stomed to find similar
myths, rites, customs, fairy tales, all over the world; of some he
can trace the origin to early human imagination and reason, working
on limited knowledge; about others, he asks whether they have been
independently evolved in several places, or whether they have been
diffused from a single centre. In the present case, the problem is
more complicated. Taboos, totemism, myths explanatory of natural
phenomena, customs like what, with Dr. Murray's permission, we call
the Couvade, are either peculiar to barbarous races, or, among the
old civilised races, existed as survivals, protected by conservative
Religion. But such things as 'clairvoyance,' 'levitation,'
'veridical apparitions,' 'movements of objects without physical
contact,' 'rappings,' 'hauntings,' persist as matters of belief, in
full modern civilisation, and are attested by many otherwise sane,
credible, and even scientifically trained modern witnesses. In this
persistence, and in these testimonies, the alleged abnormal
phenomena differ from such matters as nature-myths, customs like
Suttee, Taboo, Couvade, and Totemism, the change of men into beasts,
the raising of storms by art-magic. These things our civilisation
has dropped, the belief in other wild phenomena many persons in our
civilisation retain.

The tendency of the anthropologist is to explain this fact by
Survival and Revival. Given the savage beliefs in magic, spirit
rapping, clairvoyance, and so forth, these, like Marchen, or nursery
tales, will survive obscurely among peasants and the illiterate
generally. In an age of fatigued scepticism and rigid physical
science, the imaginative longings of men will fall back on the
savage or peasant necromancy, which will be revived perhaps in some
obscure American village, and be run after by the credulous and
half-witted. Then the wished-for phenomena will be supplied by the
dexterity of charlatans. As it is easy to demonstrate the quackery
of paid 'mediums,' as _that_, at all events, is a vera causa, the
theory of Survival and Revival seems adequate. Yet there are two
circumstances which suggest that all is not such plain sailing. The
first is the constantly alleged occurrence of 'spontaneous' and
sporadic abnormal phenomena, whether clairvoyance in or out of
hypnotic trance, of effects on the mind and the senses apparently
produced by some action of a distant mind, of hallucinations
coincident with remote events, of physical