Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/278

 238 Reviews.

such Powers, possessing neither personaUty nor will, to prove that pre-animistic religion is a fact.

Mr. Clodd, in the paper already mentioned, does take up a position which resembles this, but which also differs from it in one important respect. Whereas " supernaturalism " and the awe of supernatural powers are of the very essence of Mr. Marett's conception of the earliest stage of religion, Mr. Clodd excludes supernatural attributes altogether from the primary stage of religion. He says : " The root idea of this Pre-Animism is that of power everywhere, power vaguely apprehended, but immanent, and as yet unclothed with personal or supernatural attributes." I mention this difference between Mr. Clodd's view and Mr. Marett's, because it would not be fair to either to ignore it. But it is the resemblance between their views which is what I am concerned with, viz. that the root idea of pre-animism is the conception of Powers which are not yet spirits.

Only an abstract of Mr. Clodd's paper appears in the Trans- actions of the Congress of the History of Religions} and I w.is not fortunate enough to hear the paper read. So I am unable to say what evidence Mr. Clodd adduced to show the actual existence of pre-animistic religion. The evidence produced in the abstract of the paper unfortunately is limited to one single example, that afforded by the jungle-dwellers in Chotia Nagpur, We can therefore only venture to say that the evidence as yet communicated to the world is not sufficient to demonstrate the existence of a pre-animistic stage in the history of rehgion ; it consists of a single instance. Now, it would not be wise to generalise from a single instance, and I am not sure that the example given is really an instance of non-animistic religion at all. The jungle-dwellers, Sir Herbert Risley tells us, in the quotation given by Mr. Clodd, " fear and attempt to propitiate " the indeterminate beings which are the objects of their worship. He does not tell us that these beings have no supernatural attributes. They have their abode in sacred groves. Of their " form and functions no one can give an intelligible account." At the base of their religion is the idea "of power, or rather of many powers," which are " not persons at all in any sense of ^ But see Fortnightly Review^ June.