Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/141

 /^(•:'n-7vs. 125

procuring not only the results expected by the worsliipper, but also others, some of which are of great significance" (p. 53).

He accepts the conclusion of Sir E. Tylor that " out of naive thinking about the visions of dreams and trances, and from com- parisons of life with death, arose a belief in the existence of spirits as the powers animating nature" (p. 70). But "an in- creasingly large number of competent writers would now place earlier than the Tylorian animism, or at least side by side with it, another fundamental and universal belief, arising from commoner and simpler experiences than visions : namely, a belief in the existence of an omnipresent, non-personal power or powers" <p. 72). This new theory is largely due to the work of Messrs. 1). Brinton, in the United States, and R. R. Marett, in England. Discussing the views expressed by the latter writer, he remarks: — " I maintain that in seeking to replace belief in personal agents (animism) by Afa/ia, ' which leaves in solution the distinction between personal and impersonal,' Marett disregards the only definite line of cleavage which can be used to differentiate religious from non-religious life ; that is, the line separating the attitudes and actions that involve the idea of personal power from those that do not. In my view of the matter, when the distinction between personal and impersonal is in solution, religion itself is likewise in solution" (p. 74//.). His theory postulates "first, that the belief in non-personal powers is neither a derivative of animism nor a first stej) leading to it, but that the two beliefs have had independent origms : and, secondly, that animism a[)peared second in order of time " (p. 77).

He goes on to condemn the attempt to seek the origin of super- human, personal powers in some one class of phenomena, — the dream theory of Tylor; .Spencer's worship of the dead; Max Miiller's personification of natural objects. Gods grew, he asserts, " out of several different ideas of superhuman beings : these beings had independent origins : the attributes of the gods differ accord- ing to their origin ; the historical gods are usually mongrel gods, the outcome of the combination of the characteristics belonging to superhuman beings of difterent origins ' (p. 86). ".Several of the sources may have operated simultaneously in the formation of divine ideas of superhuman beings and subsequently of gods, so