Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/49

Rh method. Each of us is tempted to believe that he possesses the magnim secretum, the one key which will unlock the door of every mystery. But, before we attempt to apply it, we are bound to provide some definition which will cover the myriad phases of popular beliefs. Such a definition involves an artificial rigidity, and it must result in failure if we attempt to cram primitive thought, in its varied manifestations, or religion, "the uncharted region of human experience," as Professor Gilbert Murray calls it, into a set of neatly labelled pigeon-holes. This is particularly the case with the cult of fertility. In the last instalment of The Golden Bough, Professor Frazer, himself the high-priest of this phase of belief, warns us that we must not accept "the impression, natural but erroneous, that man has created most of his gods out of his own belly. That is not so, at least that is not my reading of the history of religion." And he goes on to say that the reproductive faculties are no less essential to the preservation of the species than the nutritive, thus enforcing the need of the study of the intricate problems involved in the mysterious relations of the sexes, one of the most interesting, as it is one of the most difficult and delicate tasks which await the future historian of religion. To this he adds the necessity of the enquiry how the influence of man on man has shaped human destiny. "If," as he sums up his discussion, "we could strictly interrogate the phantoms which the human mind has conjured up out of the depths of its bottomless ignorance and enshrined as deities in the dim light of temples, we should find that the majority of them have been nothing but the ghosts of dead men." We thus seem to be reverting to the Euhemerism of Herbert Spencer and Sir A. Lyall.

But I have exhausted my time and your patience in