Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/56

46 "In a hymn ascribed to St. Thomas à Becket occur the lines:—

and in an old glass window, now, I believe, in one of the museums of Paris, the Holy Ghost is represented hovering over the Virgin in the form of a dove, while a ray of light passes from his beak to her ear, along which ray an infant Christ is descending." No discontinuity is traceable between these ideas and the general belief at the time when the Synoptic Gospels took shape,

The folklorist takes up the quest where the historian lays it down, and brings his cumulative evidence to prove that the belief is of no special time or people, but the offspring of barbaric confusion about life generally, and about birth specifically. David Hume anticipated modern theories of animism in the remark that "there is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious."

Add to this attribution of life corresponding to our own