A palpable ingredient of mind appears in the laughter of savages at the white man’s ideas about the beginnings and the endings of things. The inquirer into their beliefs may present himself to them as a quite unreasonable sceptic, grubbing at the very roots of things which sensible men accept as self-explanatory. The members of a tribe in Central Australia (Arunta tribe) were immensely tickled by the question how their remote ancestors came by the sacred stones or sticks which they had handed down to them. The idea, that anything could have existed before these {243} original ancestors, struck them as ridiculous. The ultimate explanation of any custom of the tribe was, “Our fathers did it, and therefore we do it”. To try to go behind tradition was to challenge its sufficiency, and so to put forward an absurd paradox.[196] Here we have a mental attitude at once like and unlike that of our children; for the latter are conservative of tradition and disposed to accept authority, but at the same time very energetic in pushing back inquiry into “what came before”. Intelligence would seem not merely to be stirring, but to be capable of adroit play when the savage detects the ridiculous in the white man’s ideas of the future of his race. How many of the simple savages who are instructed in the dogmas of the Christian religion accept them unquestioningly it would be hard to say. Many, perhaps, fail to put any definite meaning into what they hear. Now and again, however, we meet with an instance of a daring laugh at what strikes the hearer as utterly absurd. A teacher of the native Australians had once tried to explain to an intelligent black the doctrine of the immateriality and immortality of the soul. He afterwards learned that his pupil had gone away from the lesson to have a hearty fit of laughter at the absurdity of the idea “of a man’s living and going about without arms, legs, or mouth to eat”.[197] The crass materialism of this tyro’s effort to assimilate spiritual ideas was much the same as we observe in our children. In this laughter at our ways and our ideas we superior people are inclined to see merely the ignorance and narrowness of mind of the laughers. Yet it is possible that the savage may, once and again, in making merry at our {244} expense show himself really our superior. His good sense may be equal to the detection of some of the huge follies in the matter of dress and other customs to which the enlightened European so comically clings. And he has been known to strike the satirical note and to look down upon and laugh “at the stupid self-satisfied Europeans who preached so finely but practised so little what they preached”.[198]