THE DOCTRINE OF LUNAR SYMPATHY 653 



personality, expressing itself by its imperfect grasp of the unity of the 

 individual mind and by its exaggerated estimate of the social order, derived 

 from the fundamental part played by the intercoursing social group in human 

 experience. The mistakes of primitive thought did not continue to bind 

 the thinking of Plato and his successors, who can be observed in the act of 

 shaking themselves free from them, but the mental habits stamped into the 

 mind by the dominance of the social group over thought and action continued 

 to influence them and stiU, though in decreasing extent, influence us. These 

 mental habits may be compared to ropes ; they bound the primitive mind 

 tightly ; they hung loosely round Plato so that he could move, though still 

 heavily encumbered ; round the modem mind they are loose enough to 

 permit slightly impeded movement. One modem school of writers charac- 

 terises primitive beliefs as " collective representations," conceptions (com- 

 parable with language) imposed upon indi\'iduals, independent of any one 

 of them, transmitted from generation to generation and common to social 

 groups.^ On this view the group is in efiect the thinking unit. So far as 

 it expresses the truth that primitive man is so penetrated by a sense of 

 social intercourse as to think of his relations with everything as if they were 

 social, and like his relations to his fellows, the doctrine of collective representa- 

 tions is illuminating. This, then, is the teeming psychical source of many 

 primitive beliefs and practices, the source of the preconception required to 

 interpret the associations between changing moon and growing things. Man 

 is so surrounded by social intercourse and so accustomed to responding to 

 social influences that he was constrained in the days of his youth to respond 

 to everything, both in thought and deed, as if he were always in society. 

 Even so is the child still tempted to think of things in terms of persons. 



Animism, belief in souls or personal beings who may inhabit any object or 

 live a free life, is connected with thinking in terms of social intercourse, but 

 is not its inevitable result. The animism of the human social group, whose 

 members are souls or personal beings, as the social group is extended into 

 the world may dilute do\\-n into animatisation. All grades of social qualifica- 

 tion, from animism to barely recognisable animatisation, have been ascribed 

 to objects like the moon. Prominent and striking natural objects, like the 

 moon herself, may be thought of as the habitations of great gods or as the 

 abodes of minor spirits or as divine beings in themselves or as animated in 

 greater or less degree. There is no constancy in conception and in any 

 particular myth, such as any of the previous moon stories, and in any 

 particular sympathetic connection between moon and growth it may be 

 difficult, or impossible, to define the exact nature or grade of the moon's 

 social qualifications. How far the moon, at any one time, is an actual 

 humanly conceived person, or how far she is socially qualified, would be 

 usually an anthropological conundrum. But one feature of social intercourse 

 provided a universal and permanent preconception for the primitive estimate 

 of lunar control. 



The original laughter of the child. Hartley remarked, is multiplied by 

 imitation, and " whatever can be shown to take place at aU in human nature," 

 he adds, " must take place in a much higher degree than according to the 

 original causes, from our great disposition to imitate one another. . . ." ' 

 This intensive multiplication or induration of habit in single m.embers of 

 society is accompanied by an extensive multiplication or spread of habit 

 through the social group. The I'dtah who grimaces or wags his finger in 

 faithful following of his companion ' and Critias who is driven into a difficulty 

 by the difficulty of Socrates, " as one person when another yawns in his 



1 Comford, From Religion to Philosophy, " Collective Representation." 



* Priestley, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind, p. 272. 



* McDougaU, Social Psychology, " Imitation." 



