Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/315

Rh animals is familiar to most men of the lower culture, and is in many cases misinterpreted so as to include metempsychosis. It is probable that the influence of metempsychosis has been exaggerated. It was certainly current in the philosophical schools, but it seems to have had little effect upon the masses of the people. Even Manu, who expounds its principles at length, speaks of it as a "progress hard to be understood by unregenerate men." At the present day in Burma, where it is generally accepted, it has as little effect in securing the kind treatment of animals as in modern India. As Mr. Hopkins remarks, "It is surely not because the Hindu was afraid of eating his deceased grandmother that he abstained from eating beef." Two causes seem to have led to the gradual disuse of animal food:—the fear of absorbing through the blood the rational soul of the animal; the old idea still retaining force that the tribal blood ran in the veins of the domesticated animals. It is possible that the humanitarian movement was the result of a change of environment which weakened the moral fibre of the Northern race, and that increasing material culture, with its opportunities for leisure, encouraged the growth of that morbid introspection and sentimentalism which characterise all decadent communities.

However this may be, the writers of this age of transition are obviously embarrassed in their search for an explanation of these divergent views, which recognised the use of the animal as a sacrificial victim, and at the same time encouraged its protection. Manu, for instance, promises