No doubt the disposition of primitive peoples is to conceive everything mystically, or animistically, to use the language of ethnology, particularly where it concerns something strange. On the other hand, when the primitive man has encountered among the cultural objects to which civilization has introduced him, something which he has been able to make immediately intelligible to himself, he has at once formed a perfectly rational conception of it. Some years ago at Lovedale, South Africa, the seat of one of the first successful industrial mission schools, there was an important ceremony to which all the native African chiefs in the vicinity were formally invited. It was the introduction and demonstration of the use of the plow, the first one that had ever been seen in those parts. The proceedings were followed with great interest by a large gathering of natives. When the demonstration was finished one old chief turned to his followers and said with great conviction: "This is a great thing which the white man has brought us. One hoe like that is worth as much as ten wives." An African chief could hardly have expressed appreciation of this one fundamental device of our civilization in more pragmatic or less mystical terms. The wise old chief grasped the meaning of the plow at once, but this was because he had been pre-adapted by earlier experience to do so. It is the subjective, historic and ultimately, perhaps, racial and temperamental factor in the lives of peoples which makes it difficult, though not impossible, perhaps, to transmit political and religious institutions to people of a different racial type and a different social tradition. William James' essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," in which he points out how completely we are likely to miss the point and mistake the inner significance of the lives of those about us, unless we share their expedience, emphasizes this fact. If then the transmission and fusion of cultures is slow, incomplete and sometimes impossible, it is because the external forms, the formulas, technical devices of every social tradition can be more easily transmitted than the aims, the attitudes, sentiments and ideals which attach to them are embodied in them. The former can be copied and used; the latter must be appreciated and understood.