Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/44

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its growth from the beginning I think we shall find a steady development from emotional to intellectual art.

We have yet to note that the pleasures obtained from dramatic activities are derived. There is no essential in nature as a distinct property on which pleasure is founded, but it is founded on the relative element of consciousness which is inference and which produces judgments. All our knowledge of the pleasures of dramatic entertainment are founded on judgments and are good or evil from the point of view which we have attained in the progress of culture. It needs but a single illustration to make this fact evident: The drama of the savage, dancing about the firelight which glints the trees of the surrounding forest, does not constitute an entertainment for which the civilized man longs and which he would sedulously promote. That which brings gladness in one stage, brings contempt in another. True, the ethnologist may be delighted to witness the wildwood scene and even to engage in its revelry; but his purpose would be not to dance for joy, but to dance for knowledge.

In a similar manner which we cannot stop to explain fully, all the attributes of bodies as properties or qualities are assigned to regions by wildwood men and shepherd men. The increasing knowledge of the world leads to a geographical knowledge of immense distances on the horizontal plane of the earth as it is then supposed to be; but the cardinal attributes still remain to be grouped about the one which seems to be the most conspicuous.

A survival of this classification of attributes in world schemes still remains in modern time when attributes of good are assigned to a world of space, as the heaven above, and attributes of evil are assigned to the world below—hell.

The attributes which were assigned to the cardinal worlds are grouped about the most conspicuous attribute, as the cardinal worlds are abandoned owing to an increasing knowledge of geography. Finally, they settle down into four elements; the cardinal worlds thus become elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and the