Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/512

466 the deceased is like those of the ancestors, there seems no longer any obstacle to the entry of the soul into their communion. This mental connection between the soul and the body is necessary not merely because the collective thought is in the beginning concrete and incapable of conceiving of a purely spiritual existence, but still more because it presents a profoundly dramatic character. A group of acts is required to fix the attention, to orientate the imagination, to suggest belief. Now the subject-matter on which the collective activity will be exercised after death, and which will serve as the object of rites, is naturally the corpse. The integration of the dead in the invisible society will only be fully effected when the material remains are united to those of the fathers. It is the action that society exercises on the body which confers full reality on the drama it imagines for the soul. Thus the physical phenomena constituting and following death, if they do not by themselves determine the collective representations and emotions, contribute to give them the definite form they present; they bring them, as it were, a material support. Society projects into the world that surrounds it its own methods of thinking and feeling, and the latter in return fixes, regulates, and limits them in time.

I have lingered so long over this impressive essay that I have no more space, otherwise I should have been glad to lay before the members of the Society a summary of M. Bouglé's discussion which follows on the relation between law and caste in India. The roots of the law in religion and the position and function of the Brahmans are considered in the light of the most recent investigations, and the anthropological results are carefully summarised. But for these and for the reviews of anthropological and sociological literature which form the bulk of the volume I must refer the readers to its pages.