Psychology and Folk-Lore

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill PRIMITIVE VALUES ARGUMENT TOES the natural, in the sense of the primitive, man value power simply as a means oj sell-aggrandizement and the exploitation of his fellows ? This is a question of historical fact, and history cannot of itself determine values, since these are ultimately affirmations of the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill PRIMITIVE VALUES ARGUMENT TOES the natural, in the sense of the primitive, man value power simply as a means oj sell-aggrandizement and the exploitation of his fellows ? This is a question of historical fact, and history cannot of itself determine values, since these are ultimately affirmations of the will. Ethics, however, may appeal to history to show whether a given doctrine is actually conformable with practice or not; and thus a historical justification is sought for the ethics of the militant state when it is asserted that charity and loving-kindness are denaturalized values. This statement implies that the unsophisticated kind of man on whom the struggle for existence presses most hardly has no such tender feelings, but is swayed wholly by a lust for domination. Is it, then, true that people of lowly culture are in general prone to hate rather than to love ? Is a hard life bound to produce a hard man ? Though a strain of hardness, a certain fighting quality, is an ingredient in all true manliness, it can be shown that there is likewise a gentle element in the natural man which stands to the hard element in a normal relation of superiority. A test case is the development of the will for power among the simpler peoples. The direction of primitive aspiration is typically revealed by words of the type of mana. Such a word stands, not for material power simply, but for a spiritual power on which material prosperity attends as a result. Mana implies tabu. Spiritual power is not to be attained without self-discipline. Again, mana comes as a boon, and as such must be received and used, in a spirit of due humility. It is a will to be strong in spite of, rather than for the sake of, the animal passions. A possible misuse of mana is recognized by the savage, and he who wor..