Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/32

6 great psychological interest, quite apart from our main discussion.

Mr. Hartland writes: "On the antecedent improbability that naked savages, without any organised system of government, and incapable of counting up to seven, could have attained a philosophical conception so lofty, there is no need to argue." Now here a good deal turns on words. Mr. Hartland accuses me of "many expressions rhetorically used anent the gods of the lower races," and to my rhetoric, perhaps, is due the appearance of "a lofty philosophical conception" (Folk-Lore, p. 312). There is a great deal of force in his censure, and I shall here try to strip off the rhetoric, about which, however, I have more to say later. It would have been wise in me to explain my meaning with less of rhetorical effusiveness, for a meaning I have, thus: "Moral"—I mean that certain of these beings are moral—relatively to the morality of their tribes. Mr. Howitt distinctly asserts this. The tribes (or some tribes) have "beliefs which govern tribal and individual morality under a supernatural sanction" (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xiii., p. 59). To what extent the morality goes we shall later consider. "Eternal"—that the Being of the belief was "from all eternity" I cannot demonstrate; he was "in the beginning," which Mr. Hartland may construe as he pleases, and (in some statements) he "made everything" (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xxiv., p. 101). Here blackfellows alone are excepted, they were made by a demiurge. I don't know if Heaven was the Maker's original home; it could hardly have been earth "before it was made." "Omniscient"—"He can see you, and all you do down here," as a black was told in early youth, "before the white men came to Melbourne" (Mr. Hartland, Folk-Lore, p. 307). "Tharamulun himself watched