Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/160

 142 From Spell to Prayer.

lasts. Nay more, directly there is a nascent self-con- sciousness, a sort of detached personality to act as passive spectator, the deluding passion may be actually accom- panied by an awareness of being given over to unreal imaginings and vain doings. Doubtless your relatively low savage might sav with Kipling's philosopher of the barrack- room :

[I've] stood beside an' watched myself Ee'aviiv like a blooming fool.

Make-believe, however, such as we meet with in developed magic, involves something more than mere con- current awareness that one is being fooled by one's passion. It involves positive acquiescence in such a condition of mind. The subject is not completely mastered by the sug- gestion, as in the act of primitive credulity. On the con- trary, he more or less clearly perceives it to be fanciful, and yet dallies with it and lets it work upon him. Now why should he do this? Well, originally, I suspect, because he feels that it does him good. Presumably, to work off one's wrath on any apology for an enemy is expletive, that is, cathartic. He knows that he is not doing the real thing, but he finds it does him good to believe he is doing it, and so he makes himself believe it. Symbol and ulterior reality have fallen apart in his thought, but his " will to believe " builds a bridge from the one to the other. Symbolic act and ulterior act symbolised are, we must remember, con- nected by an ideal bond, in that they are more or less alike, have a character partially identical which so far as it is identical is provocative of one and the same type of reaction. All that is required for the symbolic act to acquire projectiveness is that this ideal bond be con- ceived as a real bond. Since, however, the appearance of mere ideality can ex hypothesi be no longer ignored, it must instead be explained away. Primitive credulity no longer suffices. In the place of a naive and effortless faith there is needed the kind of faith that, to whatever extent it is assailed by doubt, can recover itself by self-justification.