43 2 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899
with a strong tendency toward conventionality ; the mythology embraces a hierarchic pantheon in which the deities and their bestial or human vicars hold definite place, sometimes fixed by a cult of the Quarters; the social organization is maintained by reckoning from the ego, and often memorized by placement of individuals in the family and of families in the tribe. The pre- vailing habit of thought is egocentric, in that the cosmos is classi- fied with respect to the ego (which is so amplified as to involve elements not only of person but of place, of time, and of action) ; but, since the dominant idea is that of relation between self and other entities, it may better be characterized as associative.
These two stages combine to form the general stage of pre- scriptorial culture, in which thought is shaped and conveyed chiefly by oral symbols, with some aid from gesture and graphic symbolism, and is measurably crystallized and perpetuated by means of tradition. The shadowy pronominative method seems to pass naturally into the associative mode of thinking, which per- sists in turn until the volume of knowledge becomes so great as to overload the increasingly complex system, when an arrangement better adapted to a larger body of knowledge arises spontaneously.
3. In the third stage the hand supplements the tongue, and the oral symbols are duplicated in manual symbols in such fashion that writing and other graphic devices replace tradition and relieve memory of its greatest burden ; at the same time the objective terminology, at first pronominal and then connotive, gradually becomes denotive, while pantomimic and other actional devices are replaced by verbs and cognate oral and graphic action- symbols ; at the same time, too, associative inflectional forms drop into desuetude, while the simplification of language is doubly accelerated through the addition of hand-economy to tongue-economy. The advance in speech, albeit notable, would seem but to reflect a stimulated cheirization and an improved coordination marking growth in self-consciousness of power and in effort to subjugate nature ; the key-note of the stage is action
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