[862] F. Tregear, The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary, pp. 203-205.
[863] This is the thesis of Preuss in his articles in the Globus which we have cited several times. It seems that M. Lévy-Bruhl also tends towards this conception (see his Fonctions mentales, etc., pp. 92-93).
[864] On this point, see our Suicide, pp. 233 ff.
[865] It may be objected perhaps that unity is the characteristic of the personality, while the soul has always been conceived as multiple, and as capable of dividing and subdividing itself almost to infinity. But we know to-day that the unity of the person is also made up of parts and that it, too, is capable of dividing and decomposing. Yet the notion of personality does not vanish because of the fact that we no longer think of it as a metaphysical and indivisible atom. It is the same with the popular conceptions of personality which find their expression in the idea of the soul. These show that men have always felt that the human personality does not have that absolute unity attributed to it by certain metaphysicians.
[866] For all this, we do not deny the importance of the individual factor: this is explained from our point of view just as easily as its contrary. If the essential element of the personality is the social part of us, on the other hand there can be no social life unless distinct individuals are associated, and this is richer the more numerous and different from each other they are. So the individual factor is a condition of the impersonal factor. And the contrary is no less true, for society itself is an important source of individual differences (see our Division du travail social, 3rd. ed., pp. 267 ff.).
[867] Roth, Superstition, Magic, etc., §§ 65, 68; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 514, 516.
[868] Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 521, 515; Dawson, Austral. Aborig., p. 58; Roth, op. cit., § 67.
[869] Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 517.
[870] Strehlow, II, p. 76 and n. 1; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 514, 516.
[871] Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 513.