Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/159

 Rh should be sound, as it is to result in action the effects of which involve life or death, dearth or plenty, weal or woe for him. Philosophical speculation in the air, without any definite relation to or bearing upon the practical conduct of life, is one of those benefits of progress which man in the folklore stage not only contrives to do without, but the excellence of which he fails to grasp."

I have called this passage amazing. I cannot agree that primitive philosophies were propounded for the purpose of founding social or political action upon their formularies. I see little evidence of this, though I do see that primitive philosophies very often resulted in action being taken upon their findings, and that with disastrous results. To give only an instance from Mr. Hartland's Legend of Perseus, perhaps the most widespread and certainly the most remarkable of all the unsound conclusions arrived at by primitive philosophy, was one that imperfectly recognised the great natural fact of fatherhood and taught in its place that paternity was possible by other than natural causes—indeed, we may say by all other than natural causes. In this case, at all events, man's intellect played him false through probably long ages of life, and there is no evidence that I can discover which shows that it was formulated for the practical conduct of life. Because action and conduct have resulted from the findings of primitive philosophies, I do not understand that this was the intention and cause of the philosophical speculations of early man.

But even more amazing is the statement that "philosophical speculation in the air, without any definite relation to or bearing upon the practical conduct of life," is not a part of primitive life. Does Mr. Nutt know the first chapter of Genesis, or, better still, the Maori story of the Children of Heaven and Earth, and will he not agree that this and most, if not all, of the primitive conceptions of the world's beginnings and man's origin (and there are many) are not philosophical speculations in the air of the most unpractical