All natural phenomena tend to seem artificial to primitive man.
When one looks close one is surprised to see how many causes would naturally lead one to attribute life, and life of an extraordinary and mysterious character, to such and such really passive objects. Such causes act evidently with greatly additional power upon the savage, the primitive man, the man of the quaternary epoch, or upon the anthropoid, as yet undiscovered, whose instruments have been found in the tertiary period. Common animals, in effect, are almost lacking in attention; from which it results that to produce any durable mental effect on them, a prolonged repetition of the same sensation is necessary; they must be accustomed to it. Moreover their crude intelligence takes no impression from evanescent facts, they are unacquainted with the external world except by averages. Exceptional facts strike them for an instant, but presently glance off into oblivion. In this imperfect machine, wear and tear is very rapid and the traces of phenomena inevitably blur and become confounded. If animals possess a memory for sensations, they lack an intellectual memory altogether; they are capable of surprise, but not of remembering a surprise. To produce in them a tenacious memory demands a setting of pain or pleasure, and even then, if they recollect the sensation they experienced, they readily forget the grounds of it. They feel passively, instead of observing. From the moment where, with man, the spirit of observation enters upon the scene everything is different; an exceptional fact, for the same reason that it becomes rapidly effaced in an animal intelligence, penetrates the more deeply into the memory of a man. Moreover, man’s sphere of action is much wider than that of any animal, and consequently the field of his experience is much more vast; the more he modifies, voluntarily, the face of nature, the more capable he becomes of recognizing and observing the variations which it presents, independently of his interventions. Man possesses a notion unknown to animals, the notion of artificial things, of results deliberately attained by self-conscious volition. One remembers that fetich comes from factitius, artificial. Man, being acquainted with the use of fire, will regard, for example, a forest set ablaze by lightning from entirely a different point of view from what any animal could: the animal will flee without any other sentiment than that of alarm; the man will naturally suppose the existence of some person who set it on fire—who was acting, who was doing on a grand scale what he himself sometimes does. Similarly with a boiling spring; this phenomenon lies too far beyond the limits of animal intelligence to be especially striking; but a man, on the other hand, who habitually goes to some trouble to provide himself with boiling water, infers the existence of some subterranean person who is heating water for purposes of his own. All natural phenomena tend thus to appear artificial to the eyes of a being who has once familiarized himself with the notion of artifice. I was present recently among some members of the lower classes at the flowing of an intermittent spring; not one of them was inclined to believe the phenomenon a natural one, they regarded it as an effect of some mechanism, of some artifice. The same belief is evidently common among primitive people, with this difference, that artificial, instead of suggesting mechanics, implies the notion of a superhuman and marvelous power.
Fetichism a logical theory to primitive man.
Just as the animal finds the rationale of all things in a notion of life and of activity, man tends to find a rationale of all things in a conception of art and of scheming intelligence. For the one, surprising phenomena are simply inexplicable conduct; for the other, they are the complex effects of deliberative intelligence, they are master-pieces. But the notion of activity, far from becoming effaced in the progress of evolution, becomes simply more definite and more precise. Given his incomplete experience, primitive man is perfectly logical in attributing intelligence and consciousness to nature, he could not rationally do otherwise; his mind is imprisoned in a blind alley, and superstition is the sole outlet. At a given moment in human evolution, superstition was perfectly rational.
Seeming immanence of conscious life in nature.
Even in our days, men of science are greatly embarrassed by their inability to point out the precise line of demarcation between the animate and the inanimate; and how should primitive man have grappled with this problem? How distinguish, for example, between sleep and death during one entire portion of life; during sleep, living bodies lie inert, and why should not inert bodies sometimes prove to be alive? At night especially, the whole becomes transformed, everything becomes animate, a breath of wind suffices to make everything palpitate; it seems as if all nature awakened after its day’s sleep; it is the hour when wild beasts go in search of prey, and mysterious noises fill the forest. The calmest imagination, under such circumstances, yields to a temptation to see fantastic objects that are not. One night I was walking on the sea-shore, and saw distinctly a gigantic beast moving some distance away; it proved to be a perfectly motionless rock, in the midst of others like it, but the waves, which alternately covered and discovered it in part, lent it, to my eyes, some portion of their own mobility. How many things in nature borrow thus from some circumstance—from the wind, from a more or less uncertain light—an appearance of life![28] Even when the eyes themselves would be incapable of self-deception, the influence of the foolish terrors so frequent among children and beings habituated to savage life would count enormously. Emotional susceptibility is the more highly developed among savages, in that it forms for them frequently a means of safety. And primitive man is much more subject than we are to hallucinations of the sort that are due to terror, and are not wholly fantastic, but result from a fantastic interpretation of some genuine sense stimulus. The traveller Park met two negroes on horseback; they fled from him at a gallop in extreme terror, and meeting his followers in the course of their flight reported that they had seen him dressed in the floating robes of some redoubtable spirit. One of them affirmed that at sight of Park he had felt himself enveloped in a breath of cold air from heaven, which was like a jet of cold water. Suppress the word spirit in this passage, which implies a pre-existing belief in the soul, and you will perceive how hallucinations due to terror may well give birth to beliefs all the more tenacious for the element of truth they contain.
Dreams.
Dreams also have played a considerable rôle in the genesis of superstitions, as Epicurus and Lucretius remarked, and the labours of Messrs. Tylor and Spencer have proved. Primitive language supplies no means of saying, “I dreamt that I saw”; one must say simply, “I saw.” Well, in the dreams which the savage himself can scarcely distinguish from reality, he sees nothing but a perpetual series of metamorphoses, of the transformation of men into ferocious beasts, and of ferocious beasts into men; he dreams that he picks up a stone, and that it comes to life in his hand; he looks out upon a motionless lake, and it becomes suddenly a crawling mass of crocodiles and of serpents.[29] How can Mr. Spencer maintain, after that, that primitive man can distinguish with some degree of certainty the animate from the inanimate? Not only during dreams, but during wakefulness, everything suggests to primitive man the notion of changes of substance and magic metamorphoses. Eggs, which are inanimate, change into birds or insects; dead flesh becomes living worms; an effigy, under the influence of memory, seems to live again and to respire.[30]
Primitive man humanizes nature.