Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/386

 processes that produce them and that cause their stability. Attempts at a psychological interpretation of these concepts have often been made by means of a comparative treatment of similar ideas, and by endeavors to arrange these ideas in such a way as to show a more or less rationalistic development of one from the other. While this may be feasible in some cases, it does not seem likely that this method of treatment will lead us to the most generalized laws governing the forms of thought in human societies.

The principal obstacle in the way of progress on these lines seems to my mind to be founded on the lack of comparability of the data with which we are dealing. When, for instance, we speak of the idea of life after death as one of the ideas which develop in human society as a psychological necessity, we are dealing with a most complex group of data. One people believes that the soul continues to exist in the form that the person had at the time of death, without any possibility of change; another one believes that the soul will be reborn in a child of the same family; a third one believes that the souls will enter the bodies of animals; and still others that the shadows continue our human pursuits, waiting to be led back to our world in a distant future. The emotional and rationalistic elements which enter into these various concepts are entirely distinct; and we can readily perceive how the various forms of the idea of a future life may have come into existence by psychological processes that are not at all comparable. If I may be allowed to speculate on this question, I might imagine that in one case the similarities between children and their deceased relatives, in other cases the memory of the deceased as he lived during the last days of his life, in still other cases the longing for the beloved child or parent, and again the fear of death—may all have contributed to the development of the idea of life after death, the one here, the other there.

Another instance will corroborate this point of view. One of the striking forms of social organization, which occurs in many regions wide apart, is what we call totemism,—a form of society in which certain social groups consider themselves as related in a supernatural way to a certain species of animals or to a certain class of objects. I believe this is the generally accepted definition of totemism; but I am convinced that in this form the phenomenon is not a single psychological problem, but embraces the most diverse psychological elements. In some cases the people believe themselves to be descendants of the animal whose protection they enjoy. In other cases an animal or some other object may have appeared to an ancestor of the social group, and may have promised to become his protector, and the friendship between the animal and the ancestor