The fact becomes more intelligible when we consider man, and especially
the uneducated man, under the exciting influence of any passion, and how
at such times he will, even when alone, gesticulate, speak aloud, and
reply to internal questions which he imagines to be put to him by absent
persons, against whom he is at the moment infuriated. The images of
these persons and things are as it were present and in agitation within
him; and these images, in the fervour of emotion and under the stimulus
of excitement, appear to be actually alive, although only presented to
the inward psychical consciousness.
In the natural man, in whom the intellectual powers were very slowly
developed, the animation and personification effected by his mind and
consciousness were threefold: first, of the objects themselves as they
really existed, then of the idea or image corresponding to them in the
memory, and lastly of the specific types of these objects and images.
There was within him a vast and continuous drama, of which we are no
longer conscious, or only retain a faint and distant echo, but which is
partly revealed by a consideration of the primitive value of words and
of their roots in all languages. The meaning of these, which is now for
the most part lost and unintelligible, always expressed a material and
concrete fact, or some gesture. This is true of classic tongues, as is
well known to all educated people, and it recurs in the speech of all
savage and barbarous races.
_Ia rau_ is used to express _all_ in the Marquesas Isles. _Rau_
signifies _leaves_, so that the term implies something as numerous as
the leaves of a tree. _Rau_ is also now used for _sound_, an expression
which includes in itself the conception of _all_, but which originally
signified a fact, a real and concrete phenomenon, and it was felt as
such in the ancient speech in which it was used in this sense. So again
in Tahiti _huru, ten_, originally signified _hairs; rima, five_, was at
first used for _hand; riri, anger_, literally means, _he shouts_. _Uku_
in the Marquesas Isles means, _to lower the head_, and is now used for
_to enter a house_. _Ruku_, which had the same original meaning in New
Zealand, now expresses the act of diving. The Polynesian word _toro_ at
first indicated anything in the position of a hand with extended
fingers, whence comes the Tahitian term for an ox, _puaatoro, stretching
pig_, in allusion to the way in which an ox carries his head. _Too_
(Marquesas), to put forward the hand, is now used for _to take_. _Tongo_
(Marquesas), to grope with extended arms, leads to _potongo tongo_,
darkness. In New Zealand, _wairua_, in Tahiti _varua_, signifies soul or
spirit, from _vai_, to remain in a recumbent position, and _rua_, two;
that is, _to be in two places_, since they believed that in sickness or
in dreams the soul left the body.[18] Throughout Polynesia _moe_ also
signifies a recumbent position or to sleep, and in Tahiti _moe pipiti_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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