tiest moods revert to language and
modes of expression which have no meaning apart from this belief in the
conscious animation of every object in the world. They may move us for
the moment by their utterances; but we never take their raptures
literally. To the savage, however, it is no figure of speech to call
upon the sun to behold some great deed, or to declare that the moon
hides her face; to assert that the ocean smiles, or that the river
swells with rage, and overwhelms a wayfarer who is crossing it, or an
unsuspecting village on its banks. These phrases for him fit the facts
of nature as closely as those which record that the man eats or the boy
runs. Nay, what would seem incredible to him would be to deny that the
sun can see or the moon hide her face, the ocean smile or the river
become enraged. Conscious personality and human emotions are visible to
him everywhere and in all things.

It matters not to the savage that human form and speech are absent.
These are not necessary, or, if they are, they can be assumed either at
will or under certain conditions. For one of the consequences, or at
least one of the accompaniments, of this stage of thought is the belief
in change of form without loss of individual identity. The bear whom the
savage meets in the woods is too cunning to appear and do battle with
him as a man; but he could if he chose. The stars were once men and
women. Sun and moon, the wind and the waters, perform all the functions
of living beings: they speak, they eat, they marry and have children.
Rocks and trees are not always as immovable as they appear: sometimes
they are to be seen as beasts or men, whose shapes they still, it may
be, dimly retain.

It follows that peoples in this stage of thought cannot have, in theory
at all events, the repugnance to a sexual union between man and the
lower animals with which religious training and the growth of
civilization have impressed all the higher races. Such peoples admit
the possibility of a marriage wherein one party may be human and the
other an animal of a different species, or even a tree or plant. If they
do not regard it as an event which can take place in their own time and
neighbourhood, it does not seem entirely incredible as an event of the
past; and sometimes customs are preserved on into a higher degree of
culture--such as that of wedding, for special purposes, a man to a
tree--unmistakably bespeaking former, if not present, beliefs. Moreover