250 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



the soul of Sheduir Van had, as he had foretold, 

 entered her womb. How was the babe identified as 

 the beheaded prince ? By the cicatrice on its neck ; 

 thus showing, in spite of Buddhist contamination, that 

 the idea underlying the incident is that of a new birth 

 of the old body. 1 The far-spread story of the lovers, 

 from whose grave two trees grew up and united their 

 branches, is a story of Transformation and not of 

 Metempsychosis. If I am right in the conclusion I 

 have drawn that the stories of fish fruit worms 

 stones and other objects entering the bodies of women 

 as food or otherwise and rendering them pregnant 

 present those various objects not merely as vehicles of 

 fertilisation but as becoming human beings by the 

 process of pregnancy and birth, then here we have 

 once more examples of metamorphosis. 



The truth is that the foundation of savage philo- 

 sophy lies far down below Animism. The lines we 

 draw between the lower animals and the vegetable and 

 mineral kingdoms on the one hand and human beings 

 on the other hand are not drawn in the lower culture. 

 Man, interpreting all objects in the terms of his own 

 consciousness, first endowed them with personality, 

 but a personality such as I have described, vague and 

 imperfectly crystallised, sufficiently fluid to run first in 

 one mould and then in another, and even to divide 

 into parts, without loss of identity. As experience 

 gradually widened, the conception of personality 

 became modified to bring it into harmony with 

 observed phenomena. In the evolution which resulted 

 dreams and trances played a prominent part. The 

 doctrine of a soul or double, an inner, a separable and 

 1 Gardner, F. L. Journ. iv. 30. 



