f certain members of his tribe as exempt from most of the limitations,
and capable of working every miracle that tradition has ever attributed
to prophets or gods. Nor are such miraculous powers, such practical
omnipotence, supposed by savages to be at all rare among themselves.
Though highly valued, miraculous attainments are not believed to be
unusual. This must be kept steadily in mind. When myth-making man
regards the sky or sun or wind as a person, he does not mean merely
a person with the limitations recognised by modern races. He means a
person with the miraculous powers of the medicine-man. The sky, sun,
wind or other elemental personage can converse with the dead, and can
turn himself and his neighbours into animals, stones and trees.

To understand these functions and their exercise, it is necessary to
examine what may be called savage science, savage metaphysics, and the
savage theory of the state of the dead. The medicine-man's supernatural
claims are rooted in the general savage view of the world, of what is
possible, and of what (if anything) is impossible. The savage, even more
than the civilised man, may be described as a creature "moving about in
worlds not realised". He feels, no less than civilised man, the need of
making the world intelligible, and he is active in his search for causes
and effects. There is much "speculation in these eyes that he doth glare
withal". This is a statement which has been denied by some persons
who have lived with savages. Thus Mr. Bates, in his Naturalist on the
Amazon,(1) writes: "Their want of curiosity is extreme.... Vicente (an
Indian companion) did not know the cause of thunder and lightning. I
asked him who made the sun, the stars, the trees. He didn't know, and
had never heard the subject mentioned in his tribe." But Mr. Bates
admits that even Vicente had a theory of the configuration of the world.
"The necessity of a theory of the earth and water had been felt, and
a theory had been suggested." Again, Mr. Bates says about a certain
Brazilian tribe, "Their sluggish minds seem unable to conceive or feel
the want of a theory of the soul"; and he thinks the cause of this
indolence is the lack "of a written language or a leisured class". Now
savages, as a rule, are all in the "leisured class," all sportsmen.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, too, has expressed scepticism about the curiosity
attributed to savages. The point is important, because, in our view, the
medicine-man's powe