SOCIETY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN. 41 



of tentative efforts, it was repeated under similar circumstances, until it 

 became the normal reaction in such cases. The success, however, need not 

 necessarily have been a real success; an apparent success, a "post hoc" was 

 equally effective : for example, if the wise man of the tribe poured water 

 upon a black stone in order to bring rain from the sky, and if rain actually 

 did fall within a few hours or even days after it, this, of course, would count 

 as a success, and the action would tend to be repeated in consequence. 



A Psychology of primitive men would seek to trace beliefs and legends 

 back to their customs, customs to their earliest and simplest forms, and 

 then the more purely psychological work to refer the earliest form of the 

 custom to the mental character from which it sprang. Thus many of the 

 Greek and Roman gods and godesses had as their symbols an animal of one 

 kind or another Jupiter the eagle, Demeter the pig .or horse, Appollo the 

 wolf, Minerva the owl. The later theory was that the animal had some 

 relation to the favourite activity of the god, or that it played some important 

 part in the god's relation to man, as Apollo was said to have freed the 

 country from wolves. Earlier, the animal was the form of the god or 

 goddess, the way in which he appeared to men ; still earlier, in most cases 

 at least, the animal itself was worshipped, not as a representation of divinity, 

 or as a manifestation of divinity, but as a being of the same kind as man 

 himself. The worship was a sign of respect, deprecating the wrath of the 

 animal for its killing; otherwise it might influence its fellows to take revenge, 

 or, as in the case of animals killed for food, the species might avoid the district 

 altogether. Again, it might be a magical ceremony to increase the numbers 

 of the animals ; so the salmon, the hare, the pig, the bison, the deer, &c., 

 were worshipped. The universal tendency is that the custom becomes refined 

 and transformed in various ways by the coalescence with it of other customs, 

 and the influence upon it of other beliefs ; especially is this the case where 

 one race has been conquered by a higher, more civilised race, as the Celtic 

 conquered a pre-Celtic race in our own country. Nearly always the customs 

 of the older race are partly at least adopted and fused with those of the new 

 comers, losing in the process some of their crudeness and brutality. 



A familiar instance of this refinement of customs is our modern harvest 

 festival ; the earliest festivals probably involved the sacrifice of a human 

 being as a form of magical rite to secure the permanence of the life of the 



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