fight us, your friends! Tut! I this is some great mistake, surely.'
Mundelé' replied one of them....'our people saw you yesterday make marks on some tara-tara .This is very bad.Our country will waste, our goats will die, our bananas will rot, and our women will dry up.What have we done to you that you should wish to kill us? We have sold you food and we have brought you wine each day.Your people are allowed to wander where they please without trouble.Why is the Mundelé so wicked! We have gathered together to fight you if you do not burn that tara-tara now before our eyes.If you burn it we go away, and shall be your friends as heretofore.'
''I told them to rest there, and left Safeni in their hands as a pledge that I should return.My tent was not fifty yards from the spot, but while going towards it my brain was busy in devising some plan to foil this superstitious madness.My note-book contained a vast number of valuable notes....I
could not sacrifice it to the childish caprice of savages.9s I was rummaging my book-box, I came across a volume of Shakespeare much worn and well thumbed, and which was of the same size as my field-book; its cover was similar also, and it might be passed for the field-book, provided that no one remembered its appearance too well.I took it to them.'Is this the tara-tara, friends, that you wish burned?'
Yes, yes, that is it.'
Well, take it, and burn it.or keep it.'
"M-m.No, no, no.We will not touch it.It is fetish.You must burn it.'
" 'I! Well, let it be so.I will do anything to please my good friends of Mowa.'
"We walked to the nearest fire.I breathed a regretful farewell to my genial companion, which.during my many weary hours of night, had assisted to relieve my mind when oppressed by almost intolerable woes, and then gravely consigned the innocent Shakespeare to the flames, heaping the brush fuel over it with ceremonious care.
''Ah-h,' breathed the poor deluded natives sighing their relief....'There is no trouble now.'...End something approaching to a cheer was shouted among them, which terminated the episode of the burning of Shakespeare.
'Rationality, Activity, and Faith' (Princeton Review, July 1883, pp 64-9).
J.Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston, 1885).pp.317-57.
Chapter XXVII
Prof.Royce puts this well in discussing idealism and the reality of an 'external world." If the history of popular speculation on these topics could be written, how much of cowardice and shuffling would be found in the behavior of the natural mind before the question, 'How dost thou know of an external reality.Instead of simply and plainly answering:
'I mean by the external world in the first place something that I accept know of an external reality or demand, that I posit, postulate actively construct on the basis of sense-data,' the natural man gives us all kinds of vague compromise answers....Where shall these endless turnings and twistings have an end?.....All these lesser motives are appealed to, and the one ultimate motive is neglected.The ultimate motive with the man of every-day life is the will to have an external world.Whatever consciousness contains, reason will persist in spontaneously adding the thought: 'But there shall be something beyond this.'..The popular assurance of an external world is the fixed determination to make one , now and henceforth." (Religious Aspect of philosophy, p.304 -- the italics are my own.) This immixture of the will appears most flagrantly in the fact that although external matter is doubted commonly enough, minds external to our own are never doubted.We need them too much, are too essentially social to dispense with them.Semblances of matter may suffice to react upon, but not semblances of communing souls.a psychic solipsism is too hideous a mockery of our wants, and, so far as I know, has never been seriously entertained.-- Chapters ix and x of Prof.Royce's work are on the whole the dearest account of the psychology of belief with which I am acquainted.
''The leading fact in Belief, according to my view of it, is our Primitive Credulity.We begin by believing everything;
whatever is, is true....The animal born in the morning of a summer day proceeds upon the fact of daylight; assumes the perpetuity of that fact.
Whatever it is disposed to do.it does without misgivings.If in the morning it began around of operations continuing for hours, under the full benefit of day-light, it would unhesitatingly begin the same roll and in the evening.
Its state of mind is practically one of unbounded confidence; but, as yet, it does not understand what confidence means.
"The pristine assurance is soon met by checks; a disagreeable experience leading to new insight.To be thwarted and opposed is one of our earliest and most frequent pains.It develops the sense of a distinction between free and obstructed impulses; the unconsciousness of an open way is exchanged for consciousness; we are now said properly to believe in what has never been contradicted, as we disbelieve in what has been contradicted.We believe that, after the dawn of day, there is before us a continuance of light;
we do not believe that this light is to continue forever.
" Thus, the vital circumstance in belief is never to be contradicted -- never to lose prestige.The number of repetitions counts for little in the process: we are as much convinced after ten as after fifty;
we are more convinced by ten unbroken than by fifty for and one against."
(Bain : The Emotions and the Will, pp.511, 512.)
Literature.D Hume : Treatise on Human Nature, part III.§§ vi-x A.Bain: Emotions and Will, chapter on Belief (also pp.20 ff).J.Sully: Sensation and Intuition, essay iv J.Mill:
Analysis of Human Mind Ch.Renouvier : Psychologie Rationnelle, vol.ii.
