Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/401

Rh apparently Mr. Howitt did; it is clearly a question of definition. Otherwise I agree with Mr. Howitt, who spoke from his own observation

As I said long ago, I agree with Lord Avebury and St. Paul, that "the mere idea of" a maker of the world "is a matter of history, or, say, of science,"—(I vastly prefer to say "of science," the occurrence of the fact being pre-historic). "It does not in itself constitute a religion." Emphatically it does not, but as to how it may lead on to a religion I expressed my poor opinion in pp. ix.-x. of the Preface to the second edition of The Making of Religion in 1900. Les esprits se rencontretit, or, in English, "wits jump." Lord Avebury and I are often really in agreement, or only separated by a definition, a purely subjective affair. I am not, indeed, quite certain as to how he defines "religion," but, if his definition includes prayer and sacrifice, and worship beyond hymns and invocations, we are at one. No religion with prayer, sacrifice, and worship more extensive than hymns and invocations (and obedience, if that be "a form of worship), is known to me among savages who have no pottery and no domesticated animals except dogs.

This is the advantage of discussion,—controversy is not the word,—with Lord Avebury, our doyen, for, as he was in the field in 1866, he is even senior to "my father Parmenides," Sir E. B. Tylor. It was he who, in discussing the probable origins of Animism, first referred (as far as I am aware) to such faculties as the Second Sight and "coincidental hallucinations" and "precognitions," without discussing the evidence for them or their actuality: these were no part of his inquiry. Herr Adolf Bastian, in 1890, followed in a rather meagre treatise Ueber psychische Beobachtungen bei Natürvölkern. Following such illustrious leaders, I compared savage psychische Beobachtungen with those recorded and investigated by the Society for Psychical Research. Nobody thanked me. Psychical Research "had no use for" savages, who could not be cross-examined at 20 Hanover Square, or by emissaries from that scientific centre. Anthropologists (I can only guess why) "had no use for" study of real or alleged human faculties of the kind called "psychic." Lord Avebury does not object to our investigation "of human faculties," but he