re personalities.[10] Judging
from the behaviour of little children, and from the myths of savages,
early man may have half-consciously extended his own sense of personal and
potent and animated existence to the whole of nature as known to him. Not
only animals, but vegetables and inorganic objects, may have been looked
on by him as persons, like what he felt himself to be. The child (perhaps
merely because _taught_ to do so) beats the naughty chair, and all objects
are persons in early mythology. But this _feeling_, rather than theory,
may conceivably have existed among early men, before they developed the
hypothesis of 'spirits,' 'ghosts,' or souls. It is the origin of _that_
hypothesis, 'Animism,' which Mr. Tylor investigates.
What, then, is the origin of Animism? It arose in the earliest traceable
speculations on 'two groups of biological problems:
(1) 'What is it that makes the difference between a living body and a
dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death?'
(2) 'What are those human shapes which appear in dreams and
visions?'[11]
Here it should be noted that Mr. Tylor most properly takes a distinction
between sleeping 'dreams' and waking 'visions,' or 'clear vision.' The
distinction is made even by the blacks of Australia. Thus one of the
Kurnai announced that his _Yambo_, or soul, could 'go out' during sleep,
and see the distant and the dead. But 'while any one might be able to
communicate with the ghosts, _during sleep_, it was only the wizards who
were able to do so in waking hours.' A wizard, in fact, is a person
susceptible (or feigning to be susceptible) when awake to hallucinatory
perceptions of phantasms of the dead. 'Among the Kulin of Wimmera River a
man became a wizard who, as a boy, had seen his mother's ghost sitting at
her grave.'[12] These facts prove that a race of savages at the bottom of
the scale of culture do take a formal distinction between normal dreams in
sleep and waking hallucinations--a thing apt to be denied.
Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer offers the massive generalisation that savages do
not possess a language enabling a man to say 'I dreamed that I saw,'
instead of 'I saw' ('Principles of Sociology,' p. 150). This could only be
proved by giving examples of such highly deficient languages, which Mr.
Spencer does not do.[13] In many savage speculations there occur ideas as
subtly metaphysical as those of Hegel. Moreover, even the Australian
languages have the v
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