Page:The Science of Fairy Tales.djvu/40

26 Poets, too, and orators in their loftiest moods revert to language and modes of expression which have no meaning apart from this belief in the conscious animation of every object in the world. They may move us for the moment by their utterances; but we never take their raptures literally. To the savage, however, it is no figure of speech to call upon the sun to behold some great deed, or to declare that the moon hides her face; to assert that the ocean smiles, or that the river swells with rage, and overwhelms a wayfarer who is crossing it, or an unsuspecting village on its banks. These phrases for him fit the facts of nature as closely as those which record that the man eats or the boy runs. Nay, what would seem incredible to him would be to deny that the sun can see or the moon hide her face, the ocean smile or the river become enraged. Conscious personality and human emotions are visible to him everywhere and in all things.

It matters not to the savage that human form and speech are absent. These are not necessary, or, if they are, they can be assumed either at will or under certain conditions. For one of the consequences, or at least one of the accompaniments, of this stage of thought is the belief in change of form without loss of individual identity. The bear whom the savage meets in the woods is too cunning to appear and do battle with him as a man; but he could if he chose. The stars were once men and women. Sun and moon, the wind and the waters, perform all the functions of living beings: they speak, they eat, they marry and have children. Rocks and trees are not always as immovable as they appear: sometimes they are to be seen as beasts or men, whose shapes they still, it may be, dimly retain.

It follows that peoples in this stage of thought cannot have, in theory at all events, the repugnance to a sexual union between man and the lower animals with which religious training and the growth of civilization have impressed all the higher races. Such peoples admit the