Howitt, who knew his Australian natives intimately,
cites the following as "a good example of how the native mind works."
To the black-fellow his club or his spear are part and parcel of his
ordinary life. There is no, "medicine," no "devil," in them. If they
are to be made supernaturally potent, they must be specially charmed.
But it is quite otherwise with his spear-thrower or his bull-roarer.
The former for no obvious reason enables him to throw his spear
extraordinarily far. (I have myself seen an Australian spear, with
the help of the spear-thrower, fly a hundred and fifty yards, and strike
true and deep at the end of its flight.) The latter emits the noise
of thunder, though a mere chip of wood on the end of a string. These,
then, are in themselves "medicine." There is "virtue" in, or behind,
them.

Is, then, to attribute "virtue" the same thing, necessarily, as to
attribute vitality? Are the spear-thrower and the bull-roarer
inevitably thought of as alive? Or are they, as a matter of course,
endowed with soul or spirit? Or may there be also an impersonal kind
of "virtue," "medicine," or whatever the wonder-working power in the
wonder-working thing is to be called? Now there is evidence that the
savage himself, in speaking about these matters, sometimes says power,
sometimes vitality, sometimes spirit. But the simplest way of
disposing of these questions is to remember that such fine distinctions
as these, which theorists may seek to draw, do not appeal at all to
the savage himself. For him the only fact that matters is that, whereas
some things in the world are ordinary, and can be reckoned on, other
things cannot be reckoned on, but are wonder-working.

Moreover, of wonder-working things, some are good and some are bad.
To get all the good kind of wonder-workers on to his side, so as to
confound the bad kind--that is what his religion is there to do for
him. "May blessings come, may mischiefs go!" is the import of his
religious striving, whether anthropologists class it as spell or as
prayer.

Now the function of religion, it has been assumed, is to restore
confidence, when man is mazed, and out of his depth, fearful of the
mysteries that obtrude on his life, yet compelled, if not exactly
wishful, to face them and wrest from them whatever help is in them.
This function religion fulfils by what may be described in one word
as "suggestion." How the suggestion works psychologically--how, for
instance, associat