PRIMITIVES AND THE SUPERNATURAL By Lucien Levy -Bruhl Current Literature --
This translatibrr(iAllen and thor5n;:.,18s.) adds another to the series of addles of pririikVe mentality bka;,_., well-known French anthropologist. Or. Levy-Brulir„ apparently adopts a' method simple but tirrie-horiciured by many writers of anthropological theory.- He reads n vast ninnber of works by missionaries, explortra, scientists, administrators, describing primitive societies all over the world. .He compares and classifies these accounts, arranging them, into chapters as to whether they deal with a ceremoniak dance,,, kinship tabu, a method of purification, a pretiatittori' against bad luck, a propitiatory rite—in fact all the various' ways by which savages recognise supernatural forces. - He then. writes an introduction to all these well-documented facts ; but this of course he cannot document, for it is the deduction of previous convictions already :stated in earlier works. Jumping at one bound from the realm of observed fact, he propounds his explanation of primitive mental habits. He declares that the pripaitive mind functions quite differently from the civilised mind;'_ tor unlike us, who rely upon our knoWledge of the laWs of :nature in all-we do, savages care not at all for knowledge ; they rely on traditions alone in their protections and defence against the presence and action of invisible powers. But here it seems Dr. Levy-Bruhl has been too flattering to modern science. In his attitude to prayer, his conception of the Christian sacraments, his views on spiritualism, palmistry, coincidence, and mysteries like birth and death, the civilised man is generally just as vague, as confused, as unscientific as any savage. The forces of nature are as fundamentally inexplicable to us as to the most ignorant Bushman. There does not seem any difference in kind between the agricultural learning of a Papuan and the latest disCoveries of a Cambridge laboratory, except that one is rudimentary science, the other not ; the one supplemented by organised ritual ; the other not. While we keep religion and science in water-tight compartments, with the savage they run alongside in the same activities, Dr. Levy-Bruhl stresses the importance of not reading our own conceptions into primitive habits, but it seems only too easy to interpret anthropological -Oct bypre:-Conceived notions.
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