absence of their capacity to generalise. They have a word for every
familiar thing, sound, and colour, but no word for animal, plant, sound,
or colour as abstract terms. It is the concrete, the special shape and
feature and action of a thing, which strike the senses at the outset; to
strip it of these accidents, as we call them, and merge it in the general,
and realise its relation to what is common to the class to which it
belongs, is an effort of which the untutored mind is incapable. Many of
the northern non-Aryan tribes, as among the Mongols, have names for the
smallest rivulet, but no word for river; names for each finger, but no
word for finger. The Society Islanders have a separate name for the tails
of various animals, but no name for tail. The Mohicans have verbs for
every kind of cutting, but no verb “to cut.” The Australians and other
southern aborigines have no generic term for tree, neither have the
Malays, yet they have words for the several parts, the root, stem, twig,
etc. When the Tasmanians wished to express qualities of things, as hard,
soft, warm, long, round, they would say for hard, “like a stone”; for
tall, “long legs”; for round, “like the moon,” and so on. Certain
hill-tribes of India give names to sunshine, candle, and flames of fire,
but “light” is a high abstraction which they are unable to grasp. Some of
the Red Race languages have separate verbs for “I wish to eat meat,” or “I
wish to eat soup,” but no verb for “I wish.” Of course, the verb “to be,”
which, as Adam Smith remarked long ago, is the most abstract and
metaphysical of all words, and therefore of no early coinage, is absent
from a large number of barbaric languages. Abstract though it be, it is,
as Professor Whitney points out, made up of the relics of several verbs
which once had, like all elements and parts of speech, a distinct physical
meaning. As in “be” and “been” the idea of “growing” is contained, so in
“am,” “art,” “is,” and “are,” the idea of “sitting” (or, as some think, of
“breathing”) is embodied. As an example of its absence, the Abipones
cannot say “I am an Abipone,” only “I Abipone.” Turning to another class
of illustration, we have proof what a far cry it is from the savage to the
Senior Wrangler in the powerlessness of the former to count beyond his
fingers; indeed, he cannot always count as far as that, any number beyond
two bewildering him. One of the best stories to the point is given in Mr.
Galton’s _Tropical South Africa_.
“When the Dammaras wish to express four they take to their fingers, which
are to them as formidable instruments of calculation as a sliding rule is
to an English schoolboy. They puzzle very much after five, because no
spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are required for
units. Yet they seldom lose oxen; the way in which they discover the loss
of one is not by the number of the herd being diminished, but by the
absence of a face they know. When bartering is going on, each sheep must
be paid for separately. Thus, suppose two sticks of tobacco to be the rate
of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a Dammara to take two
sheep and give him four sticks. I have done so, and seen a man put two of
the sticks apart, and take a sight over them at one of the sheep he was
about to sell. Having satisfied himself that that one was honestly paid
for, and finding to his surprise that exactly two sticks remained in hand
to settle the account for the other sheep, he would be afflicted with
doubts; the transaction seemed to come out too “pat” to be correct, and he
would refer back to the first couple of sticks; and then his mind got hazy
and confused, and wandered from one sheep to the other, and he broke off
the transaction until two sticks were put into his hand and one sheep
driven away, and then the other two sticks given him and the second sheep
driven away. Once while I watched a Dammara floundering hopelessly in a
calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah, my spaniel, equally
embarrassed on the other. She was overlooking half a dozen of her new-born
puppies, which had been removed two or three times from her, and her
anxiety was excessive, as she tried to find out if they were all present,
or if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and running her eyes over
them, backwards and forwards, but could not satisfy herself. She evidently
had a vague notion of counting, but the figure was too large for her
brain. Taking the two as they stood, dog and Dammara, the comparison
reflected no great honour on the man.”
Dr. Rae says that if an Eskimo is asked the number of his children he is
generally puzzled. After counting some time on his fingers he will
probably consult his wife, and the two often differ, even though they may
not have more than four or five in family. Of the languages of the
Australian savages, who are the lowest extant, examined by Mr. Crawfurd,
thirty were found to have no number beyond four, all beyond this being
spoken of as “many,” whilst the Brazilian Indians got confused in trying
to reckon beyond three. The list of such cases might be largely extended,
and although exceptions occur where savages are found with a fairly wide
range of numbers, notably where barter prevails, the larger proportion of
uncivilised people are bewildered at any effort to count beyond three or
five. The fingers have, in most cases, determined the limits, for men
counted on these before they gave words to the numbers, the words being at
last borrowed from the fingers, as in our “five,” which is cognate with
the Greek “pente,” and the Persian “pendji” (said to be derived from the
word for “hand”), and “digits,” from Latin “digitus,” a finger. This
limited power of numeration thus shown to be possessed by the savage
justifies the statement that he is nearer to the ape than to the average
civilised man, nearer, as the extract from Mr. Galton shows, to the
spaniel than to the mathematician. What conception of the succession of
time, still less of it as a confluence of the eternities, can he have
whose feeble brain cannot grasp a to-morrow! And yet the difference is not
one of kind, but of degree, which separates the aborigines of Victoria or
Papua from the astronomer who is led by certain irregularities in the
motion of a planet to calculate the position of the disturbing cause, and
thereby to discover it nearly a thousand million miles beyond in the
planet Neptune.
§ III.
BARBARIC CONFUSION BETWEEN NAMES AND THINGS.
Races which have names for different kinds of oaks, but none for an oak,
still less for a tree, and who cannot count beyond their fingers, may be
expected to have hazy notions concerning the objective and subjective; or,
to put these in terms less technical, concerning that which belongs to the
object of thought, and that which is to be referred to the thinking
subject. Although primitive religion and philosophy are too nearly allied
to admit of sharp definitions, the former may be said, if the slang is
allowed, to be one of funk, and the latter one of fog. There are those
amongst us who say that the terrorism which lies at the base of the one
and the mist which is an element of the other, linger yet in extant belief
and metaphysics. What man cannot understand he fears; and in all primary
beliefs the powers around which seem to him so wayward are baleful, to be
appeased by sacrifice or foiled by sorcery. And the confusion which reigns
in his cosmos extends to his notion of what is in the mind and what is out
of it. He cannot distinguish between an illusion and a reality, between a
substance and its image or shadow; and it needs only some bodily ailment,
as indigestion through gorging, or delirium through starving, to give to
spectres of diseased or morbid origin, airy nothings, a substantive
existence, a local habitation, and a name.
The tangle between things and their symbols is well illustrated in the
barbaric notion that the name of a man is an integral part of himself, and
that to reveal it is to put the owner in the power of another. An Indian
asked Kane whether his wish to know his name arose from a desire to steal
it; the Araucanians would not allow their names to be told to strangers,
lest these should be used in sorcery. So with the Indians of British
Columbia; and among the Ojibways husbands and wives never told each
other’s names, the children being warned against repeating their own names
lest they stop growing. Dobrizhoffer says that the Abipones of Paraguay
had the like superstition. They would knock at his door at night, and when
asked who was there, no answer would come, through dread of uttering their
names. Mr. im Thurn tells us that, although the Indians of British Guiana
have an intricate system of names, it is “of little use, in that owners
have a very strong objection to telling or using them, apparently on the
ground that the name is part of the man, and that he who knows it has part
of the owner of that name in his power.” In Borneo the name of a sickly
child is changed, to deceive the evil spirits that have tormented it; the
Lapps change the baptismal name of a child for the same reason; and among
the Abipones, the Fuegians, the Lenguas of Brazil, the North-West Indians,
and other tribes at corresponding low levels, when any member died the
relatives would change their names to elude Death when he should come to
look for them, as well as give their children horrid names to frighten the
bad spirits away. All over the barbaric world we find a great horror of
naming the dead, lest the ghost appear. An aged Indian of Lake Michigan
explained why tales of the spirits were told only in winter, by saying
that when the deep snow is on the ground the voices of those repeating
their names are muffled; but that in summer the slightest mention of them
must be avoided, lest the spirits be offended. Among the Californian
tribes the name of the departed spoken inadvertently caused a shudder to
pass over all those present. Among the Iroquois the name of a dead man
could not be used again in the lifetime of his oldest surviving son
without the consent of the latter, and the Australians believe that a dead
man’s ghost creeps into the liver of the impious wretch who has dared to
utter his name. Dr. Lang tried to get the name of a relative who had been
killed from an Australian. “He told me who the lad’s father was, who was
his brother, what he was like, how he walked, how he held his tomahawk in
his left hand instead of his right, and who were his companions; but the
dreaded name never escaped his lips, and I believe no promises or threats
could have induced him to utter it.” Dorman gives a pathetic illustration
of this superstition in the Shawnee myth of Yellow Sky. “She was a
daughter of the tribe, and had dreams which told her she was created for
an unheard-of mission. There was a mystery about her being, and none could
comprehend the meaning of her evening songs. The paths leading to her
father’s lodge were more beaten than those to any other. On one condition
alone at last she consented to become a wife, namely, that he who wedded
her should never mention her name. If he did, she warned him that a sad
calamity would befall him, and he would for ever thereafter regret his
thoughtlessness. After a time Yellow Sky sickened and died, and her last
words were that her husband might never breathe her name. For five summers
he lived in solitude, but, alas, one day as he was by the grave of his
dead wife, an Indian asked him whose it was, and in forgetfulness he
uttered the forbidden name. He fell to the earth in great pain, and as
darkness settled round about him a change came over him. Next morning,
near the grave of Yellow Sky a large buck was quietly feeding. It was the
unhappy husband.”
The original meaning has dropped out of the current saying, “Talk of the
devil and you’ll see his horns,” but savage philosophy recovers it for us.
And the shrinking from naming persons is still more marked as we ascend
the scale of principalities and powers. In the South Sea Islands not only
are the names of chiefs tabooed, but also words and syllables resembling
those names in sound. The Tahitians have a custom called _Te pi_, which
consists in avoiding in daily language those words which form a part or
the whole of the names of the king and royal family, and in inventing new
terms in their place. The king’s name being _Tu fetu_, “star,” had to be
changed into _fetia_, and _tui_, “to strike,” became _tiai_. In New
Zealand knives were called _nekra_, because a chief’s name was _Maripi_,
or “knife.” It is, Professor Max Müller aptly remarks, as if with the
accession of Queen Victoria either the word _victory_ had been tabooed
altogether, or only part of it, as _tori_, so as to make it high treason
to speak of _Tories_ during her reign. The secret name of Pocahontas was
Matokas, which was concealed from the English through superstitious fear;
and in the mythical story of “Hiawatha” the same metonymic practice
occurs, his real name being Tarenyawagon. A survival of the dislike to
calling exalted temporal, and also spiritual, beings by their names,
probably lies at the root of the Jews’ unwillingness to use the name of
Yahweh (commonly and incorrectly spelt Jehovah[62]), and in the name
“Allah,” which is an epithet or title of the Mohammadan deity, and not the
“great name”; whilst the concealment by the Romans of the name of the
tutelary deity of their city was fostered by their practice, when
besieging any place, to invoke the treacherous aid of its protecting god
by offering him a high place in their Pantheon. And in the title of
Eumenidês, or the “gracious ones,” given to the Furies by the Greeks, may
be noted a survival of the verbal bribes by which the thing feared was
“squared.” For example, the Finnish hunters called the bear “the apple of
the forest,” “the beautiful honey-claw,” “the pride of the thicket”; the
Laplander speaks of it as “the old man with the fur coat”; in Annam the
natives call the tiger “grandfather,” or “lord”; and the Dyaks of Borneo
speak of the small-pox as “the chief,” or “jungle leaves.”
The confusion between ideas and objects which these examples illustrate is
shared by us, although in a remote degree. If the initials of any
well-known name are transposed, for example, let W. E. Gladstone be
printed E. W. Gladstone; or if some familiar name is altered, for example,
let John Bright be misprinted James Bright, it is curious to note how for
a moment the identity is obscured in one’s mind. Another personality,
indistinct and bewildering, rises before us, showing how we have come to
link together a man and his name even to the details of his initials. That
which we feel momentarily the uncivilised feels constantly. He cannot
think of himself, of his squaw, of his children, or of his
fellow-tribesmen, apart from names which are more significant to him than
ours are to us. With us the reason which governed selection is forgotten
or obscured, the physical features and conditions no longer correspond to
ancestral names; but with barbarous peoples those features and conditions
are more apparent. Besides which, children are often named by the
medicine-man, and the name is thus endowed with a charm which may roughly
be analogous to the halo round a name confirmed by baptism to one simply
recorded in the office of a Registrar of Births.
§ IV.
BARBARIC BELIEF IN VIRTUE IN INANIMATE THINGS.
The artificial divisions which man in his pride of birth made between the
several classes of phenomena in the inorganic world, and also between the
inorganic and the organic, are being swept away before the larger
knowledge and insight of our time. Indeed, it would seem that the surest
test we can apply to the worth of any kind of knowledge is whether it adds
to or takes from our growing conception of unity. If it does the former,
we cannot overthrow it; if it does the latter, then is it science “falsely
so called.”
That notable doctrine known as the correlation of physical forces, or the
convertibility into one another of heat, light, electricity, chemical
affinity, etc., each being a mode of manifestation of an unknown energy
which “lives through all life, extends through all extent,” has its
counterpart in the correlation of spiritual forces. Varied as are the
modes of expression of these, that variety is on the surface only. Deep
down lies the one source that feeds them, the one heart to whose existence
their pulsations witness. All primitive philosophies, all religions “that
man did ever find,” are but as the refractions of the same light dispersed
through different media; are the result of the speculations of the same
subject, allowances being made for local and non-essential differences
upon like objects. And, therefore, in treating of the nature and
limitations of man’s early thought concerning his surroundings, whether
these be the broad earth bathed in the sunshine or swathed in the
darkness, or the sounds that come from unseen agents, the sight of
spectral visitants of whom he cannot have touch, and out of which are
built up his theories of the invisible world, the reader may find
reference to the same conditions which were shown in former pages to give
birth and sustenance to primitive myth. The same fantastic conclusions,
drawn from rude analyses and associations, and from seeming connections of
cause and effect, the same bewildering entanglement between things which
we know can have nothing in common, meet us; and the same scientific
method by which we determine the necessary place of each in the advance of
man to truth through illusion is applied.
The illustrations of the vital connection which the savage assumes between
himself and his name show how easy is the passage from belief in life
inhering in everything to belief in it as capable of power for good or
evil. This can be shown by illustrations from more tangible things than
names. The savage who is afraid to utter these also shrinks from having
his likeness taken, in the feeling that some part of him is transferred,
and at the mercy of the sorcerer and enemy. The Malemutes of North America
refused to risk their lives before a photographic apparatus. They said
that those who had their likenesses had their spirit, and they would not
let these pass into the keeping of those who might use them as instruments
of torment. Catlin relates that he caused great commotion among the Sioux
by drawing one of their chiefs in profile. “Why was half his face left
out?” they asked; “Mahtocheega was never ashamed to look a white man in
the face.” The chief himself did not take offence, but Shouka the Dog
taunted him, saying: “The Englishman knows that you are but half a man; he
has painted but one-half of your face, and knows that the rest is good
for nothing.” This led to a quarrel, and in the end Mahtocheega was shot,
the fatal bullet tearing away just that part of the face which Catlin had
not drawn! He had to make his escape, and the matter was not settled till
both Shouka and his brother had been killed in revenge for Mahtocheega’s
death. The Yanktons accused Catlin of causing a scarcity of buffaloes by
putting a great many of them in his book, and refused to let him take
their portraits. So with the Araucanians, who ran away if any attempt was
made to sketch them. Among such races we find great care exercised lest
cuttings of hair, parings of nails, saliva, refuse of food, water in which
they had washed, etc., should fall into unfriendly or mistrusted hands.
The South Sea Island chiefs had servants following them with spittoons,
that the saliva might be buried in some hidden place. Among the
Polynesians any one who fell ill attributed it to some sorcerer, who had
got hold of refuse from the sick and was burning it, and the quiet of the
night was often broken by the blowing of shell-trumpets, as signals for
the sorcerer to stop until the gifts on their way to appease him could
arrive. The idea is common both to Eskimo and Indian that so long as a
fragment of a body remains unburnt, the being, man or beast, may, by
magic, be revived from it. As with the name or the portrait, whoever
possessed a part of the material substance possessed a part of the
spiritual, and in this world-wide belief in a sympathetic connection
between things living and not living lies the whole philosophy of
sorcery, of charms, amulets, spells, and the general doctrine of luck
surviving through the successive stages of culture to this day. And he who
would prevent anything from his person getting into hostile hands,
naturally sought after things in which coveted qualities were believed to
dwell, and avoided those of a reverse nature. So we find tiger’s flesh
eaten to give courage, and the eyes of owls swallowed to give good sight
in the dark. The Kaffirs prepare a powder made of the dried flesh of
various wild beasts, the leopard, tiger, elephant, snake, etc., so as to
absorb the several virtues of these creatures. The Tyrolese hunter wears
his tuft of eagle’s down to gain long sight and daring, and the Red Indian
strings bears claws round his neck to get Bruin’s savage courage. The
customs of scalping and, in some measure, of cannibalism, may be referred
to the same notion, for the Red man will risk his life to prevent a
tribesman’s scalp being captured by the foe, and the New Zealander will
swallow the eyes of his slain enemy to improve his sight. In Greenland “a
slain man is said to have power to avenge himself upon the murderer by
_rushing into him_, which can only be prevented by eating a piece of his
liver.”[63] When a whaler died the Eskimos distributed portions of his
dried body among his friends, and rubbed the points of their lances with
them, it being held that a weapon thus charmed would pierce a vital part
in a whale, where another would fail. Sometimes the body was laid in a
cave, and, before starting for the chase, the whalers would assemble, and,
carrying it to a stream, plunge it in, and then drink the water. When the
heroic Jesuit Brébeuf was tortured by the Iroquois, they were so
astonished at his endurance that they laid open his breast and came in a
crowd to drink the blood of so valiant a foe, thinking to imbibe with it
some portion of his courage, while a chief tore out his heart and devoured
it.
Cannibalism, it may be remarked, _en passant_, is also found to have a
religious significance, on the supposition, which has unsuspected survival
among advanced races, that eating the body and drinking the blood
communicates the spirit of the victim to the consumer. It is not always
the most savage races who practise it; for example, the Australians,
despite the scarcity of large animals for food supply, rarely ate the
flesh of man, whilst the New Zealanders, who rank far above them, and had
not the like excuse, were systematic feeders on human flesh.