Similarly, to take an illustration from morals, we find that widely different in complexion and detail as are the moral codes of lower and higher groups, say the Hebrews and the African Kafirs, yet the general patterns of morality are strikingly coincident.  It is reported of the Kafirs that “they possess laws which meet every crime which may be committed.”  Theft is punished by restitution and fine; injuring cattle, by death or fine; false witness, by a heavy fine; adultery, by fine or death; rape, by fine or death; poisoning or witchcraft, by death and confiscation of property; murder, by death or fine; treason or desertion from the tribe, by death or confiscation.[263] The Kafirs and Hebrews are not at the same level of culture, and we miss the more abstract and monotheistic admonitions of the higher religion—­“thou shalt not covet; thou shalt worship no other gods before me”—­but the intelligence shown by the social mind in adjusting the individual to society may fairly be called the same grade of intelligence in the two cases.

When the environmental life of two groups is more alike and the general cultural conditions more correspondent, the parallelism of thought and practice becomes more striking.  The recently discovered Assyrian Code of Hammurabi (about 2500 B.C.) contains striking correspondences with the Mosaic code; and while Semitic scholars probably have good and sufficient reasons for holding that the Mosaic Code was strongly influenced by the Assyrian, we may yet be very confident that the two codes would have been of the same general character if no influence whatever had passed from one to the other.

The institutions and practices of a people are a product of the mind; and if the early and spontaneous products of mind are everywhere of the same general pattern as the later manifestations, only less developed, refined, and specialized, it may well be that failure to progress equally is not due to essential unlikeness of mind, but to conditions lying outside the mind.

Another test of mental ability which deserves special notice is mechanical ingenuity.  Our white pre-eminence owes much to this faculty, and the lower races are reckoned defective in it.  But the lower races do invent, and it is doubtful whether one invention is ever much more difficult than another.  On the psychological side, an invention means that the mind sees a roundabout way of reaching an end when it cannot be reached directly.  It brings into play the associative memory, and involves the recognition of analogies.  There is a certain likeness between the flying back of a bough in one’s face and the rebound of a bow, between a serpent’s tooth and a poisoned arrow, between floating timber and a raft or boat; and water, steam, and electricity are like a horse in one respect—­they will all make wheels go around, and do work.