Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/44

 8 presume to guess, believing that here all research is but baseless conjecture. Certainly, among the most remote, secluded, and undeveloped ancestors of the folk I seem to find, as a rule, both ghosts and God, but whether one idea is prior to the other, and if so which, I have discovered no positive evidence.

I have tried to state the theory of Folk-lore as I understand it. I consider that man, as far as we can discern him in the dark backward and abysm of Time, was always man, always rational and inquisitive, always in search of a reason in the universe, always endeavouring to realise the worlds in which he moved about. But I presume man to have been nearly as credulous as he was inquisitive, and, above all, ready to explain everything by false analogies, and to regard all movement and energy as analogous to that life of which he was conscious within himself Thus to him the whole world seemed peopled with animated and personal agencies, which gradually were discriminated into ghosts, fairies, lares, nymphs, river and hill spirits, special gods of sky, sun, earth, wind, departmental deities presiding over various energies, and so forth. About himself, as about the world, he was ignorant and credulous. False analogy, the doctrine of sympathies, the belief in spirits that had and in spirits that had not been men, these things, with perhaps an inkling of hypnotism, produced the faith in magic. Magic once believed in the world became a topsy-turvy place, in which metamorphoses and necromancy and actual conversation with the beasts became probable in man's fiction and possible in man's life. A painful life it seems to us, or to some of us, in which any old woman or medicine man might blast the crops, cause tempest, inflict ill luck and disease, could turn you into a rabbit or a rook, could cause bogies to haunt your cave, or molest your path, a life in which any stone or stick might possess extra-natural powers, and be the home of a beneficent or malignant spirit. A terrible existence that of our ancestors, and yet, without it where