Primitive Mentality

Among the differences which distinguish the mentality of primitive communities from our own, there is one which has attracted the attention of many of those who have observed such peoples under the most favourable conditions—that is, before their ideas have been modified by prolonged association with white races. These observers have maintained that primitives manifest a decided distaste for reasoning, for what logicians call the “ discursive operations of thought”; at the same time they have remarked that this distaste did not arise out of any radical incapability or any inherent defect in their understanding, but was rather to be accounted for by their general methods of thought.

The Jesuit missionaries, for instance, who were the first to see the Indians dwelling in the eastern parts of North America, could not help speaking of this. “We are forced to the conclusion that the Iroquois are incapable of reasoning like the Chinese and other civilized races to whom we set forth the belief in God and His truth. . . . The Iroquois is not influenced by reason. His direct perception of things is the only light which guides him. The incentives to belief which theology is accustomed to use in order to convince the most hardened free-thinkers are not listened to here, where our most profound truths are declared to be lies. They usually believe only what they see.” A little further on the same priest adds: “The truths of the Gospel would not have seemed admissible to them had they been founded on reason and good sense alone. Since these people are wanting in culture and breeding, something plainer and more tangible was required to make an impression on their minds. Although there are minds among them quite as capable of scientific thought as those of Europeans, yet their up-bringing and their need to hunt for a living has reduced them to a state in which their reasoning power does not go beyond what pertains to their bodily health, their success in hunting and fishing, their trading and their warfare; and all these things are like so many principles from which they draw all their conclusions, not only as regards their homes, their occupations, and their way of life, but also their superstitions and their deities.”