Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/165

 From Spell to Prayer. 147

itself in this way — and it must always, I contend, be felt as something other than a normal and ordinary act of impera- tive willing — it will inevitably be felt to be occult, super- normal, supernatural, and will participate in, whilst pro tanto colouring, whatever happens to be the general mode of accounting for supernaturalistic events. But this, I take it, will always tend to be some theory of quasi-personal agency.

Dr. Frazer, however, is so far from allowing this that he makes the implicit presupposition to be the very opposite of the notion of personal agency, namely the idea of mechanical causation. He does not, however, attempt to go into the psychology of the matter, and the psychological probabilities, I submit, will be found to tell dead against this view of his. Mechanical causation is indeed by no means unknown to the savage. From the moment he employs such mechanical aids as tools he may be supposed to perceive that the work he does with them proceeds as it were directly and immediately from them. He throws a spear at his enemy ; it hits him ; and the man drops. That the spear makes the man drop he can see. But when a wizard brandishes a magic spear simply in the direction of a distant, perhaps absent and invisible, person, who there- after dies, the wizard — not to speak of the bystanders — is almost bound to notice something in the action of the symbolic weapon that is indirect, and as such calls aloud for explanation on non-mechanical lines. The spear did not do it of itself, but some occult power, whether in, or behind, the spear. Further, his own consciousness cannot fail to give him an intuitive inkling of what this power is, namely, his projection of will, a psychic force, a manifes- tation of personal agency, mana. It is a secondary con- sideration whether he locate the personal agency, the "devil," in the spear, in himself, or in some tertium quid that possesses it or him. In any case the power is repre- sented quasi-personally. I am quite prepared to believe

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