which must depend for their truth upon exact data accurately co-ordinated, it would obviously have to be abandoned. But there are certain classes of general facts which remain after all errors in detail, however produced, have been allowed for. Whatever conflicts there may be among accounts of events that occurred during feudal ages, comparison of them brings out the incontestable truth that there was a Feudal System. By their implications, chronicles and laws indicate the traits of this system; and on putting side by side narratives and documents written, not to tell us about the Feudal System but for quite other purposes, we get tolerably clear ideas of these traits in their essentials-ideas made clearer still on collating the evidence furnished by different contemporary societies. Similarly throughout. By making due use not so much of that which past and present witnesses intend to tell us, as of that which they tell us by implication, it is possible to collect data for inductions respecting social structures and functions in their origin and development: the obstacles which arise in the disentangling of such data in the case of any particular society, being mostly surmountable by the help of the comparative method.

Nevertheless, the difficulties above enumerated must be ever present to us. Throughout, we have to depend on testimony; and in every case we have to beware of the many modes in which evidence may be vitiated-have to estimate its worth when it has been discounted in various ways; and have to take care that our conclusions do not depend on any particular class of facts gathered from any particular place or time.

CHAPTER VI.

SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES

INTELLECTUAL.

IF

If you watch the management of a child by a mother of small capacity, you may be struck by the inability she betrays to imagine the child's thoughts and feelings. Full of energy which he must expend in some way, and eager to see everything, her little boy is every moment provoking her by his restlessness. The occasion is perhaps a railway journey. Now he strives to look out of the window; and now, when forbidden to do that, climbs on the seats, or meddles with the small luggage. "Sit still," "Get down, I tell you, Why can't you be quiet? are the commands and expostulations she utters from minute to minute—partly, no doubt, to prevent the discomfort of fellowpassengers. But, as you will see at times when no such motive comes into play, she endeavours to repress these childish activities mainly out of regard for what she thinks propriety, and does it without any adequate recognition of the penalties she inflicts. Though she herself lived through this phase of extreme curiosity—this early time when almost every object passed has the charm of novelty, and when the overflowing energies generate a painful irritation if pent up; yet now she cannot believe how keen is the desire for seeing which she balks, and how difficult is the maintenance of that quietude on which she insists. Conceiving her child's consciousness in terms of her own consciousness, and feeling how easy it is to sit still and not

look out of the window, she ascribes his behaviour to mere perversity.

I recall this and kindred cases to the reader's mind, for the purpose of exemplifying a necessity and a difficulty. The necessity is that in dealing with other beings and interpreting their actions, we must represent their thoughts and feelings in terms of our own. The difficulty is that in so representing them we can never be more than partially right, and are frequently very wrong. The conception which any one frames of another's mind, is inevitably more or less after the pattern of his own mind-is automorphic; and in proportion as the mind of which he has to frame a conception differs from his own, his automorphic interpretation is likely to be wide of the truth.

That measuring other person's actions by the standards our own thoughts and feelings furnish, often causes misconstruction, is a remark familiar even to the vulgar. But while among members of the same society, having natures nearly akin, it is seen that automorphic explanations are often erroneous, it is not seen with due clearness how much more erroneous such explanations commonly are, when the actions are those of men of another race, to whom the kinship in nature is comparatively remote. We do, indeed, perceive this, if the interpretations are not our own; and if both the interpreters and the interpreted are mentally alien to us. When, as in early English literature, we find Greek history conceived in terms of feudal institutions, and the heroes of antiquity spoken of as princes, knights, and squires, it becomes clear that the ideas concerning ancient civilization must have been utterly wrong. When we find Virgil named in religious stories of the middle ages as one among the prophets who visited the cradle of Christ-when an illustrated psalter gives scenes from the life of Christ in which there repeatedly figures a castle with a portcullis-when even the crucifixion is described by Langland in the language of chivalry, so that the man who pierced Christ's side with a spear is considered as a knight who disgraced his knighthood'-when we

read of the Crusaders calling themselves "vassals of Christ; we need no further proof that by carrying their own sentiments and ideas to the interpretation of social arrangements and transactions among the Jews, our ancestors were led into absurd misconceptions. But we do not recognize the fact that in virtue of the same tendency, we are ever framing conceptions which, if not so grotesquely untrue, are yet very wide of the truth. How difficult it is to imagine mental states remote from our own so correctly that we can understand how they issue in individual actions, and consequently in social actions, an instance will make manifest.

The feeling of vague wonder with which he received his first lessons in the Greek mythology, will most likely be dimly remembered by every reader. If not in words, still inarticulately, there passed through him the thought that faith in such stories was unaccountable. When, afterwards, he read in books of travels details of the amazing superstitions of savages, there was joined with a sense of the absurdity of these superstitions, much astonishment at their acceptance by any human beings, however ignorant or stupid. Such beliefs as that the people of a neighbouring tribe had descended from ducks, that rain fell when certain deities began to spit on the Earth, that the island lived upon had been pulled up from the bottom of the ocean by one of their gods, whose hook got fast when he was fishingthese, and countless beliefs equally laughable, seemed to imply an irrationality near to insanity. He interpreted them automorphically carrying with him not simply his own faculties developed to a stage of complexity considerably beyond that reached by the faculties of the savage, but also the modes of thinking in which he was brought up, and the stock of information he had acquired. Probably it has never since occurred to him to do otherwise. Even if he now attempts to see things from the savage's point of view, he most likely fails entirely; and if he succeeds at all, it is but partially. Yet only by seeing things as the savage sees them can his ideas be understood, his

behaviour accounted for, and the resulting social phenomena explained. These apparently-strange superstitions are quite natural-quite rational, in a certain sense, in their respective times and places. The laws of intellectual action are the same for civilized and uncivilized. The difference between civilized and uncivilized is in complexity of faculty and in amount of knowledge accumulated and generalized. Given, reflective powers developed only to that lower degree in which they are possessed by the aboriginal man-given, his small stock of ideas, collected in a narrow area of space, and not added to by records extending through time—given, his impulsive nature incapable of patient inquiry; and these seemingly-monstrous stories of his become in reality the most feasible explanations he can find of surrounding things. Yet even after concluding that this must be so, it is not easy to think from the savage's stand-point, clearly enough to follow the effects of his ideas on his acts, through all the relations of life, social and other.

A parallel difficulty stands in the way of rightly conceiving character remote from our own, so as to see how it issues in conduct. We may best recognize our inability in this respect, by observing the converse inability of other races to understand our characters, and the acts they prompt.

“Wonderful are the works of Allah! Behold! That Frank is trudging about when he can, if he pleases, sit still! "2

In like manner Captain Speke tells us,—

"If I walked up and down the same place to stretch my legs, they [Somali] formed councils of war on my motives, considering I must have some secret designs upon their country, or I would not do it, as no man in his senses could be guilty of working his legs unnecessarily."

"3

But while, by instances like these, we are shown that our characters are in a large measure incomprehensible by races remote in nature from us, the correlative fact that we cannot rightly conceive their sentiments and motives is one perpetually overlooked in our sociological interpretations. Feeling, for