Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/178

 168 idea—as something universal and fixed to something particular and transitory?"

Now by way of answer to these questions, let me repeat, I have no brand-new theory to propound. The doctrine that I now wish to formulate unambiguously, and at the same time, so far as may be possible within the limits of a short article, to supply with a basis of illustrative fact, is one that in a vague and general form constitutes a sort of commonplace with writers on Religious Origins. These writers for the most part profess, though not always in very plain or positive terms, to discern beneath the fluctuating details of its efforts at self-interpretation, a certain Religious Sense, or, as many would call it, Instinct, whereof the component "moments" are Fear, Admiration, Wonder, and the like, whilst its object is, broadly speaking, the Supernatural. Now that this is roughly and generally true no one, I think, is likely to deny. Thus to put the matter as broadly as possible, whether we hold with one extreme school that there exists a specific religious instinct, or whether we prefer to say with the other that man's religious creeds are a by-product of his intellectual development, we must, I think, at any rate admit the fact that in response to, or at any rate in connection with, the emotions of Awe, Wonder, and the like, wherein feeling would seem for the time being to have outstripped the power of "natural," that is reasonable, explanation, there arises in the region of human thought a powerful impulse to objectify and even personify the mysterious or "supernatural " something felt, and in the region of will a corresponding impulse to render it innocuous, or better still propitious, by force of constraint, communion, or conciliation. Supernaturalism then, as this universal feeling taken at its widest and barest may be called, might, as such, be expected to prove not only logically but also in some sense chronologically prior to Animism, constituting as the latter does but a particular ideal embodiment of the former.