Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/311

 Rh is clear. Besides that waking self of which the savage is hazily conscious there must be another self, which, roaming the world while the body moves not, sees the things that are dreamed. Daily experience, if indeed it has not created the belief in this phantom-self, this ghost-soul, is ever confirming it. There are the suspensions of consciousness witnessed in swoon, apoplexy, catalepsy, and other forms of insensibility; there are the phenomena of shadows, of reflection, of echoes; whilst the analogies noticed between men and animals enlarge the belief in another-self to a world-wide doctrine of souls in the lower animals, indeed, of souls vegetal as well.

This is the philosophy which, I believe, lies at the heart of the Punchkin tales. The passage of the life-principle from princess or ogre to casket or to parrot is easy where imagination creates fellowship not only between man and brute but between man and lifeless things; while in the crediting of these with life, with power to change their form and nature, lies the germ of those more elaborate theories of transmigration and metempsychosis which have been developed among more or less civilised peoples.

Whether one be right or wrong in this interpretation of what seems the central idea crystallised in Punchkin and its variants, one cannot be at fault in claiming serious treatment for the folk-tales of the world. In so far as they aid us in determining what was the intellectual stage of man in the childhood of the race, and how far it finds correspondences in the intellectual stage of existing barbaric races, they are to be included in that study of myth which is neither more nor less than the study of the mental and spiritual history of mankind.