, swayed,
bowed and went back again. Another Indian revered a Canadian larch,
"because he once heard a very remarkable rustling in its branches".
It thus appears that while the savage has a general kind of sense that
inanimate things are animated, he is a good deal impressed by their
conduct when he thinks that they actually display their animation. In
the same way a devout modern spiritualist probably regards with more
reverence a table which he has seen dancing and heard rapping than a
table at which he has only dined. Another general statement of failure
to draw the line between men and the irrational creation is found in
the old Jesuit missionary Le Jeune's Relations de la Nouvelle France.(6)
"Les sauvages se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres
animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animees." Again:
"Ils tiennent les poissons raisonnables, comme aussi les cerfs". In the
Solomon Islands, Mr. Romilly sailed with an old chief who used violent
language to the waves when they threatened to dash over the boat, and
"old Takki's exhortations were successful".(7) Waitz(8) discovers the
same attitude towards the animals among the negroes. Man, in their
opinion, is by no means a separate sort of person on the summit of
nature and high above the beasts; these he rather regards as dark and
enigmatic beings, whose life is full of mystery, and which he therefore
considers now as his inferiors, now as his superiors. A collection of
evidence as to the savage failure to discriminate between human and
non-human, animate and inanimate, has been brought together by Sir John
Lubbock.(9)

(1) Primitive Culture, i. 167-169.

(2) Among the Indians of Guiana (1883), p. 350.

(3) Op. Cit., 355.

(4) Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, i. 41.

(5) Kohl, Wanderings Round Lake Superior, pp. 58, 59; Muller, Amerikan
Urrelig., pp. 62-67.

(6) 1636, p. 109.

(7) Western Pacific, p. 84.

(8) Anthropologie der Natur-Volker, ii. 177.

(9) Origin of Civilisation, p. 33. A number of examples of this mental
attitude among the Bushmen will be found in chap. v., postea.

To a race accustomed like ourselves to arrange and classify, to people
familiar from childhood and its games with "vegetable, animal and
mineral," a condition of mind in which no such distinctions are drawn,
any more than they are drawn in Greek or Brahmanic myths, must
naturally seem like what Mr. Max Muller calls "temporary insanity".
The ima