mc gee] THE BEGINNING OF MA THEMA TICS 665
IV
The course of intellectual development defined by the three prescriptorial number-systems (2-3, 4-5, 6-7) naturally leads in- terest toward the inception of the number idea — a point which must always remain obscure, save as illumined by analogies with lowest men and higher animals. Now, the more intelligent feral animals and the lowest known savages are fairly comparable in their capacity for counting ; they are also alike in another respect of such consequence as to shape the character of both — their lives (as Ernest Seton Thompson so well shows for the animals) are lived in the shadow of tragedies unto often early and always unnatural death. This great fact of inevitable tragedy overlays all other facts woven in the web of nascent mind ; the most firmly fixed habit of lowly life is that of eternal vigilance ; the ever-present thought is that of ever-present danger ; the dominant motive is that of mortal fear. No line of intellectual develop- ment can be fairly traced without full recognition of the ceaseless terrors of feral life ; and the primeval interpretations of environ- ment by animals and men alike manifestly reflect their tragic experiences: The fear-born cunning of the fox engenders that care for a way of escape without which he ventures on no advance ; his every intuition is molded by living realization of a two-side universe — the Danger side in van, the Safety side in rear — with Self as the all-important center ; and only religious adherence to experience-shaped instincts enables him to survive and permits his tribe to increase. The sagacious crow, even in semi-domestication, constantly betrays his notion of a two-side cosmos in frequent backward glances as he surveys the novel or forbidden field in front ; and he is an arrant mystic, crazed with abject terror by night, and given to the formless fetishism of hoarding uncanny things in well-hidden shrines. 1 In like manner nearly all animals, from the fiercest carnivores to the timidest herbivores, manifest constant realization of three overshadowing
1 Wild Animals I have Known % by Ernest Seton Thompson, 1898, pp. 72, 83.
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