Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/298

266 fact that the acorn becomes an oak—that oak and acorn are but different stages of one process of growth. And the fact that in the earlier stages of religion we do not find the later stages preformed is no proof that the earlier stages do not pass into the later. If anyone chooses to insist that an oak is not the same thing as an acorn, he is entitled to do so. But, we must point out, he is not also entitled to assert that the oak is the same thing as the tree. "Tree," we will take it, is a term which includes or is applicable to all stages from the first to the last—to the acorn, the sapling and the oak alike. And so, too, religion is a term which includes or is applicable to all stages in the one process, and not to the stage of monotheism alone or of polytheism alone, or even to those stages alone in which there is a reference to personal beings. Each of these stages is a stage in the process of religion, but no stage is by itself the whole process, and consequently a definition of one stage cannot possibly be a definition of the processes as a whole.

If we bear that simple and undeniable fact in mind, we shall have no difficulty in recognising that what is essential to, or an essential part of, religion in one stage may have to be cast aside when a later stage is reached. And in such a case it is a mistake to say that what is thrown off in the later stage was never at any time an essential part of religion. The husk of the acorn is thrown off, indeed, as the tree begins to grow, but in the acorn-stage of the tree it is an essential part of the tree, even though at a later stage it ceases to be any part of the tree whatever. Thus in the intichiuma rites there are ceremonies which, even if they are felt by the celebrants of the ceremonies to be very different from magic, and should by us be unmistakably distinguished from magic, nevertheless have the same modus operandi as magic. These ceremonies correspond to the husk of the acorn: they tend to be dropped in proportion as religion rises to higher stages.