the framework thus supplied, otherwise we cannot logically interpret it. At the best we may make for it what has been wittily called a watertight compartment. Men of the lower culture brought suddenly into contact with civilization and civilized ideas experience a corresponding difficulty. Missionaries are often in despair over their converts’ relapses. These relapses are occasioned not merely by the difference of moral atmosphere, but quite as much by the intellectual abyss between savagery and civilization. Christianity and heathenism--the new and the old--are jumbled together in the convert’s mind. His traditional modes of thought are as little changed as his outward environment, and the new ideas are incongruous with them. The result is chaos. So the civilized enquirer into savage belief is constantly brought up in what seems {23} a blind alley. He cannot find the way out, not because there is not a logical issue, but because the landscape is unfamiliar. He attempts to adapt the thoughts of the savage, so far as he has seized them, to his own totally different mental framework; and they are refractory. Not until the effort is abandoned, and patient, unprejudiced search has discovered the true pattern of the puzzle, will it be solved. For it needs a considerable apprenticeship to enable the observer, in Miss Kingsley’s phrase, to “think black,” to understand the logic of “black” thought, and accurately, or at least approximately, to reproduce its process and aims. When we are told, therefore, by a writer whom I cited a few pages back that the relation of cause and effect in all but the most patent and mechanical cases is beyond the grasp of the West African Bantu, that statement must be taken with some qualification. It should be explained that it is the relation of cause and effect according to our ideas and our reasoning that is beyond the native grasp, because our axioms are unknown to him; he reasons from quite another set of logical presuppositions. To change the figure, he is a child, but a child familiar only with what we deem a topsy-turvy world, though it is the same world from which we ourselves emerged long ago. If we would comprehend him we must painfully climb down into that world again, breathe its air, familiarize ourselves with its scenes of wonder and of terror, and make intimate companions of all its strange inhabitants. Thus and thus only can we recover the clue that will lead us safely through the shadowy forests and haunted valleys and over the primeval mountain-tops of native thought. Then we shall find that the savage is not so irrational as we have thought him, and that in his wildest divergence from our {24} methods of reasoning he has a method of his own--a method followed once upon a time by our own ancestors, a method from which the peasantry of many a European country is not yet wholly emancipated.