98 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



Hence at the outset between the willing retention of an 

 idea and the desire of the object to which the idea refers 

 there is very little difference. Hence, further, untutored 

 minds retain a difficulty in affirming resolutely that which 

 they dislike to believe, and indeed this difficulty, like others 

 that belong to the more elementary stages, persists in the 

 highest thought, and not seldom influences it. In the 

 lower thought it produces a regular make-belief, which 

 clearly plays a large part in magic and animism as it does 

 in the doll cult of children. The child likes to give the 

 Teddy Bear a bit of its cake and to think that it eats it, 

 but to make the eating real the child will cheerfully carry 

 out that process himself. The difference is not great 

 between this play and the ceremonial in which the human 

 worshippers eat the material sacrifice while the gods feed 

 upon the spirit. As long as it is a source of mental com- 

 fort to think that a spirit has accepted a sacrifice and will be 

 appeased by it the belief itself will flourish, demanding no 

 more sustenance than the formal acts required by tradition 

 with some sense of mystery, some unknown formulae or 

 secret rites at the back, to draw as it were a veil behind which 

 the transaction which the senses cannot witness may be 

 supposed to go forward. Lastly, if the ceremonial is so 

 arranged as to satisfy the motor impulses, if for the satis- 

 faction of anger there is some smiting of a victim to be 

 done, if in rejoicing there is dancing, or to summon the 

 war god music and beating of drums, the action still more 

 directly satisfies a felt want, and has a physical as well as a 

 psychic appropriateness. 



Indeed, in interpreting primitive belief it is possible that 

 we ought very often to invert what is for us the logical 

 order. We see food implements and possibly wives or slaves 

 buried with the dead by some primitive folk, and we say 

 'They believe that the dead continue to live in much the 

 same way and to need the same things : therefore they give 

 them what they will need.' Perhaps what we should say 

 is rather c The mass of sentiments and emotions stirred by 

 death impel the mourners to acts of respect, affection and 

 sacrifice. As they come to give to themselves or perhaps 

 to their enquiring children some account of these acts they 



