Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/36

 10 man" might lead him from the idea of making to that of a maker. Once conceived of, the idea of his goodness is not remote, for the things made are "good," or so the savage thinks. The idea of power is implicit in that of making "such a number of things," and power may take the shape of All-seeing, while that conception is caught at, and the All-seeing One sanctions tribal morality: or, if Mr. Hartland insists on it, sanctions the interests of the old men.

I will take a step further. The natural character of many savages (however it was evolved) is generous and kindly, even to aliens, even to white men. Children are remarkably well treated. (See Mr. Man on the Andamanese, Spencer and Gillen on Central Australia, Mr. Wallace on the Malay Archipelago, Le Jeune on the Hurons, &c.) Therefore the filial sentiment may accrue to the conception of the maker (Mungan-ngaur, Our Father; Papang, Father). Now, is this process of "reasoning" beyond "high mental powers," beyond "conspicuous ability," such as the blacks are allowed to possess? Is it not a great deal easier and simpler than the intricate speculations by which Mr. Tylor makes early man evolve the idea of a disembodied spirit? Is the conception more subtly metaphysical than that of "self-existing beings," "beings out of nothing," which the Arunta possess? Yet the conception of a primal good maker, guardian of morality, all-seeing, is capable of being stated, in my rhetorical terms, as that of "a moral, eternal, omniscient Creator and Judge." It is partly a matter of capital letters and Latinised words. If the idea of man's surviving soul arose subsequent to that of the maker (about which I profess no opinion), then the maker would look after the souls, as he does, in a future life. All this, if true, is unaffected by myths which represent the maker as a one-legged, polygamous, anthropomorphic, deceitful being who dies (like Zeus in Crete), or is "destroyed" like Daramulun, by the fiat of a superior being. To the death and destruction of Daramulun I return later. Meanwhile, in my opinion, early