Psychologie der Naturvölker

Abstract

IN this study of primitive culture, Dr. Schultze passes under review, from the standpoint of the psychologist, the material which is the common heritage of the anthro-pologists of to-day. Spite of the suspicions aroused by a sub-title of nineteen words, Dr. Schultze's volume is an unpretentious bit of work by a competent writer, whom no phantasy of construction or love of paradox has led astray from the patient use of authorities and the exercise of a sober judgment. Dr. Schultze's first essays in his subject were printed some thirty years ago. The present contribution is self-contained, though for its author it is but a part of a larger whole, preluded by physiological psychology and a treatise on the psychical life of plant and brute, and to be followed by a study of childhood. It is naturally evolutionist in conception, although the descriptive continuity which the author maintains is accompanied by the refusal to allow that the derivation of apperceptive consciousness from associational, which in the interests of a unitary view of nature he might desiderate, has been adequately made out. A feature of the book is the use made of English authorities. Not only Spencer and Tylor, but McLennan and Lubbock supply the writer with important doctrines, e.g. in his account of the evolution of marriage. Mr. Sutherland's “Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct” is recognised as having anticipated Dr. Schultze in much which he would have been glad to have said, but, far from being dismissed with a pereat, is summarised in an appendix. It is on fetichism and animism that Dr. Schultze is most at home. Not that there is not much else of interest on the alleged superiority of vision among savages, on the concreteness of their philology, on the relation of rhythm to melody, on the difference of the sexes in regard to the sense of smell, on the evolution of the sense for landscape, and the like. But to the topics of his earliest studies he returns as to a first love. On the soul-theories of savages and the corresponding eschatology he writes convincingly. The plurality of souls in pulse and blood and breath and shadow, the gradual elimination of some of these and the syncretism of the rest, the place of the dream image in the evolution of the cult of manes and in the selection of totems, the literal and unsymbolic character of the latter, the order in which the heavenly bodies enter into primitive worship—these are the points on which Dr. Schultze compresses year-long work into moments of insight and selective description. Believing, as he does, that Germany has a colonial future in direct contact with primitive stocks, Dr. Schultze offers his essay to the understanding of the savage as a help forward to the achievement of the educational mission of his country. A pious gift.

Psychologie der Naturvölker.

By Dr. J. Schultze. Pp. xii + 392. (Leipzig: Veit and Co., 1900.)