ue in some measure to the
unconscious influence of their elders? Or at most is it not a vague and
ill-defined attitude of anthropomorphism necessarily involved in all
spoken languages, which is vastly different from what the ethnologist
understands by "animism"[56]?

But whether this be so or not, there can be no doubt that the "animism"
of the early Egyptians assumed its precise and clear-cut distinctive
features as the result of the growth of ideas suggested by the attempts
to make mummies and statues of the dead and symbolic offerings of food
and other funerary requisites.

Thus incidentally there grew up the belief in a power of magic by means
of which these make-believe offerings could be transformed into
realities. But it is important to emphasize the fact that originally the
conviction of the genuineness of this transubstantiation was a logical
and not unnatural inference based upon the attempt to interpret natural
phenomena, and then to influence them by imitating what were regarded as
the determining factors.[57]

In China these ideas still retain much of their primitive influence and
directness of expression. Referring to the Chinese "belief in the
identity of pictures or images with the beings they represent" de Groot
states that the _kwan shuh_ or "magic art" is a "main branch of Chinese
witchcraft". It consists essentially of "the infusion of a soul, life,
and activity into likenesses of beings, to thus render them fit to work
in some direction desired ... this infusion is effected by blowing or
breathing, or spurting water over the likeness: indeed breath or _khi_,
or water from the mouth imbued with breath, is identical with _yang_
substance or life."[58]

[46: Baldwin Spencer and Gillen, "The Northern Tribes of Central
Australia"; "Across Australia"; and Spencer's "Native Tribes of the
Northern Territory of Australia". For a very important study of the
whole problem with special reference to New Guinea, see B. Malinowski,
"Baloma: the Spirits of the Dead," etc., _Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute_, 1916, p. 415.]

[47: The idea of the earth's maternal function spread throughout the
greater part of the world.]

[48: With reference to the assimilation of the conceptions of human
fertilization and watering the soil and the widespread idea among the
ancients of regarding the male as "he who irrigates," Canon van
Hoonacker gave M. Louis Siret the following note:--

"In Assyrian the cun