Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/443

 latterly as the token of divinity working behind the phenomenal veil". How plain here, how obvious surely, is the connection of this feeling with our own sense of the wonder and the might of those inscrutable forces round us which science is everywhere investigating; finding each, as she advances, the prelude or the indirect witness to another which may or may not as yet come within her experimental ken!

Once more we are pointed to the inherent sense of hereditary unity which Dr. Weissmann's theory has done so much to bring home to us, whatever the ultimate fate of his own view of the matter; it is suggested that "mourning in its original meaning partook largely of the nature of worship". The lecturer thinks that "the prayers were not for the dead man, but addressed to him; that the funeral service was usually an offer or an attempt to do him service". And with reference to the sacrificial aspect of this custom, he insists that, "according to the votary's conception of the god, so is the intention and meaning of the sacrifice". Here we come to a fact which might surely become (after due investigation and analysis on the comparative method) the subject for another of those really deep interpretations of which we have in this lecture such helpful examples. "There is one world-wide and inveterate superstition belonging to the sacrificial class, of which we have many vestiges in India—it is the belief that a building can be made strong, can be prevented from falling, by burying alive some one, usually a child, under its foundations". Is it not worth while to ask—examining the facts by the light of such a question—whether this may not have been a hideously perverted attempt at expressing a primordial impulse, at embodying an organic (that is, a pre-intellectual) conviction, surviving to this day in the purely abstract imagery of the poet? May it not have grown out of a fundamental instinct, that under or at the beginning of all which human intelligence can undertake to construct, life—indeed, growing life—must be found or must be placed; that whatsoever is not founded on life must be founded on death, and must fall thus into irretrievable ruin? Does this sound far-fetched? Perhaps that may be because it is too near us to be rightly focussed yet. Still it may be that as yet such questions can more safely be asked than answered.