The primitive picture has for its object not only to impart information, but to excite the very definite pleasure of recognition of a known object.  All explorers agree in their accounts of the savage’s delight in his own naive efforts at picture making.  All such drawings show in varying degrees the same characteristics; first of all, an entire lack of symmetry.  In a really great number of examples, including drawings and picture-writing from all over the world, I have not found one which showed an attempt at symmetrical arrangement.  Secondly, great life and movement, particularly in the drawings of animals.  Thirdly, an emphasis of the typical characteristics, the logical marks, amounting sometimes to caricature.  The primitive man draws to tell a story, as children do.  He gives with real power what interests him, and puts in what he knows ought to be there, even if it is not seen, but he is so engrossed by his interest in the imitated object as to neglect entirely its relation to a background.

[Illustration:  FIG. 11]

Now, this very antithesis of ornament and picture is enlightening as to the dawn of aesthetic feeling, and the strongest confirmation of our hypothesis of an original impulse to symmetry in art.  In the ornamentation of objects the content or meaning of the design is already supplied by the merest hint of the symbol which is the practical motive of all ornamentation.  The savage artist need, therefore, concern himself no more about it, and the form of his design is free to take whatever shape is demanded either by the conditions of technique and the surface to be ornamented, or by the natural aesthetic impulse.  We have found that technical conditions account for only a small part of the observed symmetry in pattern, and the inference to a natural tendency to symmetry is clear.  Pictorial representation, on the other hand, is enjoyed by the primitive man merely as an imitation, of which he can say, ’This is that animal’—­to paraphrase Aristotle’s Poetics.  He is thus constrained to reproduce the form as it shows meaning, and to ignore it as form, or as his natural motor impulses would make it.

To sum up the conclusions reached by this short survey of the field of primitive art, it is clear that much of the symmetry appearing in primitive art is due (1) to the conditions of construction, as in the form of dwellings, binding-patterns, weaving and textile patterns generally; (2) to convenience in use, as in the shapes of spears, arrows, knives, two-handled baskets and jars; (3) to the imitation of animal forms, as in the shapes of pottery, etc.  On the other hand (1) a very great deal of symmetrical ornament maintains itself against the suggestions of the shape to which it is applied, as the ornaments of baskets, pottery, and all rounded objects; and (2) all distortion, disintegration, degradation of pattern-motives, often so marked as all but to destroy their meaning, is in the direction of geometrical symmetry.