Sir Edward Tylor begins the chapters on Animism in that great work
which laid the foundation of the modern study of the history of
civilization, by a discussion of the evidence for the existence of
tribes destitute of religion. In some half-dozen pages he easily shows
that the existence of such tribes, “though in theory possible, and
perhaps in fact true, does not at present rest on that sufficient
proof which, for an exceptional state of things, we are entitled to
demand.” He convicts travellers and missionaries who have made the
assertion, of contradicting themselves; and he renders probable that
the denial of religion to peoples in the lower culture is begotten of
a perverted judgement in theological matters, and “the use of wide
words in narrow senses.”[1.1]
Other causes are equally prolific of error in regard to savage
beliefs. Sir Edward Tylor refers to haste and imperfect acquaintance
by the traveller with the people whose beliefs he is professing to
repeat. These are obvious causes on which it is needless to dwell.
Many peoples, too, are accustomed out of mere politeness to endeavour
to divine what sort of answer to his remarks will please a guest, or
what sort of answer an enquirer expects to his questions, and to make
it accordingly, {2} regardless whether it has any relation to the
facts or not. This courtier-like etiquette of agreement applies to
every subject, and is emphasized when the enquirer is an official or
social superior from whom favour may be looked for or displeasure
apprehended. The Malayans, a jungle tribe of southern India,
invariably say “Yes” in reply to a question by a government officer or
a member of a higher caste, “believing that a negative answer might
displease him.”[2.1] In such cases it is difficult to extract the
truth on the most indifferent and trivial, to say nothing of
weightier, matters.
Passing over these commonplaces, let us pause for a moment on another
cause mentioned by Tylor, namely, the natural reluctance of savages to
reveal “to the prying and contemptuous foreigner their worship of gods
who seem to shrink, like their worshippers, before the white man and
his mightier Deity.”[2.2] Very instructive is the account given by
Kolben of the Hottentots. Writing in the early years of the eighteenth
century, he says it is “a difficult thing to get out of the Hottentots
what are really their notions concerning God and religion, or whether
they have any at all. They keep all their religious opinions and
ceremonies, as they do every other matter established among them, as
secret as they can from Europeans, and when they are questioned
concerning such matters are very shy in their answers and hide the
truth as much as they can.” They take refuge from questions in “a
thousand fictions,” which they excuse, when taxed with them, by
alleging that “the Europeans are a crafty, designing people. They
never ask a question for the sake of the answer only, but have other
ends to serve, perhaps against the peace and security of the
Hottentots.” From this source, we are told, have sprung {3} most of
the contradictions to be found in authors upon the religion of the
Hottentots.[3.1] More than a hundred years after Kolben’s day a
British traveller, exploring Great Namaqualand under the auspices of
the British Government and of the Royal Geographical Society,
assembled some of the old men among the Namaqua and put them through
an examination. His thirst for information was doubtless praiseworthy;
and he was at least successful in proving, albeit unconsciously, the
truth of the older traveller’s words. For the proceeding he adopted
affords a brilliant example of “how not to do it.” I quote some of his
questions: “What laws have the Namaqua?” Answer--“They have none; they
only listen to their chiefs.” “Do the people know anything of the
stars?” Answer--“Nothing.” “Do the Namaqua believe in lucky and
unlucky days?” Answer--“They don’t know anything of these things.”
“Are there rainmakers in the land?” Answer--“None.” “What do the old
Namaqua think becomes of people when they die?” Answer--“They know
nothing of these things; all they see is that the people die and are
buried, but what becomes of them they know not; and before the
missionaries came to the Great River the people had never heard of
another world.”[3.2]
Many European casuists justify one who is questioned concerning
matters he desires to keep secret, and who meets the inquisitive
person with a falsehood. It cannot therefore be surprising that these
poor Hottentots thus took advantage of the only defence open to them
when they found their most cherished beliefs and customs the subject
of impertinent and bungling interrogations by an {4} unsympathetic
intruder into their country. Their Bantu neighbours do the same. The
Kaffir, we are told, “dislikes to find Europeans investigating his
customs, and he usually hides all he can from them and takes a
sportive pleasure in baffling and misleading them.”[4.1] When
questioned by Andersson, the Ovambo denied that they had any belief,
or abruptly stopped him with a “Hush!”[4.2] Prying of this kind is
rarely welcomed even among peoples on a much higher plane of
civilization. Not to appeal to our own feelings, we may take as an
illustration a people of the Far East. To question a native of Korea
concerning custom or belief at once arouses his suspicions. Indeed,
for a stranger to enquire the number of houses in a village, or what
the land produces, needs much tact if bad feeling is to be avoided. A
missionary who lived for many years in the country was of opinion that
people are unconscious of their customs. At any rate a Korean asked
suddenly about a certain custom will in all likelihood deny that such
a thing exists; and yet he may be absolutely free from dishonesty in
the matter: he is simply unconscious, he has never thought about
it.[4.3]
To this point we will return directly: our present point is the
conscious refusal of information. And here it should be noted that
savages, as well as others, do not hide their beliefs only because
they do not understand the motive of enquiry, or because they are
afraid of ridicule or of the denunciations of the missionary, even
where the Christian priest can call down the thunderbolt of the
magistrate. These reasons operate, but not alone. {5} From all
quarters of the world comes the report that the native is
uncommunicative. The Lengua Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco are quite
aware that their “superstition is regarded with disfavour by the
missionaries”; but they are naturally “very reticent in these
matters,” and their reticence is only heightened--not caused--by this
knowledge.[5.1] An excellent illustration of the difficulty of
discovering the beliefs and even the practices of savages is afforded
by Mr Batchelor, a missionary who, having resided among the Ainu of
Japan for more than twelve years, wrote an interesting book upon them.
He naturally supposed that so long a residence and intimacy with them
entitled him to think he knew practically all that could be told about
them. Alas for the fallibility of even a careful observer! There was
one chamber in the mind of every Ainu which he had not explored. When
another twelve years had elapsed he wrote that “when writing that book
I must frankly confess that I had no idea, nor had I for many years
after, that ophiolatry was practised at all by this people.” And all
the while the Ainu whom he knew so well were holding beliefs, relating
myths, and practising rites of which he had not the least
suspicion.[5.2] Nor is there any reason to suggest that they were
concealing those things from him out of fear of ridicule or clerical
reproofs.
Deeper reasons exist. German missionaries have been labouring for a
number of years among the tribes on the north-eastern coast of New
Guinea. In view of the various difficulties attending the
investigation of the beliefs of these tribes the latest scientific
explorer of the country called in the aid of some of the more
experienced {6} of the missionaries. He thus sums up the position:
“The heathen Papuan is a reticent fellow, and no power in the world
can move him to disclose the secrets of his fathers. He has too much
fear of the vengeance of the spirits and of the sorcerers, who would
infallibly kill him if he betrayed the smallest thing. Long years of
work accomplished with endless patience have been necessary to
convince the Black that sorcery is powerless,--that it is all lies and
deceit. Only if he is about to be baptized will he voluntarily deliver
up to his teacher his knowledge of witchcraft and its methods. In
plain terms, he feels the need on this point to lighten both his
conscience and his pocket.”[6.1] Reasons of this order have never
been better put than by an eminent French anthropologist whose
untimely death a few years ago was a serious blow to the cause of
science. Reviewing the work of a lady for whom English colleagues yet
mourn, he says: “The savage does not like to speak of his belief; he
fears the contemptuous mockery of the Whites. Perhaps, too, he fears
to give an advantage over himself, in allowing more to be known than
is fitting of the rites by which he tries to conciliate the
benevolence of the spirits, or to turn away their disfavour from his
hut and his plantations. To make known his resources for the fight
would be to half-disarm him; surrounded with supernatural dangers, he
does not willingly indicate the supernatural means by which he
guarantees himself against them.”[6.2] One other reason may be added
to these: a reason probably operative in many more cases than
enquirers have been aware of. The things after which they ask are
often revealed only to the initiate. An {7} outsider, one who is not
known to be, or at least treated as, an initiate, will seek in vain by
means direct or indirect for information on these matters. A stony
silence or repeated lies are all he will get. This has been the cause
of much mystification and many contradictory statements about tribes
in various parts of the world, not the least in Australia.[7.1]
It is not suggested, of course, that all contradictory statements
emanate from the deliberate mystification of non-initiate enquirers.
We have not by any means exhausted the causes of error in regard to
savage beliefs. Contradictory statements are made in good faith
because those who make them hold contradictory beliefs. On the
subject, for example, of the future life the mutually destructive
character of the beliefs often held by the same tribes, and even by
the same individuals, is one of the truisms of anthropology. The Zulus
and their neighbours hold that their dead are to be recognized in the
form of various animals, notably snakes, that haunt the tomb or the
abodes of the living, and yet that these very dead dwell in the bowels
of the earth, presiding in patriarchal fashion over shadowy kraals,
and rejoicing in the possession of herds of sky-blue kine with red and
white spots. Moreover, notwithstanding this wealth of cattle, they are
dependent, if not for their continued existence, at least for their
comfort, on the sacrifices offered by their descendants. The truth is
that “the whole spirit-world is one of haze and uncertainty.”[7.2]
This opinion, expressed by an experienced missionary, {8} is true of
all savage and barbarous nations. It is not merely the doctrine of
souls that is difficult to understand fully and to state clearly: all
the relations with the supernatural are shifting; and the supernatural
itself melts away into mist and gloom and the undefined terrors of
night.
Proof of the mental capacity of peoples in the lower culture, and
their alertness within the narrow range of their appetites, their
bodily needs, and the warfare they wage for existence against untoward
environment of various kinds, is to be found in every record of
exploration, in the reports of every missionary. Beyond that range
there are differences between races, as between individuals, in
reasoning power, in curiosity, and in general development. Some cause
to us unknown may have turned the thoughts of one people into
profounder and subtler channels than those of another. We are told of
two neighbouring tribes in California that their differences are very
striking, and are based on deep-lying racial factors. The mythology of
the one is more dramatic, that of the other is more metaphysical,
exhibiting “more of the power of abstract thought and intellectual
conception.”[8.1] We must beware of reading too extensive a meaning
into what is after all merely a comparison of characteristics. It is
adduced here for the sole purpose of illustrating the statement that
such differences exist even between tribes that are subject to similar
external influences. In spite of these differences the unanimous
verdict, alike of missionaries and explorers, scientific enquirers and
traders, given with tiresome iteration, is that of dormant faculties,
want of interest, inability to follow a train of thought, and dislike
of intellectual effort. These are qualities that we are sufficiently
familiar {9} with at home to render them fully credible in “the poor
heathen.” Ask a man anywhere--ask a Zulu, ask an English peasant--why
such and such a thing is done. He will tell you: “It is the custom,”
and will look at you with wondering eyes that you can demand a reason
or dream of any alternative as possible. Custom to him is more than a
second nature. It is nature itself, the established order, the cosmos.
To conceive of departure from it would entail a greater burden of
thought than he has ever undertaken or would willingly bear. It may
even be so much a part of his existence that, like the Korean referred
to above, he is barely conscious of it.
In such a case the custom may be denied in perfect good faith.
Sometimes, it is true, another cause may lead to the denial. This is
well illustrated in a recent work on the Holy Land. The author,
speaking of local variations of custom, says: “The small area in which
peculiar customs occur, and the comparative isolation of these areas
which still prevails, make it often extremely difficult to ascertain
local customs and usages. Many of these can only be discovered
accidentally or by long residence in the particular locality. The
people of neighbouring villages may be quite unaware of the existence
of a certain custom, while only a few miles away it may be very
familiar. I have known intelligent, educated natives to be entirely
ignorant of certain customs, and even to deny their existence, because
they were not in vogue in their own particular district, whereas
further enquiry or fuller acquaintance with other parts revealed the
fact that they were perfectly familiar to others.”[9.1] Here the
expression “intelligent, educated natives” must be interpreted of
course by reference to the standard {10} of intelligence and education
in the rural parts of a country so backward as Palestine. In such a
case the ignorance by natives described as intelligent and educated of
customs quite different from, and perhaps opposed to, their own may be
due to the concentration of their faculties in the struggle for daily
needs, or the absorption of their interests in the concerns of their
own little community. Millions of men and women in our country, who
may be fairly described, by reference to their class and occupation,
as “intelligent, educated natives,” are quite ignorant--and supremely
indifferent--about everything not pertaining to their material
well-being, their habitual amusements, the affairs of their little
town, their family or their church, or the latest scandal whispered in
their tiny coterie. These fill up their life; they have neither
leisure nor inclination to worry about anything beyond. We cannot,
therefore, be surprised that where the facilities for communication
are smaller and the general indigence greater, similar mental
indolence may exist. Economic causes, the product themselves of the
environment, are often responsible for internal conditions, and cannot
be disentangled from them. Intelligent curiosity about things not
immediately or apparently affecting ourselves is a rare virtue, and of
late development. We ourselves often deem that we pay it abundant
homage by witnessing the exhibition of a few lantern slides, or
slumbering tranquilly through a lecture on Dante. But to it, if
rightly and strenuously pursued, we owe how much of modern discovery
and the amenities of civilization! Let us, however, return to our
savages.
Of the Nootkas or Ahts of Vancouver Island we are told by Sproat in a
passage that has often been quoted that he “had abundant proof in
conversing with them about matters in which they took an interest,
that their mental {11} capacities are by no means small. It is true
that the native mind, to an educated man, seems generally to be
asleep; and if you suddenly ask a novel question, you have to repeat
it while the mind of the savage is awaking, and to speak with emphasis
until he has got your meaning. This may partly arise from the
questioner’s imperfect knowledge of the language; still, I think, not
entirely, as the savage may be observed occasionally to become
forgetful when voluntarily communicating information. On his attention
being fully aroused he often shows much quickness in reply and
ingenuity in argument. But a short conversation wearies him,
particularly if questions are asked that require efforts of thought or
memory on his part. The mind of the savage then appears to rock to and
fro out of mere weakness, and he tells lies and talks
nonsense.”[11.1] On this Professor Boas, the distinguished American
anthropologist, comments thus: “I happen to know through personal
contact the tribes mentioned by Sproat. The questions put by the
traveller seem mostly trifling to the Indian; and he naturally soon
tires of a conversation carried on in a foreign language, and one in
which he finds nothing to interest him. As a matter of fact, the
interest of those natives can easily be raised to a high pitch, and I
have often been the one who was wearied out first. Neither does the
management of their intricate system of exchange prove mental
inertness in matters which concern the natives. Without mnemonic aids,
they plan the systematic distribution of their property in such a
manner as to increase their wealth and social position. These plans
require great foresight and constant application.”[11.2]
So far as this comment is directed to depreciate the {12} value of
Sproat’s estimate of the mental powers of the Nootkas, I cannot think
that Professor Boas has been quite fair to the writer. Sproat was no
passing traveller, speaking to the natives in a foreign language, and
jotting down superficial impressions derived from hasty observation.
He had “lived among them and had a long acquaintanceship with them.”
He was a settler, and for five years a colonial magistrate in constant
contact with several of their tribes. His own account of his method of
collecting information and the substance of his book are conclusive as
to his painstaking researches; and Professor Boas himself elsewhere
bears testimony to his trustworthiness.[12.1] Moreover, a comparison
of the quotations renders it clear that on the whole they confirm one
another. Probably, however, Professor Boas’ criticism is intended to
apply not so much to Sproat’s statements as to the use made of them by
Herbert Spencer and other theorists. It comes to this, therefore, that
the Nootka’s mental capacity is considerable, his mind is alert and
active on subjects that interest him, but that he is not interested in
many of those on which an anthropologist desires to learn, and hence
he speedily becomes “bored” and answers at random.
The horizon of savage interests among the neighbouring Dene or Ten’a
of the Yukon Valley is thus defined by an experienced missionary: “The
activity of their minds is commonly confined within a narrow circle,
as is evidenced by their favourite subjects of conversation. Food,
hunting and fishing, with their attendant circumstances, family
happenings, health and disease, devils and their actions, sexual
propensities--such are the topics which practically sum up the
encyclopædia of their conversation.” “The {13} Ten’a mind,” he says
in another place, “is anything but speculative, and its imaginative
powers have not been turned to building theories of its belief, but
rather to excogitate a variety of ways whereby this belief
perseveringly asserts itself.” The native’s “dogmas are very nebulous
and undefined, and he has never heard them explicitly formulated, nor
even attempted to state them distinctly to himself.” Consequently,
“whereas there is a certain uniformity in the practices, and an
overabundance of them, there are very few points of belief common to
several individuals, and these are of the vaguest kind.”[13.1]
If we turn to an entirely different race, the same features present
themselves. The capacity of the Bantu peoples of the Lower Congo for
the intellectual acts of perception, recognition, memory, and so
forth, is well developed and appears early in childhood. “In this
respect the natives are much on a par with the civilized races; but
the limit is reached early in life, and but little mental progress is
observable after adolescence is reached. The ideas are mostly of the
simpler forms, seldom passing the concretes of actual experience,
generalizations being as a rule beyond their power. Association of
ideas, though good as implied by good memory, only takes place in the
concrete form of contiguity in time and space as actually already
perceived; analogies are confined to the crudest forms, and a very
simple figure of speech is apt to be unintelligible.… The
fundamental act of intelligence, the intuition of likeness and
unlikeness, is very circumscribed; and high acts of intellect are
thereby negatived.… An accompanying trait is the absence of rational
surprise. On seeing something new a vacant wonder is all that is
observable; and this is very transient, and the {14} new experience is
classified as ‘white man’s fashion.’ It almost follows as a matter of
course that there is no curiosity, no wish to enquire into the cause
of a novel experience; it never occurs to the native that there is a
cause of the novelty or an explanation required. In like manner there
is almost total absence of theorizing about natural phenomena.” In
fact, the relation of cause and effect in all but the most patent and
mechanical cases is said to be beyond his grasp.[14.1] In general
terms this description may stand for all the Bantu, due allowance
being made, as pointed out above, for individual and tribal
differences.
The natural result is vagueness on all religious and metaphysical
subjects. This is a characteristic of savages all over the world. Nor
is it limited by any means to them. Recent investigations have
established the evolution of some at least of the majestic figures of
the Olympian Pantheon from not merely rude but vague and nameless
personalities; and to the very end of Hellenic religion, unknown gods
and dim, indefinite heroes continued to be honoured not merely in
every country place, but in Athens herself. The Arabs of Moab have
professed for many generations the religion of the Prophet. Yet they
have the feeblest apprehension of that great Allah in whom they are
supposed to believe. When questioned on his nature, his abode, his
occupation, they usually answer: “We do not know.” One of them told a
missionary: “It is said that Allah is like an old man with a white
beard, but I do not know where he dwells; it is asserted that he is
above,” pointing to the sky. They also honour numerous beings called
by the generic name of _Wely_ (protector or friend), who are
identified with rocks, trees, and other holy places. Even of these,
however, {15} their ideas are obscure. Like the local hero of the
Greeks, the _Wely_ is not as a rule individualized with a personal
name. Who he is in most cases is unknown. His exact connection with
the spot where he is honoured is equally unknown. Some Arabs say that
it is he who gives vigour to the sacred tree; others declare that he
dwells beneath it, or that he dwells in the branches and the leaves;
but Allah knows.[15.1] And the pious reference to Allah and his
knowledge is sufficient for the Arab.
The fact is that on these subjects the majority of the human race,
whether savage or civilized, think little. Their minds are seldom
excited to the point of reasoning on their beliefs. They accept what
they are told, and do not even know whether they believe it or not,
because they have never reflected upon it. One has only to talk for a
few minutes to a peasant at home to find out how narrow the border of
his knowledge is, how misty and uncertain is everything beyond the
routine of his daily life and the village gossip and amusements,
unless where in the neighbourhood of a town the supreme interests of
football open to him a prospect into another world. Gossip,
amusements, his daily bread are subjects of importance; they fill his
horizon; on them his views are perfectly definite. Nor does he differ
in this respect from people who are looked upon as his social
superiors. It would be making too strenuous a demand upon their
intellectual life to expect them to rise above the markets, the
newspaper, the latest novel, the county cricket-score, and the
problems of golf and bridge. All the rest they are content to leave to
their professional advisers, who in nine cases out of ten, if the
truth must be told, have as little taste or capacity as themselves for
metaphysical speculation, historical research or theological enquiry,
and {16} are bound as tightly in the cords of tradition as the far
more imaginative Zulu medicine-man, or the Eskimo wizard. For the
average man in civilization appraises the subjects of thought no
otherwise than does his brother in savagery. Each alike is eminently
practical. Something done, or to be done, by himself or others is what
interests him. Some personal gain, some bodily pleasure--for this he
will think and think hard; all other mental exertion must be easy and
short. Nor could the human race exist on any other terms.
Still further difficulties beset the enquirer into the beliefs of the
lower culture. On the threshold is that of language. To be sure that
you have grasped the real meaning of your savage friend you must be
able to talk his language as he talks it himself--and even then you
may be mistaken. “When there is no certain medium of communication,”
says Bishop Codrington, writing of the Melanesians, “when a native
interpreter who speaks a little broken English is employed to ask
questions and to return the answers, nothing can be depended on as
certain which is received. To be able to use some European word, or
word supposed to be English, to describe a native practice or to
convey a native belief, is to have an easy means of giving
information; and so among the islands ‘plenty devil’ is the
description given of a sacred spot, and ‘_tevoro_’ (devil) in Fiji has
become the common appellation of the native ghosts or spirits.
Supposing, again, that the enquirer is able to communicate pretty
freely on ordinary subjects in the language of any island, he will
surely find himself baffled when any one of the elder people
undertakes to give him information. The vocabulary of ordinary life is
almost useless when the region of mysteries and superstitions is
approached.”[16.1]
{17}
The use of the word “devil,” universal in and around Melanesia when
speaking in pigeon English of the native mysteries and the objects of
the native cult or fear, illustrates one of the pitfalls in the path
of the anthropologist. The native ideas do not coincide with ours. The
history, the environment, the social and intellectual condition of
peoples in the lower culture are as diverse from ours as their
geographical situation. Consequently their speech contains no
equivalent for many of our words, even of words that seem to us to
convey ideas elementary and simple. No Australian language possesses a
word which is the exact equivalent of our word “mother.” The word we
roughly equate with “mother” includes a host of other women beside her
who has given birth to the child. Some of these women we should
designate as “aunt,” or as “stepmother”; but many of them stand in no
relation of kinship according to our reckoning. Yet they are all
addressed and spoken of by the same term as the veritable mother.
Kinship, in fact, is counted in the lower culture along lines quite
different from ours; and though it is probable that our degrees of
kindred have evolved from a rudimentary condition similar to that
which we find among savages, we have so far outgrown it that their
reckoning is often unintelligible to us, and only a very few of the
terms in use among European nations remain to point back to an earlier
stage of development. If we have this difficulty in finding
equivalents for terms expressive of the simplest relationships of our
social life, how much greater must be our difficulty when we come to
terms expressive of the mysterious and supersensual relations of man
to the unknown and dimly conceived powers of the universe about him!
We have no word to render the Fijian _mana_, the Siouan _wakan_, the
Malagasy _andria-manitra_. {18} Conversely, scarce a savage language
can render our word “God.” Over and over again missionaries have
sought, and sought in vain, for a native word for the purpose. When
they have fixed upon one, as often as not they have had to confess a
blunder; and many times in despair they have invented a word. The idea
embodied in the acts by which the mysterious relations between man and
the supernatural are emphasized and knit together is equally incapable
of translation by any one vocable. A Roman Catholic missionary,
speaking of the religious assembly of the Creeks of North America,
says: “The _mitewewin_ represents the highest expression of magic
(_maeghiw_ or _maskikiy_) among the nations of the Algonkian stock.
The word, in fact, signifies at the same time labour, occupation,
judgement, adoration, and sacrifice. It is a religious act addressed
to the _powakans_, or animal fetishes, and a sort of Illinoian
freemasonry requiring initiation and inviolable secrecy; it is a
camp-meeting…; it is the grand council of an entire nation.”[18.1]
These sentences afford an excellent example of the difficulty of
translating the native ideas into English words. They unite a brave
and more or less successful attempt to convey the notion of
_mitewewin_, with incidental but none the less certain failures in the
cases of _maeghiw_ or _maskikiy_ and _powakan_. For none of them would
a single English word, or even a phrase, be adequate.
The opportunity of blundering in the endeavour to understand and
report the beliefs and usages of the lower races is obviously as great
as could be desired. When to the various causes enumerated above is
added not merely the conscious want of sympathy on the part of the
observer, but his unconscious prejudice in favour of {19} certain
interpretations derived from the civilized and the specifically
Christian notions in which he has been brought up from his youth, the
wonder is not that so many mistakes have been made, but that we have
on the whole succeeded in obtaining so large a mass of fairly
trustworthy information. Even that of which we are the best assured,
however, must be used with caution. It must be criticized, checked
with other accounts of the same or neighbouring tribes; and allowance
must be made for the personal equation of the observer. The use of a
word like _worship_, _spirit_, or _God_, which connotes to us very
different ideas from those connoted to the native mind by the native
word thus translated, must put us at once on our guard. Fancied
resemblances between the myths, heard perhaps at second-hand and only
half-understood, and some story, Biblical or other, known to the
reporter, and the expectation of finding in savage tradition some
fragment of divine revelation have proved real Will-o’-the-wisps to
the unwary. Nor must we forget that things actually seen are also
liable to be misinterpreted. Captain John Smith, in writing of
Virginia, describes as a human sacrifice--a sacrifice of
children--what seems to have been no more than the ceremony of
initiation into manhood.[19.1] It is true that his account was
written three hundred years ago, and that he was not allowed to
witness the whole performance. But after all our subsequent experience
and accumulation of records, nothing is harder even yet than to
determine the meaning of ceremonies and institutions, often carefully
examined and minutely described by skilled eyewitnesses and scientific
explorers.
We may go further still. Where the observer puts aside his prejudices,
where he is animated by true sympathy--not {20} the false and mawkish
sympathy that too often takes its place--where he is able to
communicate with the natives in their own tongue, there is
notwithstanding very often a difficulty in following their ideas. We
have been told of the Andaman Islanders that “with these, as with
other savages, it is vain to expect them to understand the logical
conclusions to which their beliefs tend.”[20.1] That may be because
they have never thought them out. In the majority of cases it would
probably be juster to say that their logic follows a different course,
their ideas run in different channels, from ours. After conceding
everything that has been said with perfect truth as to their
vagueness, their indolence of mind on subjects not concerned with
their daily life, and their dislike of intellectual effort, there
remains the fact that they are human; they do reason, albeit after
their own fashion. Language among the higher races has been trained
and tortured during many centuries to express the highest thoughts of
the highest thinkers; and how inadequate an instrument has it often
been found! It must therefore not surprise us if the thought of races
in the lower culture occasionally surpasses a language not yet
exercised and adapted to the complicated processes of ideation and
ratiocination. Thus not merely is it difficult or impossible to
translate native words by English equivalents, as I have already
pointed out: the native finds it not easy to translate his thoughts
into his own tongue. When he has struggled with more or less success
to effect this, his course of thought is so widely different from ours
that we can hardly believe in its coherence.
The objects of thought, alike among savages and among ourselves, fall
into categories. Many of these categories manifest themselves in the
very fibre of language. A {21} familiar illustration is the curious
distinctions of grammatical gender, so different even in different
languages sprung from a common stock, and those comparatively simple,
as are the Aryan tongues of civilization. When we refer to the
languages of the lower culture, with their minute distinctions of
number and person, of action, tense, and all sorts of relations of
time and place, we are overwhelmed by their complexity and puzzled by
the oddness of their grouping. Categories of another kind become
visible when we attempt to push our explorations further into savage
thought. The counting of kinship and the difficulties attending the
attempt to translate words expressive of religious ideas have already
been mentioned. In the totemism of Australia the totems are classes of
animals or other objects not merely united by some mystic bond to one
or other class of tribesmen; they are related to other objects of
human environment in such a way that the whole universe is shared
among them. To us these relationships are strange and inexplicable;
they form categories that we do not understand. To the native these
categories are familiar by immemorial association; they have become
part of the texture of his mind; and thereby they have acquired
emotional values, from the bonds of which he can hardly deliver
himself. So it seems that the West African Bantu comprise their entire
social system, every activity of their mental and physical life, and
every aspect of the external universe under a limited number of
categories wholly alien to our modes of thought. Hints of them are
perhaps to be found in the various classes of Bantu nouns that have
not yet been fully explained by philologists. In any case the
classification of these nouns is probably no arbitrary association of
purely formal significance. It is based on some archaic experience,
which has grouped {22} together various objects often to us utterly
dissimilar: the connecting links escape us.[22.1] Among other peoples
in parts of the earth remote from one another categories have been
discovered associating and dissociating acts and modes of feeling, and
apportioning their environment in unexpected ways. Such categories
must react on mentality to an extent that we can hardly measure. They
form part of the traditional presuppositions of thought. They are the
framework in which ideas are grouped. We, who have gradually
elaborated and established through generations of increasing discovery
and invention a habit of regarding everything from a more or less
scientific standpoint, have acquired a series of presuppositions of an
entirely different character. To the educated classes of Europe and
America they in their turn have become traditional. They are the
axioms from which we argue. Every new experience must be fitted into
the framework thus supplied, otherwise we cannot logically interpret
it. At the best we may make for it what has been wittily called a
watertight compartment. Men of the lower culture brought suddenly into
contact with civilization and civilized ideas experience a
corresponding difficulty. Missionaries are often in despair over their
converts’ relapses. These relapses are occasioned not merely by the
difference of moral atmosphere, but quite as much by the intellectual
abyss between savagery and civilization. Christianity and
heathenism--the new and the old--are jumbled together in the convert’s
mind. His traditional modes of thought are as little changed as his
outward environment, and the new ideas are incongruous with them. The
result is chaos. So the civilized enquirer into savage belief is
constantly brought up in what seems {23} a blind alley. He cannot find
the way out, not because there is not a logical issue, but because the
landscape is unfamiliar. He attempts to adapt the thoughts of the
savage, so far as he has seized them, to his own totally different
mental framework; and they are refractory. Not until the effort is
abandoned, and patient, unprejudiced search has discovered the true
pattern of the puzzle, will it be solved.
For it needs a considerable apprenticeship to enable the observer, in
Miss Kingsley’s phrase, to “think black,” to understand the logic of
“black” thought, and accurately, or at least approximately, to
reproduce its process and aims. When we are told, therefore, by a
writer whom I cited a few pages back that the relation of cause and
effect in all but the most patent and mechanical cases is beyond the
grasp of the West African Bantu, that statement must be taken with
some qualification. It should be explained that it is the relation of
cause and effect according to our ideas and our reasoning that is
beyond the native grasp, because our axioms are unknown to him; he
reasons from quite another set of logical presuppositions. To change
the figure, he is a child, but a child familiar only with what we deem
a topsy-turvy world, though it is the same world from which we
ourselves emerged long ago. If we would comprehend him we must
painfully climb down into that world again, breathe its air,
familiarize ourselves with its scenes of wonder and of terror, and
make intimate companions of all its strange inhabitants. Thus and thus
only can we recover the clue that will lead us safely through the
shadowy forests and haunted valleys and over the primeval
mountain-tops of native thought. Then we shall find that the savage is
not so irrational as we have thought him, and that in his wildest
divergence from our {24} methods of reasoning he has a method of his
own--a method followed once upon a time by our own ancestors, a method
from which the peasantry of many a European country is not yet wholly
emancipated.
This is to “think black.” It is not everybody who can do it: it
requires more sympathy and insight than are given to all men. Above
all, it requires patience, long and close contact with the native, and
the persistent and self-abandoning endeavour to penetrate his
thoughts. Some missionaries have achieved it, some travellers, some
traders, some colonists, some government officials. Too many of them,
alas! have only skimmed the surface of the native mind. Even the
latter, however, though they have failed to read the underlying
meaning of what they saw, have sometimes taught us what to look for.
To that extent the modern school of anthropology is founded on their
observations. The training now given in anthropology at the
universities and elsewhere utilizes and criticizes the reports of all
observers, as well as the conclusions drawn from them by
anthropologists at home. That training is of material assistance in
fitting new labourers out for fresh fields of enquiry, or for working
over again those fields which have been hitherto imperfectly reaped by
ill-equipped enquirers. In some measure it supplies the place of
longer preliminary intercourse with the man of lower culture; and it
has the advantage that it teaches the student what kind of phenomenon
to expect--an advantage perhaps not unaccompanied by dangers of its
own.
Be that as it may, the information of all kinds, good, bad, and
indifferent, already at our service on the subject of the religions of
the lower culture has been and is still being subjected to ruthless
comparison and criticism. The result of this constant sifting is to
put us in {25} possession of a considerable body of material for a
sane judgement in regard to some of the beliefs of tribes in various
parts of the world and to help us forward on the track of others. We
no longer summarily deny the possession of religion to tribes whose
practices we do not understand. We no longer attempt to docket beliefs
imperfectly apprehended under headings applicable only to the highly
developed and literary theology of Europe. We lie under a more
insidious temptation--that of the too rapid generalization of the
beliefs of the lower culture, for which the groundwork may not as yet
exist. But we are learning the lesson that only by unwearied
investigation, diligent observation, sympathetic enquiry without
prepossession, can we attain to a real grasp of the protean ideas and
half-formulated speculations of savage minds.
THE RELATIONS OF RELIGION
AND MAGIC
{26}