ny restraint; he hits upon all kinds of grotesque theories, and,
having no critical faculty to test them, he repeats them and
seriously believes them. The stories of the nursery, in which there
are no impossibilities, in which a man may visit the sun and the
winds in their homes and find them at their broth, in which the
beasts can speak, in which the witch or the fairy knows at any
distance what is going on and can turn up just at the nick of time,
in which ghosts walk, in which anything can be changed into anything,
a hero going through half a dozen transformations to escape from so
many dangers,--these are to the savage not incredible nor foolish
tales, to him they are very real, and very serious matters. He lives,
in fact, we are told by the authorities on the subject, in the
myth-making period of the world; in the period when such incidents as
occur in the tales of fairyland and in the stories of mythology are
matter of common belief, and even, it is thought, of common
experience, so that when the story is put in a good form, it lives
and is believed as a true record of what has actually taken place.

On one feature of the savage imagination in particular we must fix
our attention. The savage regards all things as animated,--as
animated with a life like his own. Of his own life he has no very
exalted idea; he has no notion how different he really is from
anything around him; as he is himself, so he supposes other beings to
be also, not only the animals but the trees and all that moves and
even what does not move, even rocks and stones. He is living himself;
he regards all these as living too. He imagines them like himself,
and supposes them to have feelings and passions like his own, to
reason as he does, and even if he is told they speak as he does, that
is not incredible to him. Thus he lives in a world of infinite
confusion, in which there are no laws, no classes of beings, no means
of knowing what may happen, or of verifying any statement, where
every effort of fancy may be believed. The mental world of savages
has been compared to the ravings of a whole world turned lunatic. We
survey it, however, without horror, because we know that reason is
not unseated there, but striving towards her kingdom. That is the
experience that had to be gone through, these are part of the
experiments, such as every child has still to make, by which the
knowledge of the world is gradually arrived at.

Amid this apparent universa