such symbols. One cannot make a new king, who may be a boy, in all
respects like his predecessor, who may have been an old man. But one can
tattoo both of them with the same pattern. It is even more easy and less
painful to attach a symbol to a king which is not a part of the man
himself, a royal staff for instance, which may be decorated and enlarged
until it is useless as a staff, but unmistakable as a symbol. The king
is then recognised as king because he is the 'staff-bearer' ([Greek:
skêptouchos basileús]). Such a staff is very like a name, and there
may, perhaps, have been an early Mexican system of sign-writing in which
a model of a staff stood for a king.

[11] Cf. William James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p.
392:--'The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is
the history of our taking advantage of the ways in which they judge of
everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill
them.'

At this point it is already difficult not to intellectualise the whole
process. Our own 'common-sense' and the systematised common-sense of the
eighteenth-century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tribal
man for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded thereby of the
original social contract between ruler and ruled, or of the pleasure and
pain which experience had shown to be derived from royal leadership and
royal punishments, and that he therefore decided by a process of
reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king.

When the symbol by which our impulse is stimulated is actual language,
it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional association
with the full process of logical inference. Because one of the effects
of those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us a