第99章

Hume's cases are rather trivial; and the things which associated sensible objects make us believe in are supposed by him to be unreal.But all the more manifest for that is the fact of their psychological influence.Who does not 'realize' more the fact of a dead or distant friend's existence, at the moment when a portrait, letter, garment or other material reminder of him is found? The whole notion of him then grows pungent and speaks to us and shakes us, in a manner unknown at other times.In children's minds, fancies and realities live side by side.But however lively their fancies may be, they still gain help from association with reality.The imaginative child identifies its dramatis personæ with some doll or other material object, and this evidently solidifies belief, little as it may resemble what it is held to stand for.A thing not too interesting by its own real qualities generally does the best service here.The most useful doll I ever saw was a large cucumber in the hands of a little Amazonian-Indian girl; she nursed it and washed it and rocked it to sleep in a, hammock, and talked to it all day long -- there was no part in life which the cucumber did not play.Says Mr.Tylor:

"An imaginative child will make a dog do duty for a horse, or a soldier for a shepherd, till at last the objective resemblance almost disappears, and a bit of wood may be dragged about, resembling a ship on the sea or a coach on the road.Here the likeness of the bit of wood to a ship or coach is very slight indeed; but it is a thing, and can be moved about,...and is an evident assistance to the child in enabling it to arrange and develop its ideas....Of how much use...may be seen by taking it away, and leaving the child nothing to play with....In later years and among highly educated people the mental process which goes on in a child's playing with wooden soldiers and horses, though it never disappears, must be sought for in more complex phenomena.Perhaps nothing in after-life more closely resembles the effect of a doll upon a child than the effect of the illustrations of a tale upon a grown reader.Here the objective resemblance is very indefinite...yet what reality is given to the scene by a good picture....Mr.Back-house one day noticed in Van Diemen's Land a woman arranging several stones that were hat, oval, and about, two inches wide, and marked in various directions with black and red lines.These, he learned, represented absent friends, and one larger than the rest stood for a fat native woman on Flinder's Island, known by the name of Mother Brown.Similar practices are found among far higher races than the ill-fated Tasmanians.Among some North American tribes another who has lost a child keeps its memory ever present to her by filling its cradle with black feathers and quills, and carrying it about with her for a year or more.When she stops anywhere, she sets up the cradle and talks to it as she goes about her work, just as she would have done if the dead body had been still alive within it.Here we have an image; but in Africa we find a rude doll representing the child, kept as a memorial....Bastian saw Indian women in Peru who had lost an infant carrying about on their backs a wooden doll to represent it."

To many persons among us, photographs of lost ones seem to be fetishes.

They, it is true, resemble; but the fact that the mere materiality of the reminder is almost as important as its resemblance is shown by the popularity a, hundred years ago of the black taffeta 'silhouettes' which are still found among family relies, and of one of which Fichte could write to his affianced: ' Die Farbe fehlt, das Auge feldt, es fehlt der himmlische Ausdruck deiner lieblichen Züge' -- and yet go on worshiping it all the same.The opinion so stoutly professed by many, that language is essential to thought, seems to have this much of truth in it, that all our inward images tend invincibly to attach themselves to something sensible, so as to gain in corporeity and life.Words serve this purpose, gestures serve it, stones, straws, chalk-marks, anything will do.As soon as anyone of these things stands for the idea, the latter seems to be more real.Some persons, the present writer among the number, can hardly lecture without a black-board: the abstract conceptions must be symbolized by letters, squares or circles, and the relations between them by lines.All this symbolism, linguistic, graphic, and dramatic, has other uses too, for it abridges thought and fixes terms.But one of its uses is surely to rouse the believing reaction and give to the ideas a more living reality.As, when we are told a story, and shown the very knife that did the murder, the very ring whose hiding-place the clairvoyant revealed, the whole thing passes from fairy-land to mother-earth, so here we believe all the more, if only we see that 'the bricks are alive to tell the tale.'

So much for the prerogative position of sensations in regard to our belief.But among the sensations themselves all are not deemed equally real.The more practically important ones, the more permanent ones, and the more aesthetically apprehensible ones are selected from the mass, to be believed in most of all; the others are degraded to the position of mere signs and suggestions of these.This fact has already been adverted to in former chapters. The real color of a thing is that one color-sensation which it gives us when most favorably lighted for vision.Soon its real size, its real shape, etc.-- these are but optical sensations selected out of thousands of others, because they have aesthetic characteristics which appeal to our convenience or delight.But I will not repeat what I have already written about this matter, but pass on to our treatment of tactile and muscular sensations, as 'primary qualities,' more real than those 'secondary' qualities which eye and ear and nose reveal.