Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/280

 240 Reviews.

by the jungle-dwellers in Chotia Nagpur, the beings or powers worshipped are conceived by their worshippers to possess qualities essentially personal — in a word, they are animistically conceived.

The only beings who are worshipped, certainly the only beings who are propitiated, are beings who do something, or may do something. The advocates of the theory of a pre-animistic stage of religion must either deny that proposition, or, admitting it, they must say that the belief in such beings is not animistic. If they deny it, they must produce instances of beings who are not be- lieved by their worshippers to do, or to have the power to do, anything, yet are worshipped. Such instances are not produced, nor, I think, likely to be produced. If it be admitted that only beings who do something, or have the power to do something, are propitiated and feared, then all that remains is to maintain that beings who are conceived to do or have the power of doing things disagreeable, if they are not propitiated, and to abstain from acting, when propitiated, are beings not animistically con- ceived ; and I fail to perceive how that can be maintained.

I would suggest that the root-idea of animism is that, if some- thing happens, somebody did it. If it is obvious that this stone or that river, this tree or that glacier, did it, then the river or stone or tree or glacier is the someone in question. The river or rock or cloud is animistically conceived the moment it is conceived to have done something, and to require propitiation to induce it not to do it again. Rivers and rocks are not spirits or ghosts, and never become so ; yet they are believed to do things ; and the belief that they do things, as men do things, and can be induced, as men can be induced, to abstain from doing them, is animism.

The theory that those who do things have a power to do them is the result presumably of much thought on the part of early man. He does not start with the abstract idea of power, or with the idea of powers in the abstract ; it is an inference, and an inference probably not readily drawn. The expectation that a person having done a thing once will do it again, is one that may be entertained by a child long before it is capable of any abstract idea ; it is an expectation which the dog entertains