PRIMITIVE MIND.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20402, 2 November 1929, Page 1 (Supplement)

PRIMITIVE MIND.

ITS PROBLEMS.

Bt KOTXEE.

" Tho soul of another." says Debussy, the musician, " is a dim forest where one must walk with care." There was never au ago that needed the reminder moi-e than ours. Modern psychology in most of its developments is an ignorant eoeksure, trampling with clumsy feet of Lhe delicate mysteries that lie iu tho deep recesses of the dark forest. Psychoanalysis in its popular form provided an easily donned and particularly heavy pair of boots for tho most bumptious of tho tram piers. They have made a sorry wreck of life's beauty and mystery; but nature has a prompt remedy. Life goes unheeding on and in the secret places in the shadows the old beauties come again. For this is a forest that no vandalism can destroy. While psycho-analysis and behaviourism and the rest have been reducing the complexities of the modern man's soul to mere dirt, or to bliud mechanism, anthropology has been making headway with its exploration of the mind and soul of the primitive. Once upon a time. men could speak of the noble savage and point to a return to nature as the cure for all the world's ills. Rousseau, when he planted tiiat idea in the French mind, sowed the seed of tho French Revolution, for tho French mind, unlike our own, is severely logical, and is not afraid to carry its thinking to the logical conclusion. Others have assumed that the savage was an inferior order of humanity—if indeed he could be called human at all. In Australia the aborigine was sometimes hunted down like a wild beast who ceased to be dangerous only when he was dead. New Approach. It was obvious that either way there was no hone of understanding the native mind. If you •approached with the idea that here was the perfect pattern fresh from nature's mould, before civilisation had betiun its disfiguring and mutilating work, you were as likely to come at the truth as if you assumed that the native was a dullard and a fool, and his customs were ridiculous when they were not devilish. The modern approach takes one of two lines. In the lirst flush of enthusiasm when it seemed that Darwin had provided the master key of every mystery, and when Spencer was codifying au evolutionary philosophy that would uniiy and explain everything in nature and man, it was taken for granted that primitive man was simply civilised man at an earlier stage of development. Humanity had marched steadily on from its animal beginning: through the lower stages to its present dignity. It was still marching steadily on! The same evolutionary processes controlled its development throughout. The primitive mind was simply tho immature child mind destined to find its natural fulfilment in the adult stage. The primitive thought as we did; his mental processes were the same as ours. We could understand him by observing how far he had progressed toward our own standards. The other approach, identified with the names of Durkheim and Levy Bruhl, insists that the primitive mind should bo studied ar a complete thing in itself, not as a half-developed civilised mind on the road to maturitv. It, follows its own laws of thousrht, which are widely different from ours. It is complete and fully developed on its own litres. It has grown out of mvriads of y<?ars ol reaction to its own specialised environment. So far from being of a childish simplicity it is more complex than ours. lhe languages it has evolved for intercommunication and as the. treasure house of the accumulated wealth of ideas and experiences of the past tribal ages are far more elaborate in vocabulary and structure than our own. In a word, the primitive mind canriot. be understood in terms of the life and ideas we know; it sees nothing as we so" it: it follows paths where we cannot follow it; it is governed by laws o? thought, that sometimes run in direct contradiction to ours. Levy Bruhl. Levy Bruhl, of the Sorbounc, is the chief exponent of this view of t.iie primitive mind. And he is the leader of the modern school that seeks sympathetically to liud a clue to the dark labyrinth of the native mind. There can be no cer tainty, of course. Our own Elsdon Best has declared that we shall never fathom now the mentality of the Maori. "The mentality of the Maori is of an intensely mystical nature. We have many singu lar theories about Maori beliefs and Macr thoughts, but the truth is we do not understand either, and what is more, wp never shall. We shall never know the inwardness of the native mind. For that would mean retracing our steps for many centuries back into the dim past, fai back to the time when wc also possessed tho mind of the primitive man; and the gates have long closed on that hidden road." ...

Levy Bruhl considers that primitive mentality is divided from ours by a deep gulf. When a primitive sees an object, only tho sense or impression with which he starts corresponds with our mental process. Starting from the actual external stimulus the" two types of mind lake, different paths. With us analysis and generalisation work through to the concept. The primitive is off at once into a world of mystic powers and presences with which he has to relate the object presented to his senses, and in the light of which he has to explain it, He links ifc with a world of spirit which is the real world for him, more real than the things he can see and taste an. handle. He gains his knowledge of this world of mystic reality from the group mind of the tribe. Handed on to him amid the tremendous emotional accompaniments of his initation into the status and privileges of manhood, this traditional spiritual lore of the tribe thereafter governs all his life and thought. Mystic Background. Possessing this mystical background, ha faces life with explanations ready made. Ho knows why tilings happen and he is not much concerned to ask now. Secondary causes do not exist for -him. He goes back to what is for him the. ultimate. Nj sickness is to be explained 011 merely physical grounds Nothing happens by chance; there is a spiritual explanation behind everything. No death is natural. If a mail flics, then some, spiritual force has been directed against, him. . , , Even when some veteran dies at last of senile decay the cause of death must be sought m the spiritual world So e verv thing is related to that world, the most natural world to htm, where dwell the spirits of tho dead, and a legion of other spirit-powers either individualised or diffused and impersonal as in tho cm* ° You see the working of this mystic iuentalitv in the treatment of disease. As the cause is mystic tho diagnosis is wholly a matter of determining the spirit involved. Symptoms do not matter. When his own knowledge fail? the diagnosis is carried out by the expert, the medicine man. And the treatment is consequently i mystic, too. The afflicting spirit must be induced by incantation to change its mind. ~ ~ This world of spirit is not outside tho world he knows and sees, but is tho chief part, of it, enfolding it, penetrating it, for him the supreme reality. Other aspects of the theory I shall deal with nesi week.