n
idea of the Fairy Mythology correct as far as it goes, but, beyond that,
to vindicate the method pursued in the investigation, as laid down in
our second chapter, by demonstrating the essential identity of human
imagination all over the world, and by tracing the stories with which we
have been dealing to a more barbarous state of society and a more
archaic plane of thought. It now remains, therefore, to recall what we
have ascertained concerning the nature and origin of the Fairies, and
briefly to consider two rival theories.

We started from some of the ascertained facts of savage thought and
savage life. The doctrine of Spirits formed our first proposition. This
we defined to be the belief held by savages that man consists of body
and spirit; that it is possible for the spirit to quit the body and roam
at will in different shapes about the world, returning to the body as to
its natural home; that in the spirit's absence the body sleeps, and that
it dies if the spirit return not; further, that the universe swarms with
spirits embodied and disembodied, because everything in the world has a
spirit, and all these spirits are analogues of the human spirit, having
the same will and acting from the same motives; and that if by chance
any of these spirits be ejected from its body, it may continue to exist
without a body, or it may find and enter a new body, not necessarily
such an one as it occupied before, but one quite different. The doctrine
of Transformation was another of our premises: that is to say, the
belief held by savages in the possibility of a change of form while
preserving the same identity. A third premise was the belief in
Witchcraft, or the power of certain persons to cause the transformations
just mentioned, and to perform by means of spells, or symbolic actions
and mystical words, various other feats beyond ordinary human power. And
there were others to which I need not now refer, all of which were
assumed to be expressed in the tales and songs, and in the social and
political institutions, of savages. Along with these, we assumed the
hypothesis of the evolution of civilization from savagery. By this I
mean that just as the higher orders of animal and vegetable life have
been developed from germs which appeared on this planet incalculable
ages ago; so during a past of unknown length the civilization of the
highest races of men has been gradually evolving through the various
stages of savagery and barbari