mingle,”

every fact is unrelated to every other fact, and therefore interpreted wrongly.

Man, in his first outlook upon nature, was altogether ignorant of the character of the forces by which he was environed; ignorant of that unvarying relation between effect and cause which it needed the experience of ages and the generalisations therefrom to apprehend, and to express as “laws of nature.” He had not even the intellectual resource of later times in inventing miracle to explain where the necessary relation between events seemed broken or absent.

His first attitude was that of wonder, mingled with fear—fear as instinctive as the dread of the brute for him. The sole measure of things was himself, consequently everything that moved or that had power of movement did so because it was alive. A personal life and will was attributed to sun, moon, clouds, river, waterfall, ocean, and tree, and the varying phenomena of the sky at dawn or noonday, at gray eve or black-clouded night, were the manifestation of the controlling life that dwelt in all. In a thousand different forms this conception was expressed. The thunder was the roar of a mighty beast; the lightning a serpent darting at its prey, an angry eye flashing, the storm demon’s outshot forked tongue; the rainbow a thirsty monster; the waterspout a long-tailed dragon. This was not a pretty or powerful conceit, not imagery, but an explanation. The men who thus spoke of these phenomena meant precisely what they said. What does the savage know about heat, light, sound, electricity, and the other modes of motion through which the Proteus-force beyond our ken is manifest? How many persons who have enjoyed a “liberal” education can give correct answers, if asked off-hand, explaining how glaciers are born of the sunshine, and why two sounds, travelling in opposite directions at equal velocities, interfere and cause silence? The percentage of young men, hailing from schools of renown, who give the most ludicrous replies when asked the cause of day and night, and the distance of the earth from the sun, is by no means small.

Whilst the primary causes determining the production of myths are uniform, the secondary causes, due in the main to different physical surroundings, vary, bringing about unlikeness in subject and detail. Nevertheless, in grouping the several classes of myths, those are obviously to be placed prominently which embrace explanations of the origin of things, from sun and star to man and insect, involving ideas about the powers to whom all things are attributed. But in this book no exhaustive treatment is possible, only some indication of the general lines along which the myth-making faculty has advanced, and for this purpose a few illustrations of barbaric mental confusion between the living and the not living are chosen at the outset. They will, moreover, prepare us for the large element of the irrational present in barbaric myth, and supply a key to the survival of this in the mythologies of civilised races.

§ II.

CONFUSION OF EARLY THOUGHT BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE NOT LIVING.

In selecting from the literature of savage mythology the material overburdens us by its richness. Much of it is old, and, like refuse-heaps in our mining districts once cast aside as rubbish but now made to yield products of value, has, after long neglect, been found to contain elements of worth, which patience and insight have extracted from its travellers’ tales and quaint speculations. That for which it was most prized in the days of our fathers is now of small account; that within it which they passed by we secure as of lasting worth. Much of that literature is, however, new, for the impetus which has in our time been given to the rescue and preservation of archaic forms has reached this, and a host of accomplished collectors have secured rich specimens of relics which, in the lands of their discovery, have still the authority of the past, unimpaired by the critical exposure of the present.

The subject itself is, moreover, so wide reaching, bringing the ancient and the modern into hitherto unsuspected relation, showing how in customs and beliefs, to us unmeaning and irrational, there lurk the degraded representations of old philosophies, and in what seems to us burlesque, the survivals of man’s most serious thought.

One feels this difficulty of choice and this temptation to digress in treating of the confusion inherent in the savage mind between things living and not living, arising from superficial analogies and its attribution of life and power to lifeless things. The North American Indians prefer a hook that has caught a big fish to the handful of hooks that have never been tried, and they never lay two nets together lest they should be jealous of each other. The Bushmen thought that the traveller Chapman’s big waggon was the mother of his smaller ones; and the natives of Tahiti sowed in the ground some iron nails given them by Captain Cook, expecting to obtain young ones. When that ill-fated discoverer’s ship was sighted by the New Zealanders they thought it was a whale with wings. The king of the Coussa Kaffirs having broken off a piece of the anchor of a stranded ship soon afterwards died, upon which all the Kaffirs made a point of saluting the anchor very respectfully whenever they went near it, regarding it as a vindictive being. But perhaps one of the most striking and amusing illustrations is that quoted by Sir John Lubbock from the Smithsonian Reports concerning an Indian who had been sent by a missionary to a colleague with four loaves of bread, accompanied by a letter stating their number. The Indian ate some of the bread, and his theft was, of course, found out. He was sent on a second errand with a similar batch of bread and a letter, and repeated the theft, but took the precaution to hide the letter under a stone while he was eating the loaves, so that it might not see him! As the individual is a type of the race, so in the child’s nature we find analogy of the mental attitude of the savage ready to hand. To the child everything is alive. With what timidity and wonder he first touches a watch, with its moving hands and clicking works; with what genuine anger he beats the door against which he has knocked his head, whips the rocking-horse that has thrown him, then kisses and strokes it the next moment in token of forgiveness and affection.

“As children of weak age
Lend life to the dumb stones
Whereon to vent their rage,
And bend their little fists, and rate
the senseless ground.”[2]

Even among civilised adults, as Mr. Grote remarks, “the force of momentary passion will often suffice to supersede the acquired habit, and an intelligent man may be impelled in a moment of agonising pain to kick or beat the lifeless object from which he has suffered.” The mental condition which causes the wild native of Brazil to bite the stone he stumbled over may, as Dr. Tylor has pointed out in his invaluable Primitive Culture, be traced along the course of history not merely in impulsive habit, but in formally enacted law. If among barbarous peoples we find, for example, the relatives of a man killed by a fall from a tree taking their revenge by cutting the tree down and scattering it in chips, we find a continuity of idea in the action of the court of justice held at the