Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/303

Rh an animal is that it has innate powers—powers due to its very existence, and not to something else which has taken, possession of it, and acts through it, but is not properly the animal itself. In a less accurate way, one may define the Zoönist conception of Nature as a conception of all Things as living; but more accurately, as I have said, it is a conception of all Things as themselves Powers, and in which no definite discrimination is made between dead and living matter, save as possessed oi different powers.

III.—My third Query is: Is there any adequate evidence, or, indeed, any evidence at all, of the elaborate inductions attributed by Dr. Tylor, as by Mr. Spencer, to Savages, in the working-out of the theory of Animism, their so-called "Savage Philosophy"; and does not the theory of such inductions involve patent self-contradictions?

According to Mr. Spencer, the Ghost-theory was the identical result, all over the world, of the meditations of Savage Philosophers on the phenomena of shadows, reflections, echoes, dreams, fainting, apoplexy, catalepsy, epilepsy, somnambulism, insanity, and death. Dr. Tylor is of the same opinion, with only certain differences in his list of the facts from reflection on which Mr. Spencer and he believe the Ghost-theory to have arisen. And some here present may remember the rather heated controversy between these two authors of the Ghost-theory in the pages of Mind in 1877, with reference particularly to the priority of their respective lists of the phenomena which they believed had painfully exercised the minds of their "Savage Philosophers". Now what I venture altogether to question is this notion of Savage Philosophers among all races painfully reflecting on the problems of existence; and not—like so many of us, Civilised Philosophers—dashing to conclusions, but slowly working up to them through reflection on a dozen different classes of facts; nor, like Civilised Philosophers, coming all to different, but all to identical conclusions. And I question this more particularly on these