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during their attack on Cape Coast on the 11th of July 1824. The slaughter was so great and the repulse of the Ashantis so complete, that the Fantis, accustomed to see their foes. carry everything before them, attributed the unusual result of the engagement to the assistance of a powerful local god," and they set up a cult accordingly. The Kaffirs of Natal make thankofferings and express gratitude to the spirits for blessings received thus: "This kraal of yours is good; you have made it great. I see around me many children; you have given me them. You have given me many cattle.

You have blessed me greatly. Every year I wish to be thus blessed. Make right everything at the kraal. I do not wish any omens to come. Grant that no one may be sick all the year.' "2 In fine, as Mr. Clodd says, in primitive religion there is "an adoration of the great and bountiful as well as a sense of the maleficent and fateful.” 3

The second thing to notice is that, as it was owing to man's physical helplessness in his competition with his animal rivals that he was compelled to exercise his intellect in order to survive in the struggle for existence, so it was his intellectual helplessness in grappling with the forces of nature which led him into the way of religion; and as it was his intellectual faculties which gave him the victory over his animal competitors, so it was the strength drawn by him from his religious beliefs that gave him the courage to face and conquer the mysterious forces which beset him.

Assuming, then, that from the beginning man was compelled from time to time to recognise the existence of a supernatural power intervening unaccountably in his affairs and exercising a mysterious control over his destinies, we have yet to inquire how he came to ascribe this supernatural power to a spirit having affinity with his own. Now, savages all the world over believe that not only animals and plants but inanimate things also possess life; and the inference that whatever moves has life, though mistaken, is so natural, that we have no difficulty in understanding how the sliding stream and the leaping flame may be considered to be veritably living things. But savages also regard motionless 1 Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 40. 2 Shooter, Kafirs of Natal, 166.

3 Clodd, Myths and Dreams, 114,

objects as possessing life; and this, too, is not hard to understand the savage who falls and cuts himself on a jagged rock ascribes the wound to the action of the rock, which he therefore regards as a living thing. In this case there is actual physical motion, though the motion is the man's. In other cases the mere movement of attention" by which an object was brought within the field of consciousness would suffice to lend the thing that appearance of activity which alone was required to make it a thing of life. Then, by a later process of reasoning, all things would be credited with life; we talk of a rock "growing" (i.e. projecting) out of the ground, the peasant believes that stones actually "grow" (ie. increase), and as it is from the earth that all things proceed, the earth must be the source of all life, and therefore herself the living mother. In fine, all changes whatever in the universe may be divided into two classes, those which are initiated by man and those which are not; and it was inevitable from the first that man should believe the source and cause of the one class to be Will, as he knew it to be the cause and source of the other class of changes.

All the many movements, then, and changes which are perpetually taking place in the world of things, were explained by primitive man on the theory that every object which had activity enough to affect him in any way was animated by a life and will like his own-in a word (Dr. Tylor's word), on the theory of animism. But the activity of natural phenomena as thus explained neither proceeds from nor implies nor accounts for belief in the supernatural. This may easily be made clear. Primitive man's theory, his animism, consists of two parts: the facts explained and the explanation given-and in neither is anything supernatural involved. Not in the facts explained, for the never-hasting, neverresting flow of the stream, for instance, was just as familiar and must have seemed just as "natural" to primitive as to civilised man: there was nothing supernatural in such activity. But neither was the cause to which he ascribed this activity supernatural; for the cause assigned was a will which, being exactly like his own, had nothing unusual, mysterious, or supernatural about it; for we must remember two things, first, that for the average mind "explanation

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means likening the thing to be explained to something analogy already familiar, and next, that the familiar, which often most needs to be explained, is usually supposed to require no explanation and to have nothing miraculous in it.

If, then, for the phrase "life and will" we substitute the word "spirit," and say that in the view of primitive man all things which possessed (or seemed to him to possess) activity were animated by spirits, we must also add that those spirits were not in themselves supernatural spirits. They only became so when man was led to ascribe to them that supernatural power which he had already found to exercise an unexpected and irresistible control over his destiny. The immediate causes of this identification are easily conjectured. When a startling frustration of man's calculations brought home to him the existence of an overruling power, man would, as has been already said, eventually cast about for means of entering into relations with that power. The first thing to do for this purpose necessarily was to locate the power; and when primitive man was on the look-out for some indication as to the place of origin whence this power emanated, it would not be long before he found what he was on the watch for. In some cases the indications would be so clear that the identification would be immediate and indubitable; the erysipelas which was the result of bathing when overheated would be regarded as due to the supernatural power of the water-spirit, and was so interpreted by an Australian black-man. In other cases a longer process of induction would be required; the Peruvian mountaineer of the time of the Incas, who fell ill when he had to descend into the unhealthy valleys, ascribed his sickness to the supernatural power of the sea, for it was only when he was in sight of the sea that he was ill.

In this way the notion of supernatural power, which originally was purely negative and manifested itself merely in suspending or counteracting the uniformity of nature, came to have a positive content. A natural agent, such as the river-spirit, which at first confined its energies to the production of its ordinary operations, namely, the ceaseless, pauseless motion of the river, was eventually invested with the supernatural power, transcending its natural sphere of

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operation, of violating the laws of nature, and producing, say, sickness. But when once one exceptional action of the riverspirit had been put down as the outcome of supernatural power, then in course of time even its ordinary operation and the customary flow of the water would also come to be regarded as having a supernatural cause, and as being the manifestation, not merely of a spirit, but of a supernatural spirit. Thus in course of time all the phenomena of nature, even the discharge of the storm-cloud and the movement of the stars in their courses, came to be regarded as due to supernatural power.

To some readers this account of the conception of the supernatural may, perhaps, seem to be an inversion of the real process by which the conception was developed. Surely, it will be said, the characteristic mark of things supernatural is that they are things which it is beyond the power of man to perform or to control, and from the very beginning he must have learnt, by painful experience of the elements, that he could not control the drenching tempest or command the scorching sun. To this the reply is that primitive man for long did not believe that these elemental phenomena were beyond his control; of which the proof is that at the present day many savages are in the habit of making fain to fall, the wind to blow, or the sun to stand still; and they do not consider the power of producing these results to be supernatural. In Africa rain-makers are to be found in most negro villages, and their reputation and even their lives. depend upon their success in making it. In the Isle of Man there were, and in the Shetlands there still are, old women who make a livelihood by selling winds to seamen. The Australian black-fellow, in order that he may not be late for supper, will delay you the setting of the sun. These results are admittedly obtained by means of Sympathetic Magic. But whether sympathetic "magic" a question - begging epithet has anything supernatural about it, we have to inquire.

The inquiry has a special interest for the history of religion, because, according to a not uncommon view, all religion has been developed out of magic; the priest has been evolved out of the sorcerer, the idol is but an elaborated

fetish. On this theory the distinction between the natural and the supernatural was known to primitive man; things natural were things which men did, things supernatural were things which the gods did, e.g. causing rain or sunshine. But the distinction between men and gods, according to this theory, was somewhat blurred, because man also by means of magic art could do things supernatural, and even constrain the gods to work his will. Gradually, however, he learned that his powers were not supernatural, and that he could not use force to the gods, but must persuade them by prayer and sacrifice to grant his wishes. Then to attempt the supernatural by means of magic became an invasion of the divine prerogative, and the priest was differentiated by his orthodoxy from the sorcerer. Thus, according to this view, divine. power and magic were originally identical, and the early history of religion consists in the differentiation of the two, and the partial triumph of the former.

But there are reasons for hesitating to accept this view, and for believing, first, that religion and magic had different origins, and were always essentially distinct from one another; next, that the belief in the supernatural was prior to the belief in magic, and that the latter whenever it sprang up was a degradation or relapse in the evolution of religion. ((In this discussion everything turns on the recognition of the difference between the negative and the positive aspects of the supernatural: the negative aspect of supernatural power becomes manifest to the mind of man in any striking violation of that uniformity in nature which it is the inherent tendency of man to count upon with confidence; the positive aspect of supernatural power is later displayed to man's consciousness as the cause of the ordinary and familiar phenomena of nature. Now, the very essence of the conception of the supernatural in its negative aspect is that it is a power which mysteriously overrides and overturns the best founded human expectations, sometimes to man's disappointment, sometimes to his more agreeable surprise.

πολλαὶ μορφαὶ τῶν δαιμονίων,
πολλὰ δ ̓ ἀέλπτως κραίνουσι θεοί·
καὶ τὰ δοκηθέντ ̓ οὐκ ἐτελέσθη,
τῶν δ ̓ ἀδοκήτων πόρον ηὗρε θεός.

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