Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/182

 160 scholars to have only a non-personal significance. If we accept both this conclusion and the one now reached concerning belief in a Great Maker, we shall expect to find among primitive peoples one name for a general non-personal force and another for a great Creator. But after a time the non-personal power may naturally enough in many tribes have come to assume personal characteristics, either by direct personification, or by fusion with the creator-idea.

I know of no sufficient reasons, either psychological or historical, for denying any of the following propositions. Each appears to me possible, and, under appropriate circumstances, probable.

(1) Several of the sources may have operated simultaneously in the formation of diverse ideas of superhuman beings and subsequently of gods, so that several gods of different origins may have, from the first, divided the attention of the community.

(2) These sources may have been effective not simultaneously but successively. A ghost-ancestor may have first attained dominance and, later on, a Great Maker.

(3) Any order of succession is possible. It is nearly simultaneously that the belief in unseen personified causes of external events arises in the child's mind, that dreams begin to play a part in his waking life, and that the problem of creation presents itself to him. The question as to which is the first cannot be given a universally valid answer. If we imagine a group of children living in close companionship, uninfluenced by adults, we may conceive that belief in beings arising from any of these sources would, according to the peculiarities of the children and the circumstances of their lives, first gain ascendancy.