Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/255

 Reviews.

231

the subject matter of the science of religions. He holds that religion, in its widest and most elementary sense of the con- ception of an invisible world, is a product of suggestion.

By this, owing to the somewhat wide meaning given to the term suggestion, no more is meant than that primitive man reached his idea of the soul by the contemplation of the diverse attributes of the dead and living human body. As a secondary result of this "suggestion" arose the belief in a future life and good and evil spirits, the cult of ancestors, and the various burial customs of savage tribes.

A further series of secondary conceptions arose from the daily alternation of light and darkness. Man is a daylight animal and connects the night with the awesome, the hostile, and the uncanny. Then again, from the primary discovery of the soul is derived the animistic conception of nature and so on. Virtually the whole psychical life of man is for Dr. StoU described by the blessed word " suggestion," with the result that his book is made up of very heterogeneous elements.

It would not, however, be just to deny him the credit of having produced a highly interesting and in many directions "suggestive " work. He would probably have given us a more detailed and therefore more valuable study if he had confined his attention to savage and barbarous peoples, who have been far too much neglected on the " psychical " side. Dr. Bastian and a few others have shown a sporadic and qualified interest in the spiritualistic phenomena of the lower races, but no field anthropologist has taken up this branch of study even to the extent of investigating the use of narcotics and stimulants, the greater or less susceptibility to hypnotisation, the part played by motor and sensory automatism in religious ceremonies, and all the numerous questions directly connected with the savage doctrine of possession.

Dr. StoU's classification of the facts on an ethnographical basis renders his treatment somewhat disconnected. It would, for example, have been in many respects an advantage if he had discussed the phenomena of curative magic under one head, of divination under another, and so on, instead of his actual arrange- ment, which makes it a little difficult, in view of the size of the book, to get a clear idea of the comparative side of the question. This difficulty is increased by the fact that on an average one entry in the index covers one and a half large octavo pages of