Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/137

Rh an efficacious remedy. Here the connexion between the two ends of the chain is very remote indeed. The arbitrary characters, which represent the sound of the word, which represents the idea, have to do duty for the idea itself. The example is a striking one, and will serve to measure the strength of the tendency of the uneducated mind to give an outward material reality to its own inward processes.

This confusion of objective with subjective connexion, which shows itself so uniform in principle, though so various in details, in the practices upon images and names done with a view of acting through them on their originals or their owners, may be applied to explain one branch after another of the arts of the sorcerer and diviner, till it almost seems as though we were coming near the end of his list, and might set down practices not based on this mental process as exceptions to a general rule.

When a lock of hair is cut off as a memorial, the subjective connexion between it and its former owner, is not severed. In the mind of the friend who treasures it up, it recalls thoughts of his presence, it is still something belonging to him. We know, however, that the objective connexion was cut by the scissors, and that what is done to that hair afterwards, is not felt by the head on which it grew. But this is exactly what the savage has not come to know. He feels that the subjective bond is unbroken in his own mind, and he believes that the objective bond, which his mind never gets clearly separate from it, is unbroken too. Therefore, in the remotest parts of the world, the sorcerer gets clippings of the hair of his enemy, parings of his nails, leavings of his food, and practises upon them, that their former possessor may fall sick and die. This is why South Sea Island chiefs had servants always following them with spittoons, that the spittle might be buried in some secret place, where no sorcerer could find it, and why even brothers and sisters had their food in separate baskets. In the island of Tanna, in the New Hebrides, there was a colony of disease-makers who lived by their art. They collected any nahak or rubbish that had belonged to any one, such as the skin of a