THE HUXLEY-HEARD PARADISE
147
theless, insists upon -the primitive matriarchy, "the emotional base
of which," he says
1
"is self-forgetfulness in devotion."
Heard's Golden Age is founded upon what he called in 1929
" the new anthropology," which was
in
fact the
old
anthropology
of the French School. For it was Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl who
in
the days of the herd instinct and the group consciousness imag–
ined the undifferentiated savage, unable to think at all except by
means of
representations collectives
according to the laws of
par·
ticipation mystique.
The effect of this abstraction was to picture
the savage as a victim of chronic psychosis, even in his most com–
monplace dealings with his environment.
Heard alleges W. H. R. Rivers' "The Disappearance of Use–
ful Arts" as evidence that modern savages tend to revert to the
primal condition when, for one reason or another, they are cut off
from the diffusion of outside influences. It is true that Rivers
observed a tribe of Polynesians who had unaccountably abandoned
the manufacture of canoes, bows and arrows, and pottery-all
articles which seemed to an outsider to be eminently useful in this
particular environment. Heard believes this to prove that savages,
isolated from other cultures, will slough off the arts and crafts of
the conscious man and return to the original state of unfissured
mind. But Rivers makes no claim of finding any uniform rever–
sionism in his studies of the complicated ups and downs of Poly–
nesian culture. The tendency, in fact, of the more careful anthro–
pologists-Boas, Lowie, Malinowski, Ruth Benedict-has been to
reemphasize the functioning of a measure of common sense in the
savage's reaction to his environment. And one of the most effective
uses to which they have put psychology is to correct the oversimpli–
fied idea of the "group mind" and to indicate the presence, even
among the lowest savages, of the individualist.*
2.
The Epoch of Balanced Consciousness.
This is the period of proto-history, when the early civiliza–
tions of the Middle East came into being and when the foundations
of the matured neurosis were laid. The harmonious psyche was
fissured, says Heard, and this produced for the first time the disas-
•An incidental weakness of Toynbee's
History
is that he perpetuates this mythical
primeval society and pictures
morle~n
primitive societies as sleeping quietly in an
identical, undifferentiated "Yin" state, exhausted by the ordeal of their "mutation"
from subhumanity, and so unable to respond to the cosmic rhythm of Yin and Yang.
