A Weak Brother
Our author’s habit of omitting references to his opponents has here caused me infinite inconvenience. He speaks of some eccentric person who has averred that a ‘fetish’ is a ‘totem,’ inhabited by ‘an ancestral spirit.’ To myself it seems that you might as well say ‘Abracadabra is gas and gaiters.’ As no reference was offered, I invented ‘a wild surmise’ that Mr. Max Müller had conceivably misapprehended Mr. Frazer’s theory of the origin of totems. Had our author only treated himself fairly, he would have referred to his own Anthropological Religion (pp. 126 and 407), where the name of the eccentric definer is given as that of Herr Lippert. [{78}] Then came into my mind the words of Professor Tiele, ‘Beware of weak brethren’—such as Herr Lippert seems, as far as this definition is concerned, to be.
Nobody knows the origin of totemism. We find no race on its way to becoming totemistic, though we find several in the way of ceasing to be so. They are abandoning female kinship for paternity; their rules of marriage and taboo are breaking down; perhaps various totem kindreds of different crests and names are blending into one local tribe, under the name, perhaps, of the most prosperous totem-kin. But we see no race on its way to becoming totemistic, so we have no historical evidence as to the origin of the institution. Mr. McLennan offered no conjecture, Professor Robertson Smith offered none, nor have I displayed the spirit of scientific exactitude by a guess in the dark. To gratify Mr. Max Müller by defining totemism as Mr. McLennan first used the term is all that I dare do. Here one may remark that if Mr. Max Müller really wants ‘an accurate definition’ of totemism, the works of McLennan, Frazer, Robertson Smith, and myself are accessible, and contain our definitions. He does not produce these definitions, and criticise them; he produces Dr. Lippert’s and criticises that. An argument should be met in its strongest and most authoritative form. ‘Define what you mean by a totem,’ says Professor Max Müller in his Gifford Lectures of 1891 (p. 123). He had to look no further for a definition, an authoritative definition, than to ‘totem’ in the Encyclopædia Britannica, or to McLennan. Yet his large and intelligent Glasgow audience, and his readers, may very well be under the impression that a definition of ‘totem’ is ‘still to seek,’ like Prince Charlie’s religion. Controversy simply cannot be profitably conducted on these terms.
‘The best representatives of anthropology are now engaged not so much in comparing as in discriminating.’ [{79}] Why not refer, then, to the results of their discriminating efforts? ‘To treat all animal worship as due to totemism is a mistake.’ Do we make it?