ber the
amazement with which I received the golden sovereigns. But my mind
dwelt upon this strange thing called a cheque, and after a time I
deliberately came to the conclusion that my father was allowed to get
money for these cheques on condition only that he wrote them without a
mistake and without a blot. The conception is absurd until we come to
analyse the cause of it. My young life at that time was receiving its
greatest impressions, its all-absorbing impressions, from my school
exercises in writing. It was a copybook life for the time being, and
when I turned to ask my question as to origins, as every human being
has asked himself in turn, I could express myself only in copybook
terms. It is so with the primitive mind. It can only express itself in
the terms of its greatest impressions, and it is in this way that
primitive animism, sympathetic magic and other conceptions obtained
from the results of anthropological research, are to be found in much
the same degree wherever humanity is found in primitive conditions.
As Mr. Hickson puts it so well: "Just as the little black baby of the
negro, the brown baby of the Malay, the yellow baby of the Chinaman,
are in face and form, in gestures and habits, as well as in the first
articulate sound they mutter, very much alike, so the mind of man,
whether he be Aryan or Malay, Mongolian or Negrito, has, in the course
of its evolution, passed through stages which are practically
identical. In the intellectual childhood of mankind natural phenomena,
or some other causes, of which we are at present ignorant, have
induced thoughts, stories, legends, and myths, that in their
essentials are identical among all the races of the world with which
we are acquainted;"[245] or to take one other example from the
experience of travellers, Mr. Mitchell, speaking of the Australians,
says: "I found a native still there, and on my advancing towards him
with a twig he shook another twig at me, waving it over his head, and
at the same time intimating with it that we must go back. He and the
boy then threw up dust at us with their toes (_cf._ 2 Sam. xvi. 13).
These various expressions of hostility and defiance were too
intelligible to be mistaken. The expressive pantomime of the man
showed the identity of the human mind, however distinct the races or
different the language."[246]

This identity is shown in many other ways to have been operating,
perhaps to be operating still, upon minds not att