difEering also as continually re-appearing in something like the same places, in the same relative positions, and in moving but very slowly always in the same way; they are yet like them in becoming now visible and now in- visible. That feeble lights may be wholly obscured by a bright light, and that the stars are shining during the day though he does not see them, are facts beyond the imagina- tion of the savage. The truth, as he perceives it, is that these existences now show themselves and now are hidden.
Differing greatly from clouds and stars in their behaviour as the Sun and Moon do, they show, in common with them, this same alternation of visibility with invisibility. The Sun rises on the other side of the mountains; from time to time going behind a cloud presently comes out again; and at length hides below the level of the sea. The Moon, besides doing the like, first increases slowly night after night, and then wanes: by and by re-appearing as a thin bright streak, with the rest of her disc so faintly pei*ceptible as to seem only half existing.
Added to these commonest and most regular occulta- tions and manifestations, are various others, even more striking — comets, meteors, and the aurora with its arch and pulsating streams; flashes of lightning, rainbows, halos. Differing from the rest and from one another as these do, they similarly appear and disappear. So that by a being absolutely ignorant but able to remember, and to group the things he remembers, the heavens must be regarded as a scene of arrivals and departures of many kinds of existences; some gradual, some sudden, but alike in this, that it is impos- sible to say whence the existences come or whither they go.
Not the sky only, but also the Earth's surface, suppUes various instances of these disappearances of things which have unaccountably appeared. Now the savage sees little pools of water formed by the rain drops coming from a source he cannot reach; and now, in a few hours, the gathered liquid has made itself invisible. Here, again, is PRIMITIVB IBSAS. 121 ^ ^^gi perhaps Ijing isolated in the hollows, perhaps enwrapping everything, which came a while since and pre- sently goes without leaving a trace of its whereabouts. Afar o£E is perceived water — obviously a great lake; but on approaching it the seeming lake recedes, and cannot be found. In the desert, what we know as sand-whirlwinds, and on the sea what we know as water-spouts, are to the primitive man moving things which appear and then vamsh. Looking out over the ocean he recognizes an island known to be a long way off, and commonly invisible, but which has now risen out of the water; and to-morrow, just above the horizon, he observes an inverted figure of a boat, perhaps by itself, or perhaps joined to an erect figure above. In one place he sometimes perceives land-objects on the surface of the sea, or in the air over it — a fata morgana; ttnd in another, over against him on the mist, there occa- sionally comes into view a gigantic duplicate of himself — "a brocken spectre.'' These occurrences, some familiar and some unfamiliar, repeat the same experience — show transitions between^he visible and the invisible.
Once more, let us ask what must be the original concep- tion of wind. Consider the facts apart from hypothesis, and the implication which every breeze or gust carries with it, 18 that of a power neither visible nor tangible. Nothing in early experiences yields the idea of air, as we are now familiar with it; and, indeed, probably most can recall the difficulty they once had in thinking of the surrounding medium as a material substance. The primitive man cannot regard it as a something which acts as do the things he sees and handles. Into this seemingly-empty space around, there from time to time comes an invisible agent which bends the trees, drives along the leaves, disturbs the water; and which he feels moving his hair, fanning his cheek, and now and then pushing his body witb a force he has some difficulty in overcoming. What may be the nature of this agent there is nothing to tell him; bat one thing is irre- THE DATA OP SOCIOLOGY.
Bigtibly thrast on his conscioosness — that sounds can be made^ things about him can be moyed^ and he himself can be buffeted, by an existence he can neither grasp nor see.
What primitive ideas arise out of these experiences de- rived from the inorganic world? In the absence of hypo- thesis (which is foreign to thought in its earliest stages), what mental association do these multitudinous occurrences, some at long intervals, some daily, some hourly, some from minute to minute, tend to establish 7 They present, under many forms, the relation between a perceptible and an im- perceptible mode of existence. In what way does the savage think of this relation? He cannot think of it in terms of dissipation into vapour and condensation from it, nor in terms of optical relations producing illusions, nor in any terms of physical science. HoW, then, does he formu- late it? A clue to the answer will be furnished by recalling certain remarks of young children. When an image from the magic lantern thrown on a screen, suddenly disappears on withdrawal of the slide, or when the reflection from a looking-glass, cast for a child^s amusqpent on the wall or ceiling, is made to vanish by changing the attitude of the glass, the child asks— ^" Where is it gone to? '* The notion arising in its mind is, not that this something no longer seen has become non-existent, but that it has become non-apparent; and it is led to think this by daily observing persons disappear behind adjacent objects, by seeing things put away out of sight, and by now and again finding a toy that had been hidden or lost. Similarly, the primitive idea is, that these various existences now manifest themselves and now conceal themselves. As the animal which he has wounded hides itself in the brushwood, and, if it cannot be found, is supposed by the savage to have escaped in some incomprehensible way, but to be still existing; so, in the absence of accumulated and organized knowledge, the im- plication of all these experiences is, that many of the things above and around pass often from visibility to invisibility.
and conversely. Bearing in mind Low the actions of wind prove that there is an invisible form of existence which manifests power, we sheJl see this belief to be plausible.
It remains only to be pointed out that along with this conception of a visible condition and an invisible condition, which each of these many things has, there comes the con- ception of duality. Each of them is in a sense double; since it has these two complementary modes of being.
§ 54, Significant facts of another order, from time to time disclosed, may next be noted — ^facts irresistibly im- pressing the primitive man with the belief that things are transmntable from one kind of substance to another. I refer to the facts forced on his attention by imbedded remains of animals and plants.
While gathering food on the sea-shore, he finds, pro- truding from a rock, a shell which, if not of the same shape as the shells he picks up, is so similar that he naturally classes it with them. But instead of being loose, it is part of a solid block; and on breaking it off, he finds its inside as hard as it« matrix. Here, then, are two kindred forms, one of which consists of shell and flesh, and the other of shell and stone. Near at hand, in the mass of clay debrw detached from the adjacent cliflf, he picks up a fossil am- monite. Perhaps, like the Oryphcea just examined, it has a shelly coating with a stony inside. Perhaps, as happens with some liassic ammonites of which the shell has been dissolved away, leaving the masses of indurated clay that filled its chambers locked loosely together, it suggests a series of articulated vertebrae coiled up; or, as with other liassic ammonites of which the shell has been replaced by iron pjrites, it has a glistening appearance like that of a snake's skin. As such fossils are sometimes called " snake-stones,'^ and are in Ireland supposed to be the serpents St. Patrick banished, we caimot wonder if the uncritical savage, class- ing this object with those it most resembles, thinks it a 124 THE DATA. OP SOCIOLOGY.
transmated snake — once flesh and now stone. In another place, where a gully has been cut through sandstone by a stream, he observes on the surface of a slab the outline of a fish, and, looking closely, sees scales and the traces of fins; and elsewhere, similarly imbedded in rock, he finds skulls and bonbs not unlike those of the animals he kills for food: some of them, indeed, not unlike those of men.
Still more striking a>re the transmutations of plants occasionally discovered, I do not refer so much to the prints of loaves in shale, and the fossil stems found in strata accompanying coal: I refer, more especially, to the silicified trees here and there met with. Betaining, not their general forms only but their minute structures, so that the annual growths are marked by rings of colour such as mark them in living stems, these yield the savage clear evidence of transmutation. With all our knowledge it remains difficult to understand how silica can so replace the components of the wood as to preserve the appearance thus perfectly; and for the primitive man, knowing nothing of molecular action and usable to conceive a process of substitution, there is no possible thought but that the wood is changed into stone.* Thus, if we ignore those conceptions of physical causation which have arisen only as experiences have been slowly organized during civilization, we shall see that in their absence there would be nothing to prevent us from put- ting on these facts the interpretations which the primi- tive man puts on them. Looking at the evidence through his eyes, we find his belief that things change from one kind of substance to another, to be the inevitable belief.
* Let me here give an instance of the way in wliich facts of this kind may affect men's heliefs. In his Two Years in a Levantine FamUy, Mr. St. John, commenting on the cxtrame credulity of the Egyptians, names, in illustration, a report which was spread and widely credited that certain villagers had been turned into stones. Belief of this report seems, to us, astonishing; but it seems less astonishing when all the circumstances are knonn. Not many miles from Cairo there exists an extensive silicified forest — slumps and prone trunks in great numbers. If trees can be turned into stone, why not dmu? To the unscientific, one event looks just as likely as the other.
rRIHITIVE IDEAS. 125 And hore let us not omit to note that along wiUi the notion of transmutation is involyed the notion of daalilj. These things have obviously two states of existence.
§ 55. Much evidence forces on the primitive man tho notion that things can change their forms as well as their substances. Did we not thoughtlessly assume that truths which culture has made obvious to us are naturally obvious, we should see that an unlimited belief in metamorphosis is one which the savage cannot avoid. From early childhood we hear remarks implying that certain transformations which living things undergo are matters of course, while other transformations are impossible. This distinction we suppose to have been manifest at the outset. But at the ontset, the observed metamorphoses suggest that any meta- morphosis may occur.
Consider the immense contrast in form as in substance between the seed and the plant. Look at this nut with Wd brown shell and white kernel, and ask what basis there is for the expectation that from it will presently come a soft shoot and green leaves. When young we are told that the one grows into the other; and the blank form of explanation being thus filled up, we cease to wonder and inquire. Yet it needs but to consider what thought would We arisen had there been no one to give this mere verbal solution, to see that the thought would have been — ^trans- formation. Apart from hypothesis, the bare fact is that a thing having one size, shape, and colour, becomes a thing having an utterly different size, shape, and colour.
Similarly with the eggs of birds. But a few days since this nest contained four or five rounded, smooth, speckled bodies; * and now in place of them are as many chicks gaping for food. We are brought up to tho idea that tho eggs have been luitched; and with this semblance of inter- pretation we are content. This extreme change in visible &ad tangible characters being recognized as one constantly 126 THE DATA OF BOQIOWQY.
occurring in the order of nature, is therefore regarded as not i^markable. But to a mind occupied by no generalized experiences of its own or of others, there would seem nothing more strange in the production of chicks from nuts than in the production of chicks from eggs: a metamorphosis of the kind we think impossible^ would stand on the same footing as one which familiarity has made us think natural. Indeed, on remembering that there still survives^ or till lately survived, the popular belief that barnacle- geese arise from barnacles— on learning that even in the early Transactions of the Boyal Society, there is a paper describing a barnacle as showing faint traces of the joung bird it is about to produce; it will be seen that only by advanced science has there been discriminated the natural organic transformations, from transformations which to ignorance seem just as likely.
The insect-world yields instances of metamorphoses even more misleading. To a branch which shades the opening of his wigwam, the savage saw a few days ago, a cater- pillar hanging with its head downwards. Now in the same place hangs a differently formed and coloured thing — ^a chrysalis. In a week or two after there comes out a butterfly: leaving a thin empty case. These insect-meta- morphoses, as we call them, which we now interpret as processes of evolation presenting certain definitely-marked stages, are in the eyes of the primitive man, metamorphoses in the original sense. He accepts them as actual changes of one thing into another thing utterly different.
How readily the savage confounds these metamorphoses which really occur, with metamorphoses apparently like them bat impossible, we shall perceive on considering a few cases of mimicry by insects, and the conclusions they lead to. Many caterpillars, beetles, moths, butterflies, simulate the objects by which they are commonly sur- rounded. The Onychocerus scorpio is so exactly hke, '^ in colour and rugosity,'' to a piece of the bark of the PKIHITIYB IBXAS. 127 pnrtdcalar tree it frequents^ ''that until it moves it is absolutely invisible:" thus raising the idea that a piece of the bark itself has become alive. Another beetle^ Onthophi- hs mlcaius, is ''like the seed of an umbelliferous plant;'* another " undistinguishable by the eye from the dung of caterpillars;'' some of the GassidoB "resemble glittering dev» -drops upon the leaves;" and there is a weevil so coloured and formed that, on rolling itself up, it " becomes a mere oval brownish lump, which it is hopeless to look for among the similarly-coloured little stones and earth pellets among which it lies motionless," and out of which it emerges after its fright, as though a pebble had become animated. To these examples gfiven by Mr. Wallace, Inay l)e added that of the "walking-stick insects," so called " from their singular resemblance to twigs and branches."
" Some of these are a foot long and as thick as one's finger, and their whole colonring, form, rugosity, and the arrangement of the head, legs, and antennae, are such as to render them absolutely identical in appear- luice with dead sticks. They hang loosely about shrubs in the forest, uid have the extraordinary habit of stretching out their legs un- Q^nunetiically, so as to render the deception more complete."
What wonderful resemblances exist, and what illusions they may lead to, will be fully perceived by those who We seen, in Mr. Wallace's collection of butterflies, the Indian genus Kailimaj placed amid the objects it simulates. Habitually settling on branches bearing dead leaves, and closing its wings, it then resembles a dead leaf, not only in general shape, colour, markings, but in so seating itself that the processes of the lower wings unite to form the ^^presentation of a foot-stalk. When it takes flight, the impression produced is that one of the leaves has changed into a butterfly. This impression is greatly strengthened when the creature is caught. On the under-side of the closed wings, is still clearly marked the mid-rib, running light across them from foot-stalk to apex; and here, too, are lateral veins. Nay, this is not all. Mr. Wallace says— ''We find representations of leaves in every stage of decay, variously 128 THE DATA 07 SOCIOLOGY.
blotched aiid mildewed and pierced vnih holes, and iu many oases iiTegiilarly covered with powdery black dots gathered into patches and spots, 80 closely resembling the yarious kinds of minute fungi that grow on dead leaves that it is impossible to avoid thinking at first sight that the butterflies themselves have been attacked by real fungi."
On recalling tlie fact that^ a few generations ago^ all civilized peoplp believed, as many civilized people believe still, that decaying meat is itself transformed into maggots — on being reminded that among our peasantry at the present time, the thread-like aquatic worm Oordiiis, is said to be horsehair that has fallen into the water and become living; we shall see it to be inevitable that these extreme resemblances should suggest the notion of actual metamorphoses. That this notion, so suggested, becomes a belief, is a proved fact. In Java and neighbouring regions inhabited by it, that marvellous insect, " the walk- ing leaf,'' is positively asserted to be a leaf that has become animated. What else should it be f In the absence of that explanation of mimicry so happily hit upon by Mr. Bates, no natural origin for such wonderful likenesses between things wholly unaUied can be imagined. And while there is no generalized knowledge, there is nothing to prevent acceptance of these apparent transformations as real trans- formations: indeed, apparent and real are not distinguished until criticism and scepticism have made some progress.
Once established, the belief in transformation extends itself without resistance to other classes of things. Between an egg and a young bird, there is a far greater contrast in appearance and structure than between one mammal and another. The tadpole, with a tail and no limbs, differs from a young frog with four limbs and no tail, more than a man differs from a hysena; for both of these have four limbs, and both laugh. Evidently, then, the natural metamor- phoses so abundant throughout nature, joined with these apparent metamorphoses which the primitive man inevitably confounds with them, originate the conception of meta- PBnanvi ibsas. 129 morphoees in general; which rises into an explanatioa everywhere employed without check.
Here^ again^ we have to note that while initiating and fostering the notion that things of all kinds may suddenly change their forms^ the experiences of transformations con- firm the notion of duality. Each object is not only what it seems^ but is potentially something else.
§ 56. What is a shadow? Familiar as mature life has niade us with shadows, and almost automatic as has become the interpretation of them in terms of physical causation^ we do not ask how they look to the absolutely ignorant.
Those from whose minds the thoughts of childhood have not wholly yanished^ will remember the interest they once felt in watching their shadows — amoving legs and arms and fingers^ and observing how corresponding parts of the shadows moved. By a child a shadow is thought of as an entity. I do not assert this without evidence. A memo- randum made in 1858-9^ in elucidation of the ideas de- scribed in the just-published book of Williams on the Rjians^ concerns a little girl of some seven^ who did not know what a shadow was, and to whom I could give no con- ception of its true nature. On ignoring acquired ideas, we shall see this difficulty to be qoite natural. A thing having outUnes, and differing from surrounding things in colour, and especially a thing which moves, is, in other cases, a reality. Why is not this a reality? The conception of it as merely a negation of light, is a conception not to be framed until after the behaviour of light is in some degree understood. It is true that the un- cultured among ourselves, without clearly formulating the tmth that light, proceeding in straight lines, necessarily leaves unlighted spaces behind opaque objects, nevertheless come to regard a shadow as naturally attending an object exposed to light, and as not being anything real. But this is one of the, countless cases in which inquiry is set at 130 THE DATA Of SOOIOLOGT rest by a yerbal explanation. " If & only a sliadow/' is the answer given in early days; and tlds answer, repeatedly given, deadens wonder and stops farther thought.
But the primitive man, with no one to answer his ques- tions, and without ideas of physical causation, necessarily concludes a shadow to be an actual existence, which belongs in some way to the person casting it. He simply accepts the facts. Whenever the sun or moon is visible, he sees this attendant thing which rudely resembles him in shape, which moves when he moves, which now goes before him, now keeps by his side, now follows him, which lengthens and shortens as the ground inclines this way or that, and which distorts itself in strange ways as he passes by irregular surfaces. True, he caanot see it in cloudy weather; but, in the absence of a physical interpretation, this simply proves that his attendant something comes out only on bright days and bright nights. It is true, also, that such resemblance as his shadow bears to him, and its approximate separateness from him, are shown only when he stands up: on crouching it becomes indefinitely formed; and as he lies down it seems to disappear and partially merge into him. But this observation confirms his impression of its reality. The greater or less separate- ness of his own shadow, reminds him of cases where a shadow is quite separate. When watching a fish in the water on a fine day, he sees a dark, fish-shaped patch on the bottom at a considerable distance from the fish, but nevertheless following it hither and thither. Lifting up his eyes, he observes dark patches moving along the mountain sides — ^patches which, whether traced or not to the clouds that cast them, are seen to be widely disconnected from objects. These facts show him that shadows, often so closely joined with their objects as to be hardly distinguishable from them, may become distinct and remote.
Thus, by minds beginning to generalize, shadows must be conceived as existences appended to, but capable of PBmrnyi miAS. 181 fteparation from, material things. And tliat tliej are so conceived is abundantly proved. We find it stated by Bastiaa of the Benin»neg^roes, that they regard men^s sha- dows as their sonls; and he also says of the Wanika that tiiey are afraid of their own shadows: possibly thinking, as some other negroes do, that their shadows watch all ^eir actions, and bear witness against them. Among the Oreen« landers, according to Crantz, a man's shadow is one of his two sonls — the one which goes away from his body at night. Among the Fijians, too, the shadow is called ''the dark spirit/' as distmgaished from another which each man pos- sesses. And the commnnity of meaning, hereafter to be noted more fally, which varions nnallied languages betray between shade and spirit, shows ns the same thing.
These illnstrations of the truth that a shadow is originally regarded as an appended entity, suggest more than I here wish to show. The ideas of the uncivilized as we now find them, hare developed from their first vague forms into forms having more coherence and definiteness. We must neglect the special characters of thesis ideas, and con- sider only that most general character with which they began. This proves to be the character we inferred above. Shadows are realities which, always intangible and often invisible, nevertheless severally belong to their visible and tangible correlatives; and the facts they present, furnish further materials both for the notion of apparent and un- apparent states, and for the notion of a duality in things, § 57. Other phenomena, in some respects allied, yield these notions still more materials. I refer to reflections.
If the rude resemblance in outlines and movements which a shadow bears to the person casting it, raises the idea of a second entity, much more must the exact resem- blance of a reflection do this. Repeating all the details of form, of light and shade, of colour, and mimicking even the grimaces of the original, this image cannot at first be inter- \ \ 132 THE DATA OF SOCIOliOaT.
preted otherwise than as an existence. Only bj experiment is it ascertained that to the yisual impressions there are not> in this case^ those corresponding tactual impressions yielded by most other things. What results f Simply the notion of an existence which can be seen but not felt. Optical inter- pretation is impossible. That the image is formed by reflected rays^ cannot be conceived while physical knowledge does not exist; and in the absence of authoritative statement that the reflection is a mere appearance, it is inevitably taken for a reality — a reality in some way belonging to the person whose traits it simulates and whose actions it mocks. Moreover, these duplicates seen in the water, yield to the primitive man obvious verifications of certain other beliefs which surrounding things suggest. Deep down in the clear pool, are there not clouds like those he sees above? The clouds above appear and dis* appear. Has not the existence of these clouds below some* thing to do with it f At m'ght, again, seeming as though far underneath the surface of the water, are stars as bright as those overhead. Are there, then, two places for the stars? and did those which disappeared during the day go below where the rest are? Once more, overhanging the pool is this dead tree from which he breaks off branches for firewood. Is there not an image of it too f and the branch which he bums and which vanishes into nothing in burning — ^is there not some connection between its invisible state and that image of it in the water which he could not touch, any more than he can now touch the consumed branch? That reflections thus generate a belief — confused and inconsistent it may be, but still, a belief — ^that each indi- vidual has a duplicate, usually miseen, but which may be seen on going to the water-side and looking in, is not an d priori inference only; there are facts verifying it. Ac- cording to Williams, some Fijians '^ speak of man as having two spirits. His shadow is called ' the dark spirit,' which^ they say, goes to Hades, The other is his likeness reflected