Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/439

 Sir Alfred Lyall, in his truly significant study of Natural Religion in India, defines the religion of which he treats as "moulded only by circumstances and feelings, and founded upon analogies drawn sometimes with ignorant simplicity, sometimes with great subtlety, from the operation of natural agencies and phenomena. . . . the religious feeling works by taking impressions or reflections, sometimes rough and grotesque, sometimes refined and artistic, from all that men hear, and feel, and see". He tells us that in Hinduism this "can be seen growing; that one can discern the earliest notions, rude and vague", and "follow them upwards till they merge into allegory, mysticism, or abstract philosophical conceptions". He even thinks that in India we may trace "the development of natural into supernatural beliefs".

This, of course, raises the unsolved question of the line between the two, and where the supernatural is supposed to supersede, to supplement, or simply to intensify, the natural; also how far these terms apply respectively to the objective and the subjective. The bewildering ambiguities caused by the varying mental attitudes of those who use the words, create a real difficulty. Innumerable shades of meaning attach to them, while, unfortunately, there is a widespread tendency to suppose the contrary. We all think our own must be at once the true, the precise, and the most generally held meaning.

Let us, however, seek for the answer in the lecture itself. Taking the current theory of dreams and ghosts as the sources of the earliest superstitions. Sir Alfred Lyall lays stress on fear as "a primordial affection of the human mind", and maintains that much unreasonable terror of the present day is "traceable backward to the times when our ancestors felt themselves to be surrounded by capricious or malignant beings. The fear of ghosts is the faint shadow still left on our imaginations by the universal belief of primitive folk that they were haunted by the spirits of the dead." The value of Dr. Codrington's account of the distinctions made with regard to this even by the rude Melanesian mind is here evident. But next we get a specially valuable