Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/167

Rh "amalgamation," such as can take place only under the pressure of some extrinsic influence. For a satisfactory clue, however, to the nature of the collocating cause we search his writings in vain.

Meanwhile, Dr. Frazer seems to admit the thin end of the wedge into his case for a mechanically-causative magic by allowing that the material on which it works is composed not merely of "things which are regarded as inanimate," but likewise of "persons whose behaviour in the particular circumstances is known to be determined with absolute certainty." Now of course magic may be conceived as taking effect on a person through his body, as when that which is projected takes the form of an atnongara stone, viz. a piece of crystal, or of something half-material, half-personal, like the arungquiltha of the Arunta, or the badi of the Malays. After all, magic in one of its most prominent aspects is a disease-making. But Dr. Frazer's interest is not in these secondary notions. He is seeking to elucidate the ultimate implication of magic when he explains "determined with absolute certainty" to mean—determined, as is "the course of nature," "by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically." But a person conceived as simply equivalent to an inanimate thing—for that is precisely what it comes to—is a fundamentally different matter, I contend, from the notion I take to be, not implicit, but nascently explicit, here, namely that of a will constrained. No doubt the modern doctrine of a psychological automatism virtually forbids us to speak any longer of "will" in such a connection. To naive thought, however, as witness the more popular explanations of the phenomena of suggestion current in our own time, the natural correlative to

'» c;. .9.,= i., 67, 69.

^ See G. B.,- i., 63, where this is clearly impHed.

^' Cf. Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, 531 and S37. Skeat, Malay Magic, 427. ^' G.B.;-\.,6i. -' Compare the effect on the woman ascribed to the lonka-lonka, below, p. i.