ABSTRACT
The social interests and utilities, the social impulsions and sanctions, the social rites and observances—in short the social modes of organisation—dominate his mental development. This leads us to expect that the racial type of interpretation will show marked characters due to the flowering of purely prelogical factors, which are not inhibited, but the rather encouraged, by the type of organisation already in force in fact and in tradition. The animism of the primitive man's interpretation of nature is indeed not one of ideas and thoughts, but one of emotion and practice: not one due to intellectual intercourse, to discussion and interchange of thoughts, opinions and proofs; but one due to the presence in individuals of emotional states which are socially organised by imitation, contagion, and ejection, and fixed by representative symbols. In the progress of early racial interpretation, a picture whose outline is familiar to us in the case of the individual.
