Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/74

 48 inquirer, be he traveller or missionary or whatever he may, in placing himself at the precise point of view of the lower culture. Mr. Lang sees it himself where the word spirit is concerned. Why does he not apply it to Creator and Creation, to Supreme Being, to immortal, and a score of other expressions used of savage religion at sundry times and by divers persons? Some of these expressions as used by himself he has admitted to be "rhetorical" or "overstrained." But the fact is that nothing is easier than to lay upon them a stress they will not bear, and to interpret them in a way that would indeed "astonish the natives." There are, I am persuaded, few students of savage life and religion who will not subscribe to the opinion that, from the time of Herodotus downwards, exaggerations and misstatements of this kind, unintentional and probably unavoidable, have been the source of innumerable baseless theories; they have dug more pitfalls in the path of scientific research than any other class of causes. Vagueness is one characteristic of the savage; inconsistency is another. Truly and wittily Mr. Frazer somewhere says: "Consistency is as little characteristic of savage as of civilised man." The savage, at all events, not only fails to define his ideas, even when they are more or less definite, he entertains others equally definite but contradictory, and he is at no pains to reconcile them one with another. Perhaps he is unconscious of the contradiction. Mr. Lang interprets the contradiction as the product of two human moods; and he calls one set of ideas religion and the other myths. This is of course a mere question of words. "This belief," he says, "I choose to call 'religious' because it conforms in its rude way to and is the germ of what we commonly style 'religion.' "Very well; only let it be understood it is simply Mr. Lang's choice. Where both sets of ideas are equally and inextricably interwoven in the fabric of one and the same sequence of ceremonies, and those ceremonies are the most sacred rites of the tribe, it is hard to say that