Primitive man is so far away from us, not merely in time but in thought, that we find it difficult to imagine his attempts to grapple with the interpretation of external phenomena. What waves of desire, of curiosity, of wonder, of awe, of terror, of hope, of bewilderment must have rolled through the sluggish dawn of his intellect! As he struggled in his little communities (tiny by comparison with ours) with the evolution of speech, how did those various and perhaps ill-defined emotions come to utterance? He was not naturally speculative. Savage man even now is not, as a rule, speculative, though, as we have seen in the preceding essay, observers who have had opportunities of comparison have noted differences in this respect between one people and another. Everything primitive man saw, everything he heard or felt must have struck his mind primarily in relation to himself--or rather to the community (the food-group, as it has been called), of which the individual formed a part, to its dangers and its needs. The personal element would dominate his thoughts, and must have found expression in his words. As a matter of fact, it forms everywhere the basis of language. Hence it was impossible for man to interpret external phenomena in any other than personal terms. This necessity may have been an inheritance from a pre-human stage, since there is reason to think that the lower animals project their own sensations to other animals, and even to objects without life. Yet to fix the objective personalities that primitive man thought he saw and felt about him must have taken time and observation. Not all objects claimed his attention in the same degree or with the same insistence. Some would stand out aggressively, would fill him with a sense of power manifested in ways that seemed analogous with his own. Others would long remain comparatively unregarded, {29} until something happened which aroused his interest. His attitude was first of all and intensely practical, not contemplative. His fellow-men, the animals he hunted, the trees whose branches he saw waving in the breeze, the sun and moon overhead going their daily rounds--to all these he would early attach significance: they would easily yield the personal quality. But what of the pools, the hills, the rocks, and so forth? There must have been many things that long abode in the twilight of perception--many things upon which reflection was not yet concentrated. The North American Indian lays a tribute of tobacco at the foot of any strange rock whose form strikes him as he goes by, or strews his gift upon the waters of the lake or stream that bears his canoe. On the top of every pass in the Cordilleras of South America and of every pass in the mountains of China the native leaves a token still more trivial. It may be that his earliest forefather, who set the example of such an offering, did so without any definite conception of a personality behind the