96 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



stance of the thing. The latter case would be well illus- 

 trated by the common savage notion of obtaining a man's 

 courage by eating him or those portions of him in which 

 the courage is held to reside. Even good fortune is per- 

 haps a something that behaves like a physical quality, and at 

 a higher stage grace may be transferred by the laying on 

 of hands. Indeed the tendency to turn qualities, functions 

 and relations into substances is very persistent at much 

 higher stages of thought, since it arises from the difficulty 

 of forming a clear concept of anything without conceiving 

 it thereby as distinct and separate in its essence from other 

 things, and what is so distinct and separate readily becomes 

 self-subsisting. But if in early thought, relations and 

 qualities tend to become substances, it is equally true that 

 substances deliquesce into a series of changes. Trans- 

 formations are effected with the greatest ease. The genie 

 becomes a dragon, a seed, a fire. The big Bear that is in 

 the sky is also incarnated in the bears that are hunted here. 

 The soul goes far away, yet is affected by the fortunes of 

 the body. What belonged to the body but is severed from 

 it affects its fortunes as if it were part of the body still. 

 By a quite similar order of confusion the general is identi- 

 fied with the particular. The ceremonial treatment of an 

 individual animal serves as a bond between the whole 

 species and the performers. When the totem is eaten a 

 link is established with the class of objects to which the 

 totem belongs, and to explain the character of a species a 

 story is told of something that happened to an individual 

 member of it. What is similar functions as though it 

 were the same, so that the maltreatment of an image 

 destroys the original, and to represent the fertilising process 

 assists fertility. Indeed, whatever is connected with a 

 thing in any way may retain strands of connection with 

 the thing, so that shorn hair or nail clippings falling into 

 the hands of an enemy give him physical powers over the 

 original owner, and the sword that has made a wound will 

 afterwards inflame it if allowed to rust, and should be kept 

 clean and bright if the wound is to heal healthily. I call 

 this mass of confusions which underlie the bulk of animism 

 and magic the two characteristic constructions of primi- 



