But has the savage no other faculties, save his five senses and five
passions? I do not say that. I should be most unphilosophical if I said
it; for the history of mankind proves that he has infinitely more in him
than that. Yes: but in him that infinite more, which is not only the
noblest part of humanity; but, it may be, humanity itself, is not to be
counted as one of the roots of superstition. For in the savage man, in
whom superstition certainly originates, that infinite more is still
merely in him; inside him; a faculty: but not yet a fact. It has not
come out of him into consciousness, purpose, and act; and is to be
treated as non-existent: while what has come out, his passions and
senses, is enough to explain all the vagaries of superstition; a vera
causa for all its phenomena. And if we seem to have found a sufficient
explanation already, it is unphilosophical to look further, at least till
we have tried whether our explanation fits the facts.
Nevertheless, there is another faculty in the savage, to which I have
already alluded, common to him and to at least the higher
vertebrates--fancy; the power of reproducing internal images of external
objects, whether in its waking form of physical memory--if, indeed, all
memory be not physical--or in its sleeping form of dreaming. Upon this
last, which has played so very important a part in superstition in all
ages, I beg you to think a moment. Recollect your own dreams during
childhood; and recollect again that the savage is always a child.
Recollect how difficult it was for you in childhood, how difficult it
must be always for the savage, to decide whether dreams are phantasms or
realities. To the savage, I doubt not, the food he eats, the foes he
grapples with, in dreams, are as real as any waking impressions. But,
moreover, these dreams will be very often, as children's dreams are wont
to be, of a painful and terrible kind. Perhaps they will be always
painful; perhaps his dull brain will never dream, save under the
influence of indigestion, or hunger, or an uncomfortable attitude. And
so, in addition to his waking experience of the terrors of nature, he
will have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more terrific
kind. He walks by day past a black cavern mouth, and thinks, with a
shudder--Something ugly may live in that ugly hole: what if it jumped out
upon me? He broods over the thought with the intensity of a narrow and
unoccupied mind; and a few nights after, he has eaten--but let us draw a
veil before the larder of a savage--his chin is pinned down on his chest,
a slight congestion of the brain comes on; and behold he finds himself
again at that cavern's mouth, and something ugly does jump out upon him:
and the cavern is a haunted spot henceforth to him and to all his tribe.
It is in vain that his family tell him that he has been lying asleep at
home all the while. He has the evidence of his senses to prove the
contrary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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