Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/179

 Rh own creation. It is these believing children who make the traditions and the dogmas of childhood. Is it improbable that savages should, both in earnest and in play, have placed personal and animal beings behind certain striking phenomena? How otherwise could they better gratify at once a demand for explanation and a love of dramatic play?

The personifications of the primitive man, as well as those of the child, often are classed as animal forms. Nothing could be more natural. Is not the animal world more varied and mysterious to the savage than the human? The size, appearance, and behaviour of animals are so exceedingly diverse that one may expect almost anything that shows self-movement to be an animal. Why, for instance, should not the savage believe that the sun is an animal? Is its shape too simple, or its motion too regular? I do not see how uncivilized man could set limits to the shapes of animals. And as to the sun's movements, they are not, after all, so regular as the scientist would make them. The sun rises at different points winter and summer, and traverses the heavens by different paths. It hides away for long periods, and then shows itself constantly for many days. Even its heat is variable.

But, even though the personification of natural phenomena is to be expected of savages, it is perplexing to find people as far advanced as the old Egyptians, for instance, continuing to worship nature-gods. One must in this case reckon with the momentum of psychic life, just as one does with physical inertia. Habits once formed and expressed in venerated institutions cannot easily be cast aside. But something else contributes also to the production of this paradox: the literal assumes a poetic or a moral sense, and the change remains long unrecognized or unacknowledged.