Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/301

personification of its objects and powers gives a very questionable account of the probable character and origin of the primitive consciousness of Things. That there ultimately arises a personification of the objects and powers of Nature may be admitted, and I shall presently have occasion to suggest what the origins probably were of the personifying process. But I submit that if, with due scepticism as to the reports of missionaries and travellers, saturated with Christian notions of "dead" matter and immaterial "spirits", we endeavour rather to gain a realising knowledge of primitive conceptions from a comparative study of the different departments of Folk-lore, scientifically classified with this end in view, we shall conclude that the primitive, and still universally prevalent, conception of Nature is one in which all objects—whether what we would call "animate" or "inanimate"—are conceived, so far as they are noticed at all, as themselves Powers, harmful or beneficial. And not to Folklorists only, but to Psychologists, I would appeal as to whether such a consciousness of Things is not a necessary condition of the existence of all creatures; and as to whether such a consciousness of Things as practically discriminates only between what may eat, and what may be eaten, implies, any such irrelevant and unnecessary discrimination between "animate" and "inanimate" as is insisted on by Mr. Spencer? We have here, however, to deal with Dr. Tylor. And, again, I would appeal to Psychologists as to whether, in the conception of the objects of Nature as themselves Powers, harmful or beneficial—understanding by the objects of Nature, of course, those only which specially influence the creatures' existence, no notice being taken of the rest—whether in such a conception there is any sort of "personification"? Does a horse, for instance, either personify, or associate with an indwelling demon, a heap of stones by the roadside before he shies at it? And why, therefore, imagine that a negro must either personify an odd-looking pebble