Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/159

 From Spell to Prayer. 141

to recall the bull's attention to myself, I escape. Thus there is none of that projectiveness to be ascribed to the bull's motive which so characteristically enters into the motive of the act of developed magic. We may be sure that the bull does not conceive («) that he is acting sym- bolically, that, in child-language, he is " only pretending " ; [h) that at the same time his pretending somehow causes an ulterior effect, similar as regards its ideal character, but different in that it constitutes that real thing which is the ultimate object of the whole proceeding.

And now let us go on to consider how such primitive credulity is sundered from the beginnings of enlightenment — if to practise projective magic is to be enlightened — only by the veriest hair's-breadth. The moment the bull's rage has died out of him, the coat he was goring becomes that unin- teresting thing a coat must be to the normal animal whose interest is solely in the edible. Now the bull, being a bull, probably passes from the one perceptual context to the other, from coat gorable to coat inedible, without any feeling of the relation between them ; they are simply not one coat for him at all, but two. But now put in the bull's place a more or less brute-like man, with just that extra dash of continuity in his mental life that is needed in order that the two coats — the two successive phases of consciousness — may be compared. How will they be compared ? We may be sure that the comparison will be, so to speak, in favour of the more normal and abiding experience of the two. If it be more normal to ignore the coat than to gore it, there will arise a certain sense — you may make it as dim as you will to begin with, but once it is there at all it marks a step in advance of primitive credulity — of the gorable aspect of the coat as relatively delusive and unreal, of the act of passion as relatively misdirected and idle.

Meanwhile, notwithstanding this new-found capacity to recognise later on that he has been deluded, rage will con- tinue to delude the subject so long as its grip upon him