observer collected led him to conclude
that the "almost uniform train of circumstances which affected these
countries from their border situation, and the little difference there
was between one of the dark ages and another, strongly induce me to
believe that the Northern people were little altered in manners from
very remote times to those immediately preceding the reign of Queen
Elizabeth," and this is confirmed by what we actually find from the
report of the Commissioners appointed to settle the peace of the
Marches by fixed and established ordinances, who collected "their
ordinances from the traditional accounts of ancient usages that had
been sanctified as laws by the length of time which they had endured.
These laws were different from most others, nay, almost peculiar to
the men to whom they belonged."[243]

I need not continue these notes as to the backwardness of portions of
the country compared with its general level of culture, because I have
dealt with the evidence elsewhere.[244] What I am anxious to point out
here is that the faculty of such people as these to think, not in
terms of modern science but in terms of their own psychological
conditions, must have been pronounced. If they ever put the question
to themselves as to the origin of things, they would answer themselves
according to the life impressions they were then receiving, and
according to the limited range of their actual knowledge. As with the
creators of the traditional myths, the scientific inquirers of
primitive times, so with these non-advanced people of later times,
they would deal with the problems they did not understand in fashions
suitable to their own understanding. It has always appeared to me that
the impressions of the surrounding life are not sufficiently regarded
in their influence upon primitive thought. They press down upon the
mind, and enclose it within barriers so that it can only act through
these surroundings. Child-life is, in this respect, much the same as
the life of primitive man. A child thinks and acts in terms of his
nursery, his school, or his playground. Thus a memory of my own is to
the point. When quite a child, probably about eight or nine years old,
I was entrusted with the changing of a small cheque drawn by my father
in a country town where we were staying. I had never seen a cheque
before. I remember the ceremony of writing it and the care with which
the necessary instructions were given to me, and I remem