Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/37

Rh Christianity is the adoption of its mode of disposal of the dead by interment in the extended position in a coffin. It is possible that changes in the past may have been equally rapid and complete, but there is much more reason to believe that the process was, in many cases at least, gradual and was the result of a conflict between the beliefs and ideals of the settlers and their children with the practices and traditions of the indigenous inhabitants.

This leads me to the third finding of modern psychology in its relation to our subject. We have seen reason to believe that in the case of the individual many mental products are the result of conflict, usually conflict between early beliefs and dispositions formed in childhood and later ideas derived from contact with peoples different from those of the immediate family circle where the earlier group of beliefs and ideals had been formed. One result of this conflict is the production of compromise-formations, products which while satisfying to some degree, perhaps only in a symbolic manner, the demands of the father-ideal, enable the individual to adjust his behaviour to the different conditions of the environment of his later life.

If now we turn to the modes of treating the dead in such a region as Melanesia, we find behaviour which strongly suggests the presence of similar compromise-formations. We find that people who practise cremation collect the ashes and, either then or after an interval of time, inter them or throw them into water. When evidence of other kinds points to cremation as the more recently introduced practice, and neighbouring peoples, who seem to represent the earlier inhabitants, inter the dead or throw their bodies into the sea, the most reasonable hypothesis is that cremation was adopted as the result of external influence, but that the demands of the old ideal were met by a more or less symbolic interment or by throwing into water the ashes which serve as the representative or symbol of the body. Again, if the ideals of a people who inter their