Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/28

 2 direction. Mr. Hartland’s onset is magnificent, mais, parbleu, ce n’est pas la guerre. (2) Having occupied a strategic point which nobody defended, Mr. Hartland set to work to fortify his own camp. Among his materials he employed two contradictories, which, I need hardly say, cannot logically be conceived as simultaneously true by the mere unaided un-Hegelian human intellect. Nor, in fact, did Mr. Hartland achieve this miracle; he “escaped his own notice” (as the Greek idiom runs) in first holding one of the contradictories and then deserting it, and to some extent holding its opposite. Either might be a trenchant reply to me, but I am not to be asked to face both contradictories at once, nor even “one down and the other come on.” If all this be true, as I believe, Mr Hartland has not done me very much harm. On the other hand, he has incidentally done me much good, and I shall hasten to make such corrections and modifications of my work as seem necessary or desirable after a study of his censures.

Now we may come to business.

The general drift of my theory is that, obscured and even contradicted by many myths, religious ideas of a relatively high order exist among low savages such as these most archaic peoples, the Australian tribes, and are not to be explained as the result of a long process of evolution which began in the propitiation of ghosts of the dead. There must be some other explanation of the rise of these ideas, and as to the nature of that explanation I repeatedly decline to theorise. Mr. Hartland “agrees with Mr. Lang that the evidence will not warrant such a conclusion” as that “the idea of God has arisen from that of a ghost or disembodied spirit” (Folk-Lore, p. 292). To make that point, on which Mr. Hartland and I are happily agreed, was one of