TYLOR'S PRIMITIVE CULTURE,*

(SECOND NOTICE.]

By animism Mr. Tyler means a belief in spiritual beings, includ- ing, and beginning from, a belief in the soul as something distinct from the body. Ile considers that, so far as men's beliefs have developed without interference from without, the earliest belief * Primitive Culture: Researches into the Deveiopment of Mythology, Pulotophu,Bettgion,

is in the being of a soul, capable of wandering from the body, and of visiting those it knows ; thus men believe in the visits of the dead, in the influence of the dead, in possession of the living by the spirits of the dead, of animals by the souls of men, of men by the souls of animals. Close upon these notions follow beliefs in the souls of animals, rocks, trees, rivers, &c. From a belief in the souls of individual things, "the tyranny of language," making thought follow it, leads men to personify abstract beings. This is admir- ably illustrated by Mr. Tylor in the conclusion of the fifteenth chapter, to which we have already referred, a portion of which we here quote :—

"The North-American Indians have thus speculated as to the common ancestors or deities of species. One missionary notes down their idea as he found it in 1631. They say, moreover, that all the animals of each species have an elder brother, who Is aa it wore the principle and origin of all the individuals, and this elder brother is marvolloualy great and powerful. The elder brother of the beavers, they told me, is per- haps as large as our cabin.' Another early account is that each species of animals has its archetype in the land of souls ; there exists, for example, a manitu or archetype of all oxen, which animates all oxen. ltforgan's comparatively modern account of the Iroquois mentions their belief in a spirit of each species of trees and plants, as of oak, hemlock, whortleberry, raspberry, spearmint, tobacco ; most objects of nature being thus under the care of protecting spirits. According to Father Gteronime Boscana, the Acagehemem tribe of Upper California furnish a curious parallel to the Samoan notion. They worshipped the 'panes' bird, which seems to have boon an eagle or vulture, and each year, in the temple of each village, one of them was solemnly killed without shedding blood, and the body burned. Yet the natives main- tained and believed that it was the same individual bird they sacrificed each year, and more than this, that the same bird was slain by each of the villages."

It is easy to see haw, by this process, mythology proceeds from individualism to polytheism, to monotheism. But though we agree with Mr. Tylor in the above theory of development, which starts from a belief in the being of a soul, we very strongly dissent from his theory of the way in which this prinvwy belief originated, and think appearances are wholly against it. We also strongly dis- sent from his assertion that this belief in its earliest stage has nothing about it of a moral character. Here is his theory :— " What the doctrine of the soul is among the lower races may be explained by a theory of its development. It seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of culture, were deeply impressed by two groups of biological problems. In the first place, what is it that makes the difference between a living body and a dead one; what causes wak- ing, sleep, trance, disease, death? In the second place, what are those human shapes whieh appear In dreams and visions ? Looking at these two groups of phenomena, the ancient savage philosophers practically make each help to account for the other, by combining both in a con- ception which we may call an apparitional-soul, a ghost-soul."

Now, the above questions, " What makes the difference between the dead body and the live one?" &c., are emphatically nineteenth- century questions;—and yet, perhaps, they are primitive questions also. The first thing that vexes the savage mind with thoughts beyond the reachings of his every-day logic seems to be the sight of his own dead. But where does Mr. Tylor say he finds an answer to these questions? In dreams. A man sees in dreams the living image

of the dead, and so he believes that this living image is able to leave the dead man, and visit its old haunts. And so, on the

evidence of dreams, he at once believes that the living image of the dead survives and quits the body. Mr. Tylor considers such evidence to be perfectly satisfactory to the savage mind. Ile says, vol. ii., page 21 :—

"That this soul should be looked on as surviving beyond death is a matter scarcely needing elaborate argument. Plain experience in there to teach it to every savage ; his friend or his enemy is dead ; yet still, in dream or open vision, he sees the spectral form, which is, to his philesphy, a real objective being."

Now this assumption that a savage takes dreams for reality, and does not distinguish between them and facts, is to our mind perfectly astounding. A savage dreams that his dead father is alive again, and receives this dream as a piece of matter-of-fact evidence that it is so Did lie never dream that his broken bow was whole again? or his lost arrow found ? and did he not

wake to find his mistake ? Some people may afford to take dream for fact, but not a hungry hunter. No. If he dreams of game where none is, and goes to seek it, he loses his supper, and does not trust his dreams a second time. But the Zulus told Calloway, and the Manganjas of South Africa told some one else, that they believed that the souls of their friends still lived because they saw them in dreams ; and we know that a dream will often take hold of a savage mind so as to bring conviction. So it was with the old Greek : the old Hebrew. Granted, most heartily granted. But why does a savage believe in the power of his dead father, but not in the power of his broken bow ? Why is the dream believed about one, and not about the other ? Why does he find evidence in what is no evidence?. Why does a man's image seen in a dream, or his shadow, or his reflection in the water, or the echo of his voice in the woods suggest the idea that he has a spirit that can leave the. body and exist after death ? Why, except that there is something. in the sight of the dead—if those dead have been closely attached to us—that disturbs the action of our ordinary reasoning powers ?' It is this disturbance of reason at the sight of the dead, the un- reasoning fear that it awakens, that is the real prinuan mobile of a. belief in the existence of the soul. Something within us is shaken and outraged when we see death in those very near to us. Reason says to the savage, "that dead man is no more use to you. nor are you to him," but something within him rebels against this conclusion. He is haunted by an obscure feeling that the- bond which bound him to the live man still binds him now that the man is dead. This feeling, unable, perhaps, by day to make. head against the logic of the senses, asserts itself at night in a dream, and leaves conviction behind it.

So far from a life beyond the grave being an inference from appear- ances—or from dreams, which are appearances of appearances—as Mr. Tyler asserts, it is a revolt in the mind of man against the tyranny of appearances. Something within him forces on him the no- tion that an occult life and power exist there in that dead man, from. whom all token of life has fled. This is the first stage. As a refuge from this ghastly oppressive notion of a living death, man, is gradually led to the idea of a distinction between the mortal. body and the living spirit. The reason of Mr. Tyler's misappre- hension of the nature Of this early belief is that he has not adhered closely enough to the method he himself commends as the true.

one. He should have attended to that saying of Comte's,. "No conception can be understood except through its his-

tory." Perhaps this saying of Coleridge's also would prove- helpful : " In every living form the conditions of its exist- ence are to be sought for in that which is below it." So. the nature of animism, of man's belief in the soul, cannot be properly understood without the history of its origin ; without. a knowledge, in fact, of that prior or lower state in which man has learnt to make no distinction between soul and body. In his. zeal to show that all—almost the very lowest races, if not the very lowest—have some conception of a soul, Mr. Tylor haa. disparaged all counter-evidence, and so has omitted to notice- the actually existing indications of this prior state. This omis- sion seems to us the weak point of the chapters on animism. Now what was this prior state ? Row did men's feelings of consideration for the dead first originate ? They first woke, no doubt, in the mother looking at her dead child. She. did not say to herself "lie is gone," nor even "lie is dead,' in our sense of the word. He was not gone ; he had not cease& to exist ; simply he was changed. The change she had seen come. over others, from which was no recovery, had come over lain, That- he had ceased to be, or ceased to be her child she certainly would. not think. The things that wooed her senses and drew out her tenderness, the warmth, the living colour, the cry for help, the answering affection, are all gone, lost to sense ; but these lost things attach her to the dead child, whom she believes in her simplicity to be still the same. And so she would sometimes, persist, in spite of rebukes and threats, in carrying about her dead child for months ; an Australian mother has been known to do so for more than a year, carrying it with her wherever she went, sleeping with it day and night. The.

decay could not scare her or overcome her love. But. in cases where love was less strong, we find a conflict of feel- ings. On the one hand, tenderness towards the dead as towards- beings who are in a very helpless and distressing state, who, per- haps, may feel bitterly and resent deeply any neglect ; on the- other, horror at their condition, the natural shudder of life at the- close contact of mortality. The suggestion of occult power and, life in the dead, making as it does instinctively a strong impres- sion, would no doubt become greatly strengthened by dreams, and' the idea of life existing in one who is falling into such an awfuli couditiou strikes terror. The very prevalence of the dread of the. dead amongst the rudest nations, witnesses to their inability either to think the dead non-existent or to separate them mentally from their mortal remains.

After death, among the lowest races, errogysi becomes arricerogra.. The parent is looked on as the terrible being to be pacified. This transition of love into " ghostly dread," as a missionary calls it, witnesses to the inability to make discrimination of body and soul.. The treatment of the dead witnesses to this. What we call "the body" is treated as a living sentient being. A man, after he has passed into the still and motionless state, is treated much as he is when dying. Likely enough they render him no respect at alh They would have left him alone in the woods with a small supply of food by him when he became useless, and so they do when he becomes permanently useless. But what respect they paid him before, that they are apt in most cases to continue. They place with him probably, besides food, the things he counted his own, perhaps his bow, his arrow, spoon, mat, pillow, spear. He can't use them now, neither could he, some of them, in his latter days ; but they feared, or shrank from taking them away from him then, and they still do so. A dread to touch the dead sometimes shows itself, or even to touch the things that have touched him or belonged to him. The shape, as it begins to change, grows oppressive to them, dreams of occult incalculable powers scare them ; and they leave him shut up in his house, or move him to a house of his own, withholding none of his possessions, protecting him, as if he were a sentient being, from the pressure of the earth, but taking care so to shut him in that he cannot come back to them. We may say of funeral rites generally that, though performed by races who for the most part do distinguish between body and soul, yet they generally contain surviving usages inconsistent with such a distinction, and treat the body as if it was the whole living sentient being. The horror felt at the visit of the dead lies in that primary belief into which the weak and childish are still prone to fall, not that the spirit comes back, but rather that the dead body itself, by a mysterious indwelling life and power of a magic sort, leaves the tomb and comes back to terrify the sur- vivors. The movement towards distinction between body and soul presents itself in the shape, as we said just now, of a conflict between two feelings ; one forbidding men to sever the bonds that unite them to the dead ; the other bidding men to separate them- selves from bodily contact with the dead. The idea of its being unclean to touch the dead, shows itself already nascent in some of the very lowest races. Witness the Bosjemen mentioned by Moffat, yrho, being ordered to remove his dead mother, would not even touch her, but dragged her along by a thong, and left the thong with her, as though unwilling even to touch what had touched the dead.

Most savage usages show something of these two conflicting feel- ings, which must painfully wrestle together till they have found reconciliation in the dogma of the separation of body and soul,— a feeling, on the one hand, really sometimes marvellously strong among the rudest races, that when a man has passed into the still and silent state, the Bond that unites him to the living still remains, though it has become invisible ; and a feeling, on the other hand, of horror and shrinking from the dead which does not so much annihilate love, as turn it into fear.

Now, the first of these two feelings is the very essence of morality. It springs out of love ; out of that affection which is the root of morality. It is felt almost exclusively towards those who have been closely united to the living by the bond of natural affection. The savage, for the most part, believes in and fears the power only of his own dead. Love is the known assertor of the truth and reality of the bond that unites men. It utters its protest against the notion that we are mere shadows, or that the bonds that unite us are mere shadow-bends that vanish into thin air at the touch of death. Is not love's protest essentially a moral protest ? For if the bond that unites us is a shadow, duty and constancy are delusions. Animism and morality, then, are not two streams that flow into one, but they come from one and the same source. Mr. Tylor does not see this. He sees "no morality" in the earliest stage of animism, because it declares only the con- tinuance, not the reward or punishment of the soul. Even meeting him on this very low ground it is easy to show that he is wrong. Man's early faith in the continued existence of the dead or of the soul exists simply in the shape of a fear,—a man's fears that the dead will resent neglects shown him. Put to many a savage the question, "Do you believe the soul lives after death?" He will answer, No. But still he fears the dead, fears their resentment. Here is morality at once, even of the kind which Mr. Tyler recog- nizes, viz, a sense that men's debts to the dead are not immediately cancelled by the fact that the dead are unable to enforce their payment; a suspicion that though the injured has no visible power, he has still a latent one. If the lowest races have no idea of a God to avenge wrong•doing, still the fear of the dead, as possessing mysterious inscrutable powers of avenging themselves, contains in it the germ of the very same feeling. Had we space, we could show historically how this fear of the dead has grown into

fear of the great avenger of all wrongs. Not having space to do this historically, we must appeal to our readers' intuitions to see how the seeds of monotheism are contained in these primitive fears. For fear felt towards an unseen being whose power cannot be tested by sense is ready at a moment's notice to flash into the

infinite, and to suggest a being of infinite power. A savage has. left his mother to die in the woods and given her no burial. She comes to him in dreams, which bring conviction of reality, and he dreads her, and goes off a hundred miles, and yet the dreams. follow him. He sees her there also, and the thought dawns on him. of an avenger from whom there is no escape. The seed of all monotheism is here. Nay, more : the awful cause of monotheism is here. For who is the real cause of his terror ? That better- nature which he has offended, and from which he cannot escape.

We have statsd some of the things we dissent from. But after all we wish to thank our author heartily for two volumes which are truly, to use his own words, " crowded " with facts of a most interesting and suggestive character, and which bear. throughout marks of patient, intelligent, and wise research.