[61] Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 137.
[62] Fison and Howitt, op. cit. p. 250.
[63] Dorman, op. cit. p. 350.
[64] Turner, ‘Ethnology of the Ungava District,’ in Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethn. xi. 272.
[65] Duveyrier, Exploration du Sahara, p. 418. See also Schneider, Religion der afrikanischen Naturvölker, p. 103.
[66] Livingstone, Expedition to the Zambesi, p. 521 sq.
Man’s belief in supernatural agents, then, is an attempt to explain strange and mysterious phenomena which suggest a volitional cause.[67] The assumed cause is the will of a supernatural being. Such beings are thus, in the first place, conceived as volitional. But a being which has a will must have a mind, with emotions, desires, and a certain amount of intelligence. Neither the savage nor ourselves can imagine a volitional being which has nothing but a will. If an object of nature, therefore, is looked upon as a supernatural agent, mentality and life are at the same time attributed to it as a matter of course. This I take to be the real origin of animism. It is not correct to say that “as the objects of the visible world are conceived as animated, volitional, and emotional, they may be deemed the originators of those misfortunes of which the true cause is unknown.”[68] This is to reverse the actual order of ideas. Inanimate things are conceived as volitional, emotional, and animate, because they are deemed the originators of startling events. The savage does not speculate upon the nature of things unless he has an interest in doing so. He is not generally inquisitive as to causes.[69] The natives of West Australia, says Eyre, “are not naturally a reasoning people, and by no means given to the investigation of causes or their effects.”[70] In matters not concerning the common wants of life the mind of the Brazilian Indian is a blank.[71] When Mungo Park asked some negroes, what became of the sun during the night? they considered his question a very childish one; “they had never indulged a conjecture, nor formed any hypothesis, about the matter.”[72] I often found the Beduins of Morocco extremely curious, but their curiosity consisted in the question, What? rather than in the question, Why?
[67] Already Hobbes (Leviathan, i. 12, p. 79) traced, in part, the origin of religion to the fact that when man cannot assure himself of the true causes of things, he supposes causes of them. See also Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen, i. 16.
[68] Peschel, Races of Man, p. 245.
[69] Cf. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, i. 86 sq.; Karsten, op. cit. p. 43 sq.