FASCICULI MALATENSES 
57 
transferred, may not, in the philosophy of primitive races, the spiritual energy 
bound up with this substance be used to effect a bodily cure or to prevent a 
bodily want ? in order that a man’s heart may be invulnerable it must be 
hard, in order that his hair may not turn white it must remain black, in order 
his body may remain healthy it must be vigorous. May not it be possible 
in the belief of the savage who thinks—as many savages undoubtedly do— 
to transfer the hardness of a heart-shaped stone to his heart, the blackness 
of a crow’s feather to his hair, the vigour of a sparrow to his body, through 
the spiritual essence which pervades the stone, the feathers, and the sparrow, 
and that which pervades every part of the man himself. These are obvious 
cases, and we are so accustomed to speak of a man’s soul that it is easier for 
us to conceive its existence than to realize that a stone, a feather, a plant, 
and even a house may be regarded by persons less scientific than ourselves as 
possessing some equivalent spirit, differing in kind and in form but not 
absolutely different. That the lower races of mankind believe in such 
equivalents has been amply proved, and the idea that has just been put for¬ 
ward with several notes of interrogation is, I think, capable of explaining a very 
much wider set of beliefs and customs than that to which the space at my 
disposal permits me to apply it. How far it is in accordance with certain 
schools of thought which claim to be philosophical in modern America and 
Europe, this is not the place to discuss. 
My indebtedness, in these and other Anthropological studies, to Professor 
Tylor’s Primitive Culture and Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough is very great, and 
it is to the personal influence of the former writer that the assumption of such 
studies is due. I cannot say how much I owe to his ever ready and kind 
advice, and to the discussions I have had with him. 
i 
