Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/38

 12 it outside of the mysteries. Of gratitude I see little trace, and perhaps the natives, absorbed in the present, do not hope. Here, at all events, are the elements of a religion which implies, as Mr. Darwin writes, "intellectual and moral faculties on at least a moderately high level." How high? Mr. Darwin writes: "The Fuegians rank among the lowest barbarians; but I was continually struck with surprise how closely (sic) the three natives on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' who had lived some years in England and could talk a little English, resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental faculties." They could talk a little English (manifestly York could do so on board ship), but could Mr. Darwin talk a little Fuegian? Probably not, as he was wholly unable to learn German. The mental faculties of Billy Button and York could give those of Mr. Darwin "a stroke a hole" in language. German was hard to read for him, just as the Australians cannot count up to seven. The question is, then, whether "antecedent improbability" makes it unlikely that men of such high faculties, men who have confessedly been equal to the abstract speculation required before a ghost can be conceived of, are unequal to the ideas which I assign to them. I see no improbability in the matter. So much for the "antecedent improbability" of Mr. Hartland.

But, I have observed, early man may be incapable of regarding these ideas fixedly, of living on their level, and of refraining from sportive fancy in their regard. Early man's incapacity in these respects produced his humorous, obscene, and trivial myths, contradictory of his religious conceptions. As Mr. Darwin remarks, "The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe .... would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various strange superstitions and customs." This degeneration from the higher level, Mr. Darwin compares to the occasional mistakes "in the instincts of the lower animals" (op. cit., p. 69). The good element seems