspicuous, originators who laid the foundations of civilization in achievements and discoveries so long taken for granted that we do not realize that they ever had to be made at all.

Since man is descended from less highly endowed animals, there must have been a time when the man animal was in a state of animal ignorance. He started with no more than an ape is able to know. He had to learn everything for himself, as he had no one to teach him the tricks that apes and children can be taught by sophisticated human beings. He was necessarily self-taught, and began in a depth of ignorance beyond anything we can readily conceive. He lived naked and speechless in the woods, or wandered over the plains without artificial shelter or any way of cooking his food. He subsisted on raw fruit, berries, roots, insects, and such animals as he could strike down or pick up dead. His mind must have corresponded with his brutish state. He must at the first have learned just as his animal relatives learn -by fumbling and by forming accidental mental associations. He had in the beginning the guidance of his animal instincts and such sagacity as he individually derived from experience, but no heritage of knowledge accumulated by the group and transmitted by education. This heritage had to be constructed on man's potentialities.

Of mankind in this extremely primitive condition we have no traces. There could be no traces. All savages of the present day or of recent times represent a relatively highly developed traditional culture, with elaborate languages, myths, long-established artificial customs, which it probably took hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate. Man in a state of nature is a presupposition, but a presupposition which is forced upon us by compelling evidence, conjectural and inferential though it is.

On a geological time scale we are all close to savagery, and it is inevitable that the ideas and customs and sentiments of savagery should have become so ingrained that they may have actually affected man's nature by natural selection through the survival of those who most completely adjusted themselves to the uncritical culture which prevailed. But in any case it is certain, as many anthropologists have pointed out, that savage customs, savage ideas, and conventional sentiments have continued to form an important part of our own culture down even to the present day. We are met thus with the necessity of reckoning with this inveterate element in our present thought and customs. Much of the data that we have regarding primitive man has been accumulated in recent times, for the most part as a result of the study of simple peoples. These differ greatly in their habits and myths, but some common salient traits emerge, which cast light on the spontaneous workings of the human mind when unaffected by the sophistications of highly elaborate civilization.

Man started at a cultural zero. He had to find out everything for himself. He had to learn to see and to think. While we do not know what goes on in the head of an ape or dog, we may be sure that it is not what we should imagine. They have no means of seeing things as we do, for the way we see things is a slowly achieved art. They must have only mass impressions which they have little power to analyze. A dog

perceives a motor-car and may be induced to ride in it, but his idea of it would not differ from that of an ancient carryall, except, mayhap, in an appreciative distinction between the odor of gasoline and that of the stable. Locke thought that we first got simple ideas and then combined them into more complex conceptions and finally into generalizations or abstract ideas. But this is not the way that man's knowledge arose. He started with mere impressions of general situations, and gradually by his ability to handle things he came upon distinctions, which in time he made clearer by attaching names to them. The typewriter is at first a mere mass impression, and only gradually and imperfectly do most of us distinguish certain of its parts; only the men who made it are likely to realize its full complexity by noting and assigning names to all the levers, wheels, gears, bearings, controls, and adjustments. John Stuart Mill thought that the chief function of the mind was making inferences. But making distinctions is equally fundamentalseeing that there are many things where only one was at first apparent. This process of analysis has been man's supreme accomplishment. This is what has made his mind grow.

At the start man had to distinguish himself from the group to which he belonged and say, “I am I." This is not an idea given by nature.1 There are evidences that the earlier religious notions were not based on individuality, but rather on the "virtue" which objects had-that is, their potency to do things. Only later did the animistic belief in the personalities of men, animals, and the forces of nature appear. When man discovered his own individuality he

1 In the beginning, too, man did not know how children came about, for it was not easy to connect a common impulsive act with the event of birth so far removed in time. The tales told to children still are reminiscences of the mythical explanations which our savage ancestors advanced to explain the arrival of the infant. Consequently, all popular theories of the origin of marriage and the family based on the assumption of conscious paternity are outlawed.

We

spontaneously ascribed the same type of individuality and purpose to animals and plants, the wind, and the thunder. This exhibits one of the most noxious tendencies of the mind-namely, personification. It is one of the most virulent enemies of clear thinking. speak of the Spirit of the Reformation or the Spirit of Revolt or the Spirit of Disorder and Anarchy. The papers tell us that, "Berlin says," "London says," "London says," "Uncle Sam so decides," "John Bull is disgruntled." Now, whether or no there are such things as spirits, Berlin and London have no souls, and Uncle Sam is as mythical as the great god Pan. Sometimes this regression to the savage is harmless, but when a newspaper states that "Germany is as militaristic as ever," on the ground that some insolent Prussian lieutenant says that German armies will occupy Paris within five years, we have an example of animism which in a society farther removed from savagery than ours might be deemed a high crime and misdemeanor. Chemists and physicians have given up talking of spirits, but in discussing social and economic questions we are still victimized by the primitive animistic tendencies of the mind.

The dream has had its great influence in the building up of the mind. Our ideas, especially our religious ones, would have had quite another history had men been dreamless. For it was not merely his shadow and his reflection in the water that led him to imagine souls and doubles, but pre-eminently the visions of the night. As his body lay quiet in sleep he found himself wandering into distant places. He was visited by the dead. So it was clear that the body had an inhabitant which was not necessarily bound to it and which could desert it from time to time during life and which continued to exist and interest itself in human affairs after death. Whole civilizations and religions and vast theological speculations have been dominated by this savage inference. It is true that in very recent times, since

Plato, let us say, other reasons have been urged for believing in the soul and its immortality, but the idea appears to have got its firm footing in savage logic. It is a primitive and spontaneous inference, however it may later have been revised, rationalized, and ennobled.

The taboo-the Verboten-of savage life is another thing very elementary in man's make-up. He had tendencies to fall into habits and establish inhibitions for reasons that he did not discover or easily forgot. These became fixed and sacred to him, and any departure from them filled him with dread. Sometimes the prohibition might have some reasonable justification, sometimes it might seem wholly absurd and even a great nuisance, but that made no difference in its binding force. For example, pork was taboo among the ancient Hebrews. No one can say why, but none of the modern justifications for abstaining from that particular kind of meat would have counted. It is not improbable that it was the original veneration for the boar and not an abhorrence of him that led to the prohibition.

The modern "principle" is too often only a new form of the ancient taboo, rather than an enlightened rule of conduct. The person who justifies himself by saying that he holds certain beliefs, or acts in a certain manner "on principle," and yet refuses to examine the basis and expediency of his principle, introduces into his thinking and conduct an irrational, mystical element similar to that which characterized savage prohibitions. Principles unintelligently urged make a great deal of trouble in the free consideration of social readjustment, for they are frequently as recalcitrant and obscurantist as the primitive taboo, and are really scarcely more than an excuse for refusing to reconsider one's convictions and conduct. The psychological conditions lying back of both taboo and principle are essentially the same.

We find in savage thought a sort of intensified and generalized taboo in the