ABSTRACT
The foundation of both logics is the same, for it is the uniformity of nature. What reason we have for believing that nature is uniform is a matter much disputed by philosophers. The cause of the belief, the inherent tendency of the human mind to expect similar sequences or coexist ences in similar conditions, was as strong in primitive man as in the modern savant; and the savage not only expects a cause to produce its effect, but also holds with Mill that a single instance of the production of a phenomenon by a given antecedent is enough to warrant the belief that it will always tend to be produced by that antecedent. Thus, “ the king of the Koussa Kaffirs having broken off a piece of a stranded anchor died soon afterwards, upon which all the Kaffirs looked upon the anchor as alive, and saluted it respectfully whenever they passed near it.” 2
Here the Kaffirs’ error consisted in jumping to the conclusion that the molestation of the anchor was the cause of the king’s death; and as it is against this class of error that the inductive methods are designed to guard, the reader may be tempted to imagine that it is in the ignorance of those methods that the difference between savage and scientific logic consists. But the reader would be mistaken. The savage has not indeed formulated the methods, but he uses them all to distinguish the antecedent which is the cause from the other antecedents which have nothing to do with the effect under investigation. Thus the Peruvian mountaineers mentioned in the last chapter, who observed that a certain kind of illness befell them whenever they were in sight of the sea, were using the Method of Agreement in inferring that the sea-spirit was the cause of that particular kind of illness. The Method of Difference, according to which, if the intro duction of a new antecedent into a set of conditions already known is immediately followed by the emergence of a new effect, the new antecedent may be regarded as the cause of the new effect, is employed by the Dusuns in Borneo, who, according to Mr. Hatton {North Borneo, 233 *), “ attribute anything-whether good or bad, lucky or unlucky-that happens to them to something novel which has arrived in their country. For instance, my living in Kindram has caused the intensely hot weather we have experienced of late.” The Method of Concomitant Variations again plays a large part in savage logic. According to this method, things which vary together are causally related to one another, or, vice versd, things which are related together vary together. Hence the world-wide belief that, if the nail-parings or the cut hair of a man pass into the possession of an enemy, the enemy can injure the man; and hence, too, the equally wide spread custom of burying hair or nail-parings, or otherwise placing them beyond reach of an enemy. The shadow, the image, the picture, and the name of a man are closely related to him; and therefore as they are treated so will he suffer. Hence the witch could torture her victim by roasting or wounding a waxen image of him. The savage declines to be sketched or photographed for the same
reason ; 1 the ancient Egyptian secured happiness hereafter by having his tomb filled with pictures representing him engaged in his favourite occupations and surrounded by luxury; wounds inflicted on the shadow or the foot-prints of a man will take effect on him; savages frequently keep their names a profound secret, and the safety and inviolability of the city of Rome depended on the secrecy observed as to the name of its tutelary deity. If the connection required by the method does not exist, then it must be artificially created, as it easily may b e : the Ephesians placed their city under the protection of Artemis by connecting the city and the temple with a rope seven furlongs long. Rut the best exemplification of the savage application of the Method of Concomitant Variations is the waxing and the waning of the moon, with which the growth and decay of all sorts of sub-lunar objects, plants, and animals, things animate and inanimate, are associated; and if the reader is inclined to smile at the obvious folly and puerility of the savage, let him remember that the weather is still supposed, by educated people, to vary with the changes of the moon; and that as to the influence of her phases on vegetation and the advisability of sowing on a waxing moon, the founder of inductive logic, Bacon himself, thought there was something in i t : “ videmus enim in plantationibus et insitionibus setatum lunae observationes non esse res omnino frivolas ” {De Aug. Scient. iii. 4). So thin are the partitions between savage and scientific logic.
