Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/177

 Rh similar instances, yet the following may not be out of place as an illustration of the manner in which a child deals with a situation resembling in one respect that by which primitive man is confronted in the explanation of his dreams and visions. A boy of my acquaintance, nearly four years old, had been deeply impressed by the dragon in a performance of the Play of Saint George. He was told that it was a skin inside which a person roared and gave life-like movements to the skin. He seemed readily to understand and to accept the explanation, yet he still firmly believed the dragon to be alive. In order to complete the explanation, the dragon's skin was brought to the child, and in his presence a man got into it, roared, and moved about. The child, of course, understood, yet the next day he was ready to go hunting for the dragon, and this was not simply in play, if a careful observer can judge at all what is and what is not play in a child's behaviour. What happened in this case is a common experience; emotion made it impossible for him to bring his knowledge and his critical sense to bear upon the problem. An occasional terrifying vision would be sufficient, it seems, to establish and keep up the belief in doubles. Regarding the frequency of hallucinations among savages, Mary Kingsley writes of the West Africans:—"I also know that the African, in spite of all his hard-headed common sense, is endowed with a supersensitive organisation—he is always a step nearer delirium, in a medical sense, than an Englishman; a disease that will by a rise of bodily temperature merely give an Englishman a headache will give an African delirium and its visions."

The four objections just reviewed are offered by Durkheim as an argument against animism. That theory, taken as an original philosophy of life, I do not defend; nor, indeed, do we need to concern ourselves with it at all.