it is difficult even to conceive a time when there were no natural laws. And yet to him who knows not the law of a thing's movements, the thing's behaviour is as though it had no law, for ex hypothesi he does not know what it will do next. If, then, we suppose a time when no natural laws had as yet been discovered, all things then must have appeared to happen at haphazard; and primitive man's experience must have consisted of a stream of events as disjointed and disconnected as the successive incidents in a dream. So Eschylus describes the condition of men before Prometheus :

οἱ πρῶτα μὲν βλέποντες ἔβλεπον μάτην,
κλύοντες οὐκ ἤκουον, ἀλλ ̓ ὀνειράτων

ἀλίγκιοι μορφαῖσι τὸν μακρὸν βίον
ἔφυρον εἰκῇ πάντα.

Of what might happen in those early days, when nature had but few laws to obey and obeyed them by no means uniformly, we have fortunately plenty of contemporary evidence the fairy tales which were composed in the infancy of the human race, and are still the delight of childhood, faithfully reflect what actually happened in the daily life of primitive man. The proof of this statement is the fact that for savages now existing the incidents of which fairy tales. are made up, and which seem to us most extravagant and supernatural, are matters of ordinary if not everyday Occurrence. The transformation of men into beasts and vice versa is not only believed to take place, but is actually witnessed by savages, and in the case of witches has been proved in many an English court of law. "The Jacoons believe that a tiger in their path is invariably a human enemy who assumes by sorcery the shape of the beast to execute his vengeance or malignity. They assert that, invariably before a tiger is met, a man has been seen or might have been seen to disappear in the direction from which the animal springs. In many cases the metamorphosis they assert has plainly been seen to take place" (Cameron). The Bushmans say their wives can change themselves into lions and so get food for the family (Anderson). Even in Europe, a woman still (1860) living in Kirchhain changed herself not long ago into a wolf, and scratched and tore a

girl going across the fields (Mühlhausen). The giant "who had no heart in his body," and was invulnerable and immortal because he had deposited his heart or soul in a safe place, was but doing what the Minahassa of Celebes do whenever they move into a new house: "A priest collects the souls of the whole family in a bag, and afterwards restores them to their owners, because the moment of entering a new house is supposed to be fraught with supernatural danger." 1

The helplessness of primitive man set down in the midst of a universe of which he knew not the laws, may perhaps be brought home to the mind of modern man, if we compare the universe to a vast workshop full of the most various and highly-complicated machinery working at full speed. The machinery, if properly handled, is capable of producing everything that the heart of primitive man can wish for, but also, if he sets hand to the wrong part of the machinery, is capable of whirling him off between its wheels, and crushing and killing him in its inexorable and ruthless movement. Further, primitive man cannot decline to submit himself to the perilous test: he must make his experiments or perish, and even so his survival is conditional on his selecting the right part of the machine to handle. Nor can he take his own time and study the dangerous mechanism long and carefully before setting his hand to it: his needs are pressing and his action must be immediate.

It was therefore often at the actual cost and always at the danger of his life that primitive man purchased that working knowledge of the laws of nature and the properties of matter, without which modern man could never have acquired either the theoretic science or the material comfort which he now enjoys. But if modern man owes his science and his comfort to primitive man, primitive man in his turn owes his preservation in his perilous quest to a gift by the power of which mankind has conquered the material universe; that gift is the faith in the uniformity of nature, the belief that what has once happened will in similar circumstances happen again. The existence of this belief in the earliest times is a matter susceptible of easy demonstration, and is of some importance for the history of religion. It is important, because when it 1 Frazer, G. B. ii. 327.

is overlooked we are liable to fall into the error of imagining that there was a time when man did not distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. This error may take the form of saying either that to primitive man nothing was supernatural or that everything was supernatural. Nothing,

it may be said, was supernatural, for, as in a dream the most incongruous and impossible incidents are accepted by the dreamer as perfectly natural, and are only recognised as surprising and impossible when we wake and reflect on them, so events which are seen by civilised man to be incredible and impossible are to primitive man matters of everyday occurrence, and are perfectly natural. On the other hand, it is said that, when no natural laws are known there can be no natural and necessary sequences of events, and everything therefore is supernatural. According to this view, primitive man lived in a state of perpetual surprise: he marvelled every time he found that water was wet, he was racked with anxiety every time he went to bed lest the sun should not rise the next day, and he was filled with grateful astonishment when he found that it did rise. But this view, sufficiently improbable in itself, must be rejected for two reasons: first, the very animals have, for instance, their lairs and their customary drinking-places to which they resort in full confidence that they will find them where they were before; and we cannot rate the intelligence of primitive man so far below that of the animals, as to imagine that he was ever in doubt whether, for instance, water would slake his thirst, or food appease his appetite. Next, it is a fact of psychology that the native tendency of the human mind to believe that what has once happened will happen again is so strong that, until experience has corrected it, a single occurrence is sufficient to create an expectation of recurrence: the child to whom you have given sweetmeats once, fully expects sweetmeats from you at your next meeting.

We may then regard it as certain that from the beginning there were some sequences of phenomena, some laws which man had observed, and the occurrence of which he took as a matter of course and regarded as natural. Or putting ourselves at the practical point of view-the only point of view which could exist for primitive man in his

strenuous and unrelaxing struggle for existence-we may say that he discovered early how to set going certain portions of the mechanism of nature to further his own private ends, and that he felt neither surprise nor gratitude when the machinery produced its usual results. It was when the machinery did not produce its usual results that V he was astonished-when it produced nothing or produced something the opposite of what he expected-when, for instance, the cool water which aforetimes had refreshed his limbs gave him, in his heated condition, erysipelas. And as at the present day man takes to himself the credit of his good actions and throws the blame of the bad on circumstances over which he had no control so we may be sure that primitive man took to himself the credit of his successful attempts to work the mechanism of nature for his own advantage, but when the machinery did not work he ascribed the fault to some overruling, supernatural power. In fine, where the natural ended, the supernatural began." Laws on which man could count and sequences which he habitually initiated and controlled were natural. It was the violation of these sequences and the frustration of his expectations by which the belief in supernatural power was not created but was first called forth. That this was the first and earliest way in which man's attention was directed to the supernatural is probable, because his earliest inductions were necessarily framed on a narrow basis of experience, and consequently must soon have broken down. He must therefore from the beginning have been brought to confront a mysterious power which was beyond both his calculation and his control. In the next place, the shock of surprise with which he witnessed the violation of his expectations

1 Since writing the above, I find Waitz says (Introduction to Anthropology, p. 368) "that which regularly and periodically recurs passes by unheeded, because, being expected and anticipated, he (primitive man) is not obstructed in his path"; and that Major Ellis (Tshi-speaking Peoples, p. 21), quoting this passage from Waitz, says: "Hence the rising and the setting of the sun and moon, the periodical recurrence of the latter, the succession of day by night, etc., have excited no speculation in the mind of the Negro of the Gold Coast. None of the heavenly bodies are worshipped; they are too distant to be selected as objects of veneration; and the very regularity of their appearance impresses him less than the evidences of power and motion exhibited by rivers, the sea, storms, landslips, etc."

was as great as that with which civilised man would witness the unaccountable suspension or inversion of what he considered a law of nature; for the tenacity with which a belief is held does not vary with the reasonableness of the belief or the amount of evidence for it; but, on the contrary, those people are usually most confident in their opinions who have the least reason to be so. Again, it will hardly be doubted that, when primitive man found his most reasonable and justifiable expectations (as they appeared to him) frustrated in a manner for which he could not account or find any assignable cause, the feeling thus aroused in him would be that which men have always experienced when they have found themselves confronted by what they deemed to be supernatural. At all times the supernatural has been the miraculous, and the essence of miracle has been thought to be the violation of natural law. Even where there is no violation of natural laws, men may be profoundly impressed with the conviction that they are in the hands of an inscrutable, overruling, and supernatural power. To awaken this conviction it is only necessary that their "reasonable' expectations should be disappointed in some striking way, as, for instance, by the triumph of the ungodly or the undeserved suffering of the innocent. In fine, to be convinced of the existence of the supernatural, it is sufficient that man should realise his helplessness.

When, however, primitive man realised that he was in the hands, at anyrate occasionally, of a mysterious and supernatural power, it was inevitable that he should cast about for some means of entering into satisfactory relations with that power. We shall have to consider hereafter what were the conditions which governed and directed his first attempts; here, however, we may note two things. The first is, that it is not always necessarily to the disadvantage but sometimes to the advantage of man that his reasonable expectations may be miraculously disappointed-in other words, the belief in the supernatural is not necessarily or exclusively the outcome of fear. Thus "tradition says that the people of Cape Coast first discovered the existence' of Djwi-j'ahnu [the local deity of Connor's Hill] from the great loss which the Ashantis experienced at this spot