ORIGIN OF THERAPEUTIC BATHING 207 



as they learn how to deal with the world before them. 

 What seems perfectly natural now was by no means 

 natural to primeval man. How indeed could it be when 

 their great working hypothesis of life was that some innate 

 power or some governing spirit was at the bottom of every- 

 thing ? Before animism, in the sense that all things had 

 souls, was a current belief, the primitive mind seems to 

 have regarded all nature as self-moving like themselves. 

 For the notion of spirit is a late abstract notion. But when 

 a power or a spirit, good or bad, had to be managed, it is 

 perfectly obvious that water itself, that strange triple- 

 natured liquid, should have become the subject of magic. 

 Long ages before Thales, humanity had recognized that it 

 was in many ways the basis of life. They attributed to it 

 remarkable qualities, and when the Hebrews spoke of it as 

 " living " water we should do the nature of language 

 wrong if we considered the adjective was employed merely 

 as a metaphor. To us it seems natural if we are by a river 

 or a pool in hot weather to strip ourselves and plunge into 

 it. But this is by no means the attitude of many savages 

 even at the present day, and in the far-off beginning of time 

 to do so obviously risked placing the bather at the mercy 

 of the naturally untrustworthy fluid or, later, of the spirit 

 which lived in and moved all water. 



Among savages nothing answers to our conception of 

 the natural. Disease is not natural. It, like death itself, 

 is the work of an enemy. It is the result of the evil 

 machinations of those who hate men or a man. But all 

 evil is not wrought by spirits or magicians. Even now 

 there are material agencies of a horrible kind. In Australia 

 there are no dangerous wild beasts ; but the fearful mind 

 of man invented them. Terror is infectious ; the abori- 

 gines have made many white converts. When I was 



