Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/46

 10 foolish? Was mankind ever insane? one is asked. Certainly not; he had always the germ of the scientific habit, was always eager rerum cognoscere causas, but he was ignorant, indolent, and easily satisfied with a theory. How did he come to believe in ghosts? people inquire, and why did he not believe in some other kind of ghost? Really, except on the hypothesis that there is a ghost, or something very like one, I don't know. I can only repose on facts. People were not all mad two hundred years ago, but they believed as firmly in witchcraft as a Solomon islander does to-day, and the English witch's spells were even as those of the Solomon islander. The belief rested on false analogies, the theory of sympathies, and the credence in disembodied spirits. The facts are absolutely undeniable, and the frame of mind to which witchcraft seemed credible and omens were things to be averted everywhere survives. You will never make mankind scientific, and even men of science, like Ixion, have embraced agreeable shadows and disembodied mediums. We have conceived these follies because "it is our nature to", as the hymn says. Further explanation belongs to the psychologist, not to the Folk-lorist. If ignorance, conjecture, and credulity be insanity in the persons of our ancestors, deliravimus omnes.

The unity, the harmony of the human beliefs, and even the close resemblances of popular myths and stories among all peoples, are among the most curious discoveries of folk-lore. Now, as to custom and belief, we may expect to find them nearly identical in essentials everywhere, because they spring from similar needs, occasions, and a past of similar mental conditions. But, as to the resemblances of myths and stories, from the Cape to Baffin's Bay, from Peru to the Soudan, we shall doubtless have the matter discussed at later meetings. I myself am inclined to attribute the resemblances, partly to identity of ideas and beliefs, partly to transmission, either modern, or in the course of pre-historic war and commerce.