Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/174

 164 long course of its evolution. Suffice it, then, to presuppose that the word stands for a certain composite or concrete state of mind wherein various emotions and ideas are together directly provocative of action. Let it be likewise noted at the start, that these emotions and ideas are by no means always harmoniously related in the religious consciousness, and indeed perhaps can never be strictly commensurate with each other. Now for most persons, probably, the emotional side of Religion constitutes its more real, more characteristic feature. Men are, however, obliged to communicate expressly with each other on the subject of their religious experience by the way of ideas solely. Hence, if for no other reason, the ideas composing the religious state tend to overlay and outweigh the emotional element, when it comes to estimating man's religious experience taken at its widest. Thus we catch at an idea that reminds us of one belonging to an advanced creed and say, Here is Religion; or, if there be found no clear-cut palpable idea we are apt to say, There is no Religion here; but whether the subtle thrill of what we know in ourselves as religious emotion be present there or no, we rarely have the mindfulness or patience to inquire, simply because this far more delicate criterion is hard to formulate in thought and even harder to apply to fact.

Now the object of this paper is to grope about amongst the roots of those beliefs and practices that at a certain stage of their development have usually been treated as forming a single growth which is labelled Animism, or more properly Animistic Religion. It is a region hard to explore, because the notions that haunt it are vague and impalpable; the religious sense (if such it may be called) manifesting itself in almost unideated feelings that doubtless fall to a large extent outside the savage "field of attention," and at any rate fall wholly outside our field of direct observation. Now, even where there undeniably do exist precise ideas of the savage mind for Anthropology to grasp and garner,