ro^-3 
 
 1- 
 
 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS 
 
 BENJAMIN P. KURTZ 
 
 Assistant Professor of English 
 in ike University of California 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE BERKELEY 
 
 LEIPSIC. INSELSTRASSE lo ,g,0 
 
 1910
 
 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS 
 
 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS 
 
 BENJAMIN P. KURTZ 
 
 Assistant Professor of English 
 in the Uni'versity of California 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE BERKELEY 
 
 LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE zo 
 igio
 
 C.3
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 This book is the expansion of a thesis of the same title 
 submitted in 1905 to the English Department of the University 
 of California in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the 
 degree of Doctor of Philosophy. I wish gratefully to acknowl- 
 edge the constant help afforded me in the preparation of these 
 papers by Professor Charles Mills Gayley. In no way is he to 
 be held responsible for the views here expressed; but hardly 
 could they have taken shape without his friendly and unfailing 
 criticism. 
 
 Bebkeley, March, 1909.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 Introduction 3 
 
 I. Greek Criticism of Fiction and Marvel 14 
 
 11. The Psychology of Wonder 52 
 
 III, Wonder in Primitive Mind, Custom, and Belief 93 
 
 IV. Wonder in Central Australian Belief and Story 135 
 
 Conclusion 171
 
 Tavra tolwv lort ixiv ^v/xwavTa iK ravTov Trd6ov<;, koI Trpos tovtoi<s 
 Irepa ^vpia, /cat toutwv Irt davfjiaaroTcpa' 8ia 8c ;(porou Tr\rjOo<;, to. fikv 
 al'Twv aTri(7J3r]K€, to. Si, Buairapixeva elpyjTaL X^P'-'* ^/ctttrra drr a\Xi]\(DV. o 
 8' icTTi iraat tovtol<; uiTtov to ira.Oo'i, ovSets (.iprjKC. vvv 8c S»y Acktcov. tis 
 yap T7)i' Tov ySacnAeoJS d7ro8ei^iv irphpu prjdev, — Plato: PoUticus, 269B. 
 
 ' ' All these stories, and ten thousand others which are still more wonder- 
 ful, have a common origin ; many of them have been lost in the lapse of ages, 
 or are repeated only in a disconnected form; but the origin of them is what 
 no one has told, and may as well be told now; for the tale is suited to throw 
 light on the nature of the king. ' ' 
 
 Tr., Benjamin Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, iv, 467. 
 
 ". . . dieser (der Mythos) als eine vom Volke selbst geschaffene 
 Welt von Phantasiebildern blieb im Alterthum immer der Hauptinhalt der 
 Dichtung auch in der Zeit der Verstandesbildung, nur dass nun das poetische 
 Bild von der prosaischen Wirklichkeit unterschieden wurde. ' ' 
 
 A. Boeckh, Encyk. u. Method, d. Philol. Wisschftn., 
 2d ed., Leipzig 1886, p. 649. 
 
 " . . . But little by little, in what seemed the most spontaneous fiction, 
 a more comprehensive study of the sources of poetry and romance begins to 
 disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that has led up to each train 
 of thought, a store of inherited materials from out of which each province 
 of the poet 's land has been shaped, and built over, and peopled. ' ' 
 
 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, i, 273.
 
 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The marvellous in Eomance — Its profusion, and recurrent 
 character — Its neglect by literary criticism — Aristotle — Desul- 
 tory and fragmentary nature of wonder-criticism after 
 Aristotle — Data furnished by the ethnologists — The opportunity 
 for a criticism of the marvellous — Purpose and plan of the 
 present work — History of the usage of the term ' ' marvellous ' ' 
 — as an intensive — as denoting the supernatural — in other 
 languages — Suggestiveness of these usages. 
 
 Throughout the course of romance one element occurs 
 continually, — the marvellous. In the literature of every age its 
 presence is provocative of pleasure or criticism upon the part of 
 the reading or learned public. In the myth and legend of the 
 barbarian it multiplies under religious and faithful sanction. 
 With the rise of a critical philosophy it is subjected to searching 
 analysis ; but no philosophy or science of a few can check its ad- 
 vance, for it lives perennially in the hearts and in the super- 
 stitions of the ignorant masses. When a self-conscious epic art 
 develops, the adoption and handling of the prodigious become 
 subjects of acrimonious dispute.^ The European ]\[iddle Ages con- 
 tributed to occidental marvel a renovation, and a new impulse 
 along both sacred and profane lines. Chivalry, that romantic 
 institution of the wonderful, belonged, as Professor Woodberry 
 has well said, "to a world of marvel, where the unloiown, 
 even in geography, was a large constituent element, and magic, 
 superstition, and devildom were so rife as to be almost parts of 
 the human mind."- Medieval Metrical Romance perpetuated all 
 
 1 Cf. Ker, Epic and Eomance, 1897, pp. 34, 39. 
 
 2G. E. Woodberry, in McClure's Magazine, April, 1905. Vol. XXIV, 
 p. 621. (Art. Cervantes.)
 
 4 STUDIES IX THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 this ill a literary form; and, after the skepticism of the Age of 
 Reason hail dwindled, the same themes lived again in the modern 
 romanticist's keen delight in wonder and amplification.^ The 
 mood of marvel was making its way back into English literature 
 of the eighteenth century even while Robert Anderson, travelling 
 through Scotch scenes in "moralizing mood," was at pains to 
 asperse it thus in a letter to the wonder-loving Bishop of 
 Dromore: "I surveyed for the first time the scenery of the 
 Border Ballads, and visited the ancient castles of the Border 
 chiefs, the dens of thieves and robbers. I sat on the ruins of 
 Hermitage, in a moralizing rather than a marvellous mood, so 
 that I saw neither Redcap nor Shellycoat; and indeed the 
 creatures of popular superstition live only in legends, and no 
 longer haunt these peaceful valleys. ' '* 
 
 While reading this letter from Robert Anderson, it occurred 
 to me that there is an opportunity for research into the treatment 
 of the marvellous in literature. For, while most of the principles 
 and elements of literary art enumerated by Aristotle in the Poetics 
 have received a systematic and comparative illustration from the 
 hands of such modern critics as Brunetiere, Texte, Beljame, Paris, 
 and Gautier, the important literary ingredient here called the 
 marvellous, which is mentioned repeatedly in the twenty-fourth 
 and twenty-fifth chapters of the Poetics, has not as yet been 
 exploited by any modern literary critic of the scientific school. 
 It is possible to go even further, and say that nothing of compre- 
 hensive scope has been written upon the wonderful by any literary 
 student of any school of criticism since Aristotle in a fragmentary 
 way marked out its scope in epic and tragedy, and incidentally 
 declared its justification under the broader category of poetic 
 truth. Opinions of the moment, to be sure, mere asides from other 
 investigations, have often been thrown out, from Plato or Horace 
 down ; and the ancients occasionally made collections of wonder- 
 stories, such as the famous pseudo- Aristotelian HEPI 0ATMAS- 
 IHN AKOTSMATHN. Photius (Vol. 3, Col. 413) quaintly 
 notices one of these latter as consisting of four books, one each on 
 
 3 Cf. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Eomancc, London 1762, p. 319. 
 (No. X.) 
 
 * Nichols, lUufttrations, etc., London 1817-58, VII, 187.
 
 INTEODUCTION. 5 
 
 the following subjects : of incredible fiction, of incredible stories 
 about demons, of incredible tales of souls appearing after death, 
 of incredible things of nature. But these had no more purpose of 
 literary criticism than did the moralistic and philosophic objec- 
 tions of the Greek philosophers who descended upon Homer for 
 employing incredible and impious tales about the gods. The self- 
 conscious epic art of the Italian Renaissance, of Ariosto and 
 Tasso, drew in its wake an acrimonious and voluminous disputa- 
 tion upon the place of the prodigious in epic composition; but 
 the criticism was always dogmatic, a priori, and partisan — never 
 comparative and inductive. The same is true of the English 
 echoes of that continental battle of the books. D 'Avenant, Hurd, 
 Pope, Addison, and others, contributed their not infrequent, but 
 always tentative, paragraphs to the question of the proper place 
 of wonder in the various literary types. Fielding, in one of his 
 asides in Tom Jones, discoursed wittily upon the proper use of 
 wonder in his own art. There is an extremely sketchy essay by 
 Yardley upon The Supernatural in Bomantic Fiction,^ which 
 stands very lonely in the midst of modern criticism along other 
 lines. Now and then have appeared short essays upon the habits 
 of particular authors or periods in dealing wnth the wonderful, 
 such as Dj^er's essay upon the folk-lore in Shakespeare," or 
 Bodmer's antiquated monograph upon the angels in Paradise 
 Lost.'' A collection of medieval wonders in the sixth volume of 
 the Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte suggests the 
 sort of preliminary collection of data which must precede any 
 methodical inquiry upon the subject. A classification of the 
 wonders in French literature of the age of Louis XIV has been 
 made by Delaporte.® The most encouraging work that has yet 
 appeared is Reitzenstein 's Hellenistische Wundererzdhlungen.^ 
 In this monograph, undertaken primarily as a study in theological 
 criticism, the author argues for the derivation of much of the 
 
 5 London 1880. 
 
 6 Dyer, T. F., FolJc-Lore of Shalcespeare, New York 1884. 
 
 7 Bodmer, Kritische Abhandlung von dem Wunderharen in der Poesie, 
 Zurich 1740. 
 
 8 P. V. Delaporte, Du Merveilleux dans la Littcraiure Fran(;aise sous le 
 Begne de Louis XIV., Paris 1891. 
 
 9 Eeitzenstein, Hellenistische Wundererzdhlungen, Leipzig, 1906.
 
 6 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 wonder-element in early Christian literature from Hellenistic 
 sources; and incidentally he distinguishes two types of separate 
 origin, the Hellenistic wonder tale (or aretalogy, as he calls it), 
 and the Hellenistic romance. 
 
 But if the marvellous has failed to receive a satisfactory treat- 
 ment at the hands of literary students, in another direction it has 
 been investigated with surprising fulness. The students of eth- 
 nology and folk-lore have, with purposes quite other than those 
 of literary' criticism, brought together, and partially classified, a 
 vast number of marvels drawn from primitive and popular 
 religious belief, custom, and superstition. It is hardly necessary 
 to cite the long roster of those who in all parts of the learned 
 world are following in the steps of Lord Avebury, Spencer, Tylor, 
 Frazer, and Berenger-Feraud. By the systematic and devoted 
 efforts of this great band of modern humanists, there has been 
 brought together a mass of observations and explanations of the 
 marvellous element in belief and story, which, though quite inde- 
 pendent of any literary interpretation, nevertheless is by all 
 odds the most considerable achievement in the study of the 
 wonderful, not only since the time of Aristotle, but in all time. 
 Such works, to mention only English examples, as The Origins 
 of Civilization, Primitive Culture, The Golden Bough, Myth, 
 Ritual and Religion, or The Legend of Perseus, are as monu- 
 mental to the success attending the application of the methods 
 of scientific research to spiritual matters as they are unique in 
 the history of humanism. 
 
 Dr. Tylor, speaking in the light of his long investigations, 
 has said, in the first volume of his Primitive Culture, that "little 
 by little, in what seemed the most spontaneous fiction, a more 
 comprehensive study of the sources of poetry and romance begins 
 to disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that has led up 
 to each train of thought, a store of inherited materials from out 
 of which each province of the poet's land has been shaped, and 
 built over, and peopled." Than this statement, based upon the 
 scientific accumulations of Tylor and his fellow-students, there 
 could be nothing more encouraging to the literary student who 
 might wish to take up Aristotle's observations and expand them 
 into a coherent presentation of the function and development of
 
 INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 the marvellous in literature. Here, ready to his hand, is a body 
 of data and principles, which needs only an application of the 
 literary point of view, and the addition of further data, strictly 
 literary, which did not enter into the view of the ethnologists, to 
 be reduced to a history and theory of the appearance, function, 
 and development of the literary use of the wonderful. Here are 
 the keys to a literary criticism of the marvellous that will show 
 the relations between the various cases or details of wonder before 
 they were incorporated in literary beginnings, during the proc- 
 esses of that incorporation, and through their subsequent stages 
 of literary development. By following successively the constantly 
 changing relations of the wonder-element in literature to other 
 elements, and to the general principles, of literary art and 
 evolution; by observing its concomitant and relative positions 
 in the various literary types at the different periods of their 
 development ; by determining the evolution of particular marvels 
 as they are influenced or determined by parallel changes in the 
 technique and consciousness of the literary artist ; by explicating 
 the sometimes obvious, the sometimes subtle, influence of con- 
 temporary philosophic or scientific criticism of the marvellous 
 upon the vitality and popularity of wonder in purely literary 
 usage; by generalizations concerning the inspiration offered by 
 wonder to the individual artist at various stages of his own or 
 the race's development, — by such employments as these that 
 peculiarly basic element in literary interest, which, as Aristotle 
 racily observed, persuades good stoiy-tellers, consciously or un- 
 consciously, to add something wonderful to their recitals, would 
 receive the consistent treatment and illustration obviously de- 
 manded by its prime, but slightly recognized, importance. 
 
 The studies included in this book represent a series of pre- 
 liminary attempts to supply the need of a literary criticism of 
 the marvellous, and to make use, for this purpose, of the data 
 collected by the ethnologists. Each one of these attempts has 
 been undertaken separately, with a view to approaching the sub- 
 ject from various points of vantage ; and so strictly have the facts 
 been followed that the postponement of conclusions to a regular 
 position behind the data has often enjoined a rather bulkj'
 
 8 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 handling of the argument. Whatever relations there may be 
 between the studies is the result of identity of the object under 
 consideration in each case — not of any concatenated theory of the 
 rise of the marvellous and its development into literary form. 
 Inevitably many such relations have developed : the conclusions 
 based upon them have been rigorously deferred to the close of 
 every chapter, and are collected at the end of the volume. 
 
 The methods adopted, or rather the points of view, were 
 arrived at simply. The first study endeavors to gain some 
 orientation toward the subject by tracing in detail the history of 
 what Greek literary criticism had to say on the use of the mar- 
 vellous. Thus the warrant in previous criticism for the present 
 undertaking can be determined, while at the same time the 
 various moments and trends in the development of Greek criti- 
 cism, themselves considered as stages in the development of the 
 marvellous in literature, are revealed. The next study is an effort 
 toward the attainment of some general psychological criteria 
 of wonder. It is believed that the subjective nature of the 
 wonderful makes such a standard absolutely imperative. This 
 subjective aspect of the problem is frankly conceded at the out- 
 set. These essays are very intentionally studies in subjective 
 phenomena. It is not conceived that the subjective character of 
 the work can be extended as an objection to its value or prac- 
 ticability by those who themselves have indulged in researches 
 into the tragic, the comic, the satiric, the beautiful, and the 
 like, in literature ; nor yet by those who have studied the nature 
 and development of either art or belief. The third chapter 
 begins to take up the ethnological evidence. It regards the 
 general fields of primitive belief and custom in order to determine 
 what in them may be the general forces and conditions relative to 
 wonder and the wonderful. In the final study, a particular 
 primitive people, the Central Australians, are brought before the 
 reader; and, after a discussion of their cultural conditions, their 
 actual legends, as reported by investigators who lived among 
 them for a long time, are contemplated and resolved into elements 
 which do possess, or do not possess, wonder. So far as is possible, 
 by piecing together evidence and inference, these elements are
 
 INTBODUCTION. 9 
 
 discussed in view of their relations to any inceptive literary 
 treatment they have undergone in the course of being handed 
 down in tradition and legend. In a word, this last study of the 
 present collection is an investigation of the first, actual, positive 
 step taken by what are nowadays called marvels, out of their 
 beginnings in belief and custom, and into their modification at 
 the hands of the earliest type of narrative art. It is the first stage 
 of the story-marvel. 
 
 In the course of these studies one question will continually 
 recur : What is the exact meaning of the word marvellous ? As 
 a preliminary consideration of this difficulty, a brief notice of the 
 use and definition of the word may be conveniently inserted at 
 this place. It will be seen, moreover, that the history of the use 
 and meaning of the word bears very directly on the entire 
 problem before us. 
 
 Upon the part of one of the least superstitious minds of the 
 nineteenth century there is a striking use of the word marvellous. 
 In the last essay of the last book published by Herbert Spencer 
 this passage occurs : ' ' Concerning the multitudes of remarkable 
 relations among lines and among spaces very few ever ask — Why 
 are they so? Perhaps the question may in later years be raised, 
 as it has been in myself, by some of the more conspicuously 
 marvellous truths now grouped under the title of 'the Geometry 
 of Position.' Many of these are so astounding that but for the 
 presence of ocular proof they would be incredible ; and by their 
 marvellousness, as well as by their beauty, they serve, in some 
 minds at least, to raise the unanswerable question — How came 
 there to exist among the parts of this seemingly-structureless 
 vacancy we call Space, these strange relations? How does it 
 happen that the blank form of things presents us with truths as 
 incomprehensible as do the things it contains ?"^° 
 
 The way in which the word ' * marvellous ' ' is used in this quota- 
 tion offers a suggestive starting point for the discussion of the 
 general use of the substantive and its derivatives. On the one 
 hand, it will be noted that these space-relations, which are pro- 
 
 10 H. Spencer, Facts and Comments, New York 1902, pp. 290-291. The 
 italics are mine.
 
 10 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 nonnced marvellous, are by ocular proof actual realities. There 
 is about them nothing that is strange to the order of nature. 
 There is no supernatural intrusion. They are extraordinary only 
 to a limited observation ; strange only to the mind unaccustomed 
 to waiting upon them. On the other hand, there is a note of 
 sublimity in the emotion with which they are regarded. Now the 
 application of the adjective ''marvellous" to such associations 
 illustrates a very general use of the term, and one that it has 
 always exercised, — the designation of the extraordinary that is 
 within the realm of possibility, but has about it an air of sub- 
 limity. At present this connotation belongs to the literary or 
 learned use of the word. It is a heavier word than the Saxon 
 equivalent, "wonder," — "a little more wonderful than wonder- 
 ful." In Spencer's sentence, "wonderful" cannot be substituted 
 for "marvellous" without a loss of emphasis. 
 
 But, as a variation of this usage, the word, still applied to the- 
 possible, is often employed in the familiar fashion of a mere 
 intensive to express conditions, the extraordinary character of 
 which is comparatively low and insignificant in degree. In 
 Middle English, merveil, marveyle (or any other of its dozen or- 
 more spellings) was used oftener in this more familiar way than 
 in the more sublime connotation. Extraordinary adventures, 
 were always dubbed marvellous, as : 
 
 Lat no clerk haue cause or diligence 
 
 To wryte of yow a storie of swich meruaille 
 
 As of Grisildia pacient and kynde,ii 
 
 or, 
 
 He made so grete merueyll of armea, that the Frensmen durst not com' 
 forth for fere of hym.12 
 
 Distinguished service of any kind might be termed a matter- 
 
 of marvel. Thus : 
 
 Saturnus after his exile fro Crete cam in great perile 
 
 Into the londes of Itaile, 
 
 And there he did great merveile. 
 
 For he founde of his own wit 
 
 The first crafte of ploughtilling." 
 
 The extreme familiarity of the word as a mere intensive, is. 
 
 illustrated by 
 
 11 Chaucer, C. T., II E, 1185. 
 i2Caxt. S. of Aym., p. 79. 
 "Gower, II, 168.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 11 
 
 pe Saxons . . . broughte wij? hem Hengistus his daughter, a wonderful 
 fairs mayde, mervellious of kynde and wonder sightly for men to byholde.i* 
 
 In the verb form this extreme familiarity is especially common in 
 Middle English romances. "He merueyled him," or the like, is 
 a part of the stock phraseology of the old tale-tellers, and sug- 
 gests nothing more than amazement, or wonder ; thus : 
 
 Whan Reynawde sawe so grete nombre of folke eomynge oute of the 
 wode, he was sore merveylled.is 
 
 With the Elizabethans, too, the more familiar usage is that 
 oftener met with. 
 
 A mad-man that haunts the Fayre, doe you not know him? it's marueU 
 he has not more followers, after his ragged heeles.i^ 
 
 Shakespeare, in the great majority of cases, as may easily be seen 
 by consulting Dr. Schmidt's Shakespeare-Lexicon, employs the 
 word familiarly, while he reserves wonder and wonderful for 
 cases of rarer moment. 
 
 Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me; nor a 
 man cannot make him laugh; but that's no marvel, he drinks no wine.iT 
 
 With the dramatist, too, the adverbial use, signifying "very," 
 "extraordinarily," is common. "Marvellous searching wine," 
 "marvellous convenient place," "marvellous hairy about the 
 face," and the like, are to be found in every play. On the other 
 hand, English of the present has lost this ready, French use 
 of the word, but inherits a looseness of application, on the part 
 of the hyperbolically minded at least, which almost takes its place 
 in colloquial life. 
 
 The extraordinary that is still within the realm of possibility, 
 if not of probability, that posits nothing that is contrary to the 
 law of nature, is thus, either in its familiar cases or in its sub- 
 limer effects, termed the marvellous. But there is another and 
 equally well-established use of the word marvel, which connotes 
 that which is distinctly supernatural or closely associated with 
 the vague realms of unknown possibilities. It has always desig- 
 nated the impossible, the incredible, the miraculous. Komance 
 and legend are full of this use : 
 
 i4Trevisa, V, 267-9. 
 
 iBCaxt. S. of Aym., p. 137. 
 
 18 Nightingale (of Trouble-all), in B. Jonson's Barthol. Fair, III, 2. 
 
 IT King Henry IV, B, IV, 3, 96.
 
 12 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 Now yc, J^at wvllyS wondorcs her, hearkened maruayle. 
 How I>at chykl with a foiuies fere Dede batayle,i8 
 
 or, 
 
 Forth pe meruaile of the greal be don.io 
 
 Often it is employed thus to designate the magical machines of 
 sorcery : 
 
 pis solere was be sorsry selcuthely fouudid, 
 Made for a niervall to mecne with engine; 
 Twenti tamed oliphants turned it aboute.20 
 
 Especially rich in examples of the application of the word to 
 the miraculous is the old literature of the Church. The Golden 
 Legend, for instance, knows many such. The dissipation of 
 marvels in which the saints, say St. Brandon or St. ]\Iargaret, 
 indulged, puts many a secular romance to shame. Eight centuries 
 later Shakespeare is not nearly so fond of this use of the term. 
 Schmidt cites only a few cases.-^ The revival of romance in the 
 eighteenth century saw the entrance of this usage into a new 
 favor, to which Fanny Burney bore witness, somewhat sarcas- 
 tically, when she wrote in her Preface to Evelina: "Let me, 
 therefore, prepare for disappointment those who, in the perusal 
 of these sheets, entertain the gentle expectation of being trans- 
 ported to the fantastic regions of Romance, where Fiction is 
 colored by all the gay tints of luxurious Imagination, where 
 reason is an outcast, and where the sublimity of the Marvellous 
 rejects all aid from sober Probability. ' ' 
 
 No illustration is needed of the present use of the word in 
 this specific sense of the supernatural. 
 
 It may now be remarked with considerable emphasis that 
 these uses of the terra marvellous are not peculiar to the English 
 language. The same word in the Latin languages and its equiva- 
 lent in the German tongues are found, peculiarly enough, in 
 each case to carry the same variety of connotation. The familiar 
 and the more sublime uses, the popular and more learned 
 "fringes" of association, on the one hand, and the connotation 
 of the merely unusual or of the distinctly supernatural, of the 
 
 IS Oclon., 903, Sarr. 
 10 Arth. a. Merl, 4293. Kolb. 
 20 TVars of Alex., 5291. Ashmol. 
 2i Hamlet, I, 2, 195.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 naturally extraordinary or of the impossible and incredible, on 
 the other hand, are all to be found in the Romance and Germanic 
 languages alike. Littre, for example, defines merveille as ' ' Chose 
 qui cause de 1 'admiration " ; such, e.g., as the Seven Wonders of 
 the World. Again, in the next subdivision of his definition, we 
 read " Familierement. Ce n'est pas grande merveille, ou, par 
 ironic, voila une belle merveille, ou, elliptiquement, belle mer- 
 veille, belles merveilles, se dit pour rabaisser une chose, une 
 action que quelqu'un veut faire passir pour admirable." The 
 connotation of the supernatural is referred to thus: "Chose qui, 
 excitant retonnement, parait depasser les forces de la nature"; 
 and under merveillenx he writes: " L 'intervention d'etres sur- 
 naturels comme dieux, anges, demons, genies, fees, dans les 
 poemes et autres ouvrages d 'imagination. "- 
 
 Here, then, is an interesting state of affairs. Quite univers- 
 ally the civilized languages seem to unite in attributing to their 
 respective equivalents of the word wonder, or marvel, a similar 
 set of variations in meaning. In each case these variations run 
 from the sublimely intensive to the familiar, and from the super- 
 natural to the unusual but possible. Such a verbal fact as this, 
 with its hint of a mental trait common to the race, might, 
 a priori, seem rich in suggestion; and it carries us naturally 
 forward to an inquiry into the mental states and experiences 
 symbolized in these equivalent words. It may be that such an 
 investigation will bring to us a realization of the way in which the 
 mind, receiving and working over the observations of the senses, 
 has come, consciously or unconsciously, to apply to two sets of 
 phenomena, supposedly widely different in origin, and even 
 diametrically opposed, a single term, which it uses with equal 
 facility for the familiar and the prodigious. Does the history of 
 a word here, as is the case with other words and other subjects, 
 contain some vague but suggestive testimony as to the origin 
 and nature of the metaphysical conception ?-3 In the second 
 chapter we shall recur to this question. 
 
 22 For similar usage in other languages it is only necessary to turn to 
 the dictionaries, s. v. Wxmdcr in German; maraviqUa in Italian; miror, 
 minis, admirabiUs, in Latin; tfan/xdfw, ^aO^a, etc., in Greek. 
 
 23 Compare below, p. 92. On the differentiation of wonderful and ?)!t7r- 
 vellous, see below, p. 75.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 
 
 Outline of method — The philosophical doubt: (a) the 
 earlier expostulation with myth; (b) Pindar and the 'Charis 
 Doctrine'; (c) Xenophanes; (d) Empedocles; (e) Plato — 
 Philosophical attempts to explain the marvel in myth: (a) the 
 allegorists; (b) Euhemerism — The beginnings of literary criti- 
 cism proper: (a) Aristotle; (b) Dionysius of Halicarnassus ; 
 (c) 'Demetrius'; (d) Plutarch; (e) 'Longinus' — Minor phil- 
 osophers, rhetoricians, etc. — Conclusion : eight general points. 
 
 To Greek philosophy the presence of the marvellous in Homer 
 and in Greek mythology in general was a cause of constant worry. 
 From Xenophanes to Simplicius the philosophic line was haunted 
 by the unquiet spirit of an inability to acquiesce in the Homeric 
 airiOava. All other elements of the epic were accepted with a 
 religious enthusiasm and implicit faith. Indeed, everything, from 
 the ideal conduct of government to the proper way of turning a 
 horse,^ might be, and was, by many an early 'saint' or later 
 sophist, deduced from the Homeric rule; but from Xenophanes 
 down, philosophers and the sons of philosophers, nay the edu- 
 cated class at large, found their piety forever disturbed by the 
 airCdava. Along with the blind and errant struggle toward a 
 right adjustment of the Homeric fictions to life and literature, 
 this restless doubt takes its way from the palmiest age of Greek 
 thought, through checkered centuries, to the closing of the schools 
 by Justinian. Like some new stream striving to find its way 
 through obstructions to a clear and open course, and making 
 trial of each turn and twist, now this depression and again that, 
 so the Greek persuasion that all was not right with the marvellous 
 and impious stories of the ancient bard makes many a turn and 
 counter before it discovers the only possible adjustment, — a 
 literary criticism that will, in marking out the peculiar territory 
 of the literature of power, provide therein for the proper use 
 and place of the wonderful and impossible. 
 
 1 See Xenophon 's satirical remarks in the Banquet, § iv.
 
 GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MAEVEL. 15 
 
 For such a solution the search was not only often misdirected ; 
 it was also unsystematic. In the whole course of discussion the 
 problem was never exhaustively stated, never categorically in- 
 vestigated. Throughout the discussion the marvellous was seldom 
 separated from the broader category of fiction. Furthermore, 
 problems of literary justification of the use of fiction, and so of 
 the marvellous, were attacked as problems in ethical and histor- 
 ical justification. In the mass of the resulting confusion it is 
 not strange that the simple, impartial question, ''What has 
 been the evolution of the literary use, especially in the older 
 poets, of the untrue?" w^as preceded by the biased question, 
 ' ' How can we make the old and impious poetic usage harmonize 
 with our present standards of truth and piety?" The ancient 
 critic argued from two incompatible premises, — that the older 
 poets always spoke truthfully and piously, and that the critic's 
 own vision was always true and pious. When particular cases 
 revealed the contradiction in these premises the critic had either 
 to deny the universality of the first premise, or confess the error 
 of his own deepest intuition, or gloss the premises into harmony. 
 At first he was surprised into a denial of tradition ; later he 
 was scared into apologetics and confusion, lest the quaking 
 ground of truth be destroj^ed under his feet. In that confusion 
 the marvellous as such, i.e., as differentiated from fiction, was 
 mentioned casually rather than categorically. Often the notice 
 was fragmentary, — incidental to a discussion of truth in general. 
 Often it occurred as a mere illustration of a theme. Often it 
 was merely tentative, — a wonder at a wonder, or a ' When-I-was-a- 
 child-I-believed-as-a-child '-statement, as when Philostratus says : 
 Hat? /j.€v yap cov en iiriarevov toZ? roiovTOfi ^ kul Kare/xvOo- 
 Xoyet, fie rj tltOtj 'y^apL€VTQ)'i avra eTraSovcra Kai Ti Kal KXaiovaa 
 CTT ivioa avTcov^ fxeipuKiov Be jevofievo^; ovk ajSaaaviaTco^ at^drjv 
 ')(^pT]vai TrpoaSe^eaOaL ravTU.^ 
 
 But from the formless mass of these notices the account of 
 Greek criticism of the marvellous must be patched together. 
 Some men indeed, Plato and the rest, made a great hue and cry 
 over the fictions of the poet ; and so came a fine quarrelling back 
 and forth between the poet and sage, — though to be sure the sage, 
 
 Philostratus, Heroic Dialogue, §668 (ed., Kayser-Teubner) .
 
 16 STUDIES IN THE MAIiVELLOJJS. 
 
 being after all the, more irritable of the two, blew the louder in 
 that cacophony. It will be convenient first to gather the notices 
 from this source; and an examination of Xenophanes, Era- 
 pedocles, and Plato will give us a fair idea of the general nature 
 of the problem of fiction and the marvellous in literature as it 
 confronted the early philosophers. In the course of the whole 
 matter, however, Greek intelligence, proving itself not very 
 different from that of a modern apologist, found, of course, a 
 ready compromise in allegorical interpretation. Anaxagoras, or 
 was it Theagenes of Rhegium^, first began this sin to cover a sin, 
 this lie to habilitate a lie; and each lie begot successive lies in 
 the most approved fashion of such theological vagaries, until 
 Alexandria was full of the useless spawn, which ceased not even 
 with Hypatia. The long and futile tale of this attempt at adjust- 
 ment by means of the allegory may be sufficiently illustrated by 
 gathering the loci from Anaxagoras and the earlier school, who 
 began it all, from Plato who deprecated it, and from Maximus 
 Tyrius, Porphyry, and Julian, who may serve as examples of the 
 Neoplatonic devotion to this, the most palpable of expedients. 
 After these Euhemerus and his followers must be briefly men- 
 tioned. In the fourth place, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Longinus, 
 with two or three of lesser name, will form another class, — the 
 most important of all, since they were happy enough to come 
 nearest to a final and correct adjustment of the matter. Finally, 
 passing away from philosophy proper, that other wearisome line 
 of criticism, the Alexandrian and Byzantine, must be glanced at. 
 Hermogenes, Apthonius, Theon, and Photius will serve to illus- 
 trate this class. 
 
 Such they are — philosophers, sophists, and scientists, theo- 
 logians and rhetoricians — all haunted by this flaw in the epics, — 
 TO, airiOava. They all took up the search for a solution ; and, 
 because each sort answered in a characteristic fashion, the above 
 classification of their answers has been deemed more convenient 
 to a presentation of the unsystematic mass of criticism than 
 would be a scheme based strictly upon chronological sequence. 
 
 To begin, then, with the philosophical doubt, and the quarrel 
 which came therefrom between poet and sage ! Xenophanes, the 
 
 3 See below, pp. 31-32.
 
 GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 17 
 
 Eleatic of the sixth century before Christ, stands out as the first 
 to make much of the philosophic objection to m}i;h and marvel 
 in Homer. But before him there had been grumblings. The 
 gradual separation of Greek philosophy and religion from their 
 combination in myth, and their differentiation one from another, 
 was marked first of all by an ethical attack upon the blasphemous 
 deeds and characters attributed to the gods. It is important to 
 insist that this first attack was not, primarily, an attack directed 
 by love of fact against the marvellous elements in myths; but 
 rather a moral expostulation with those circumstances, marvel- 
 lous and otherwise, of Greek story, that ill harmonized with a 
 pure and sublime conception of diety. The marvel was morally, + 
 rather than rationally, impossible. In place of such disgraceful 
 stories as that of Ares and Aphrodite, or those of the amours of 
 even the highest gods ; in place of the boastings of Zeus, the thefts 
 of Hermes, or the insatiate war-god 's cries on the field of Ilium,— 
 a new and less anthropomorphic idea of the divinities early began 
 to make its way. Solon and Theogonis, in the sixth and seventh 
 centuries, are said to have renounced the fabulous myths of 
 Homer and Hesiod, and to have anticipated the philosophers 
 proper by setting up a system which rested on ethical and meta- 
 physical principles.'' Alcmaeon, who flourished in the middle of 
 the sixth century and was a pupil of Pythagoras, maintains in 
 the fragment of his treatise (said to be the first) on natural 
 philosophy {(pvaiKovXoryov) preserved by Diogenes Laertius, that 
 "about things invisible, and things mortal, the gods alone have a 
 certain knowledge ; but men may form conjectures. ' '^ Here indeed 
 is a piece of early skepticism, on the part of a philosopher, which, 
 though it may not contain a direct criticism of the marvel-mjths, 
 yet indicates a fecund ground for the growth of such observation. 
 Heraclitus, too, at the close of the same century, recognized the 
 limits of human knowledge when he declared that the people did 
 not know the real nature of the gods and heroes." This is that 
 
 4 Egger, Hist. Crit. Grec, 2d eil., p. 92. 
 
 ^ Uepl tQ>v a<t>avlwv, irepl tCjv dvtiTwv cracp-qveiav fiiv Oiol (xovri us 8' avOpwirois 
 T€KiJ.aip€<Teai.—Diog. L, VIII, 83; Diels, Fraffm. Vorsokr., Frg. I. 
 
 ^Kal TO(s dyd\p.a(Ti di TovrioiaLv iGx°vT<^i- okoTov €[ ris Ufwiffi. \6(rx'7>'ew)tTO <oJ/ 
 TL yivihcTKwv eeovs ovd' i^puas oI'tiv^s elaiy — Diels, Fragm. Vorsokr, Frao- V 
 Cf. Frag. CXXVIII. , r. •
 
 18 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 same philosopher whom Diogenes reports as having said that 
 Plomer and Arehiloehus should have been driven from the games, 
 apparently because their learning did not, according to Ilera- 
 clitus, inform the mind of the one, true, all-ruling ideaJ 
 
 But these early grumblings of law-givers and philosophers are 
 shared by a man of quite another stamp, — the lyric poet, Pindar. 
 "Pindare lui-meme, ce lyrique si enthousiaste, Pindare, qui 
 definit la sagesse une science innee (<7o<^o9 6 ttoXXo. elBoo^; (f)va) , 
 c'est-a-dire ime science donnee a I'ame par la faveur du ciel, 
 Pindare neanmoins n'est pas exempt de doutes sur les dieux de 
 rOlympe. "^ "Verily," cries the poet, "many things are won- 
 drous, and haply tales decked out with cunning fables beyond the 
 truth make false men's speech concerning them. For Charis, 
 who maketh all things sweet for mortal men, by lending honour 
 unto such maketh oft the unbelievable thing to be believed; 
 but the days that follow after are the wisest witnesses. Meet 
 it is for a man that concerning gods he speak honourably; for 
 the reproach is less."* And then the ode continues by substi- 
 tuting for the old disgraceful story of Pelops a new version 
 more flattering to the honour of the gods. Such a performance 
 as this,^° is, in its subject at least, if not in its beauty, quite a 
 part of the philosophical grumble. In the doctrine of Charis, 
 however, Pindar is centuries ahead of his time. This doctrine, 
 though it breathes something of the rationalistic air of our 
 philosophers, and is advanced more as an accusation than as a 
 defense of the fictions of the poet, contains, nevertheless, the first 
 suggestion of the proper attitude of literary criticism toward 
 the use of the marvellous in literature. This is not the ethical 
 attitude of the natural philosopher; it is the aesthetic attitude 
 of the poet. Charis, beauty, says Pindar, beauty of presenta- 
 tion, lends belief to the unbelievable, makes the impossible pos- 
 sible. He is not yet ready to say that Charis renders the 
 marvellous legitimate to the hand of the poet: it only makes 
 possible a deception which must be guarded against, and to the 
 
 7Diog. L., IX, I. 
 
 8 Egger, Hixt. Crit. Grec, p. 92. 
 
 9 0. I., 42 ff., Tr., E. Myers, Odes of Pindar, London 1899, p. 4. 
 
 10 For another of the same kind, see 0. IX, 35 ff.
 
 GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 19 
 
 nature of which "the days that follow are the wisest witnesses." 
 In another passage the same point of view is occupied with regard 
 to the fame of Odysseus; and there, since the impious applica- 
 s tion of unworthy characters to the gods is absent, the tone is 
 somewhat less philosophical and more purely aesthetic. The 
 passage occurs in Nem. VII, 20ff: "Now I have suspicion that 
 the fame of Odysseus is become greater than his toils, through 
 the sweet lays that Homer sang; for over the feigning of his 
 winged craft something of majesty abideth, and the excellence 
 of his skill persuadeth us to his fables unaware. "^^ The criti- 
 cism of the untrue and unbelievable in literature, which is 
 here shadowed forth in what may, for convenience sake, be 
 called the ' Charis Doctrine, ' comes thus as a suggestion from the 
 days long before literary criticism grew to a separate and con- 
 scious discipline. For our purpose, it is, perhaps, the most 
 notable locus to be found before Aristotle. 
 
 Literature is indeed a fragment of fragments. One realizes 
 that with peculiar vividness as he turns the pages of Diels^- and 
 Karsten.^3 j^ ^.j^g century that intervened between the years 
 when Thales was starting a physical philosophy in place of the 
 old mythical cosmology, and the days of the Samian Pythagoras^* 
 and Xenophanes the Eleatic, many an animadversion must have 
 been directed against the fabulous theology of Homer and 
 Hesiod.i^ Yet from all those years our literary remains are so 
 meagre that it is not until Xenophanes is reached that the 
 mumblings of the time, caught in the references noted in the 
 previous paragraph, break into clear and unmistakable speech. 
 With him the ethical objection takes the form of a definite and 
 reiterated charge of anthropomorphism against Homer and 
 Hesiod. Homer and Hesiod, he says, have attributed to the gods 
 everything that by men is held disgraceful and blameworthy,— 
 
 iiMyers, Odes of Pindar, p. 127. 
 
 12 H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsolratiker, Berlin 1903. 
 
 13 Karsten, Philosophonnn Grcrcorum Veterum Reliqui(e, Amstclodami 
 1830-8. For a convenient English edition, see Fairbanks, A., The First 
 Philosophers of Greece, London 1898. 
 
 i-t For Pythagoras' criticism, see Diog. L., VIII, 19. 
 15 6'/"., e.g., Hecata'us (Herod. II, 143). See Gomperz, T., Greek Thinkers, 
 tr., Magnus-Berry, Scribners 1905, sub. Hecatceus.
 
 20 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 theft, deception, and adultery.^" Men think the gods were born 
 as men were born, and that they have form, countenance, and 
 habit such as mortals have.^^ And if animals had hands where- 
 with to fashion images, as men have done, they would give to the 
 gods animal forms like their owti ; and the gods of horses would 
 have the shapes of horses, those of oxen the shape of oxen.^^ But, 
 in truth, he observes, there is but one supreme God ; and He is 
 like mortals in neither form nor mind.^" There could be no clearer 
 charge against the poets and popular belief — hardly a completer 
 statement of Xenophanes' own conception of the sublimity of the 
 deity — than is conveyed in observations of this kind. 
 
 For a criticism of the marvellous in myth, such ethical objec- 
 tions to the vulgar anthropomorphism of Homeric story are 
 obviously more than a fertile field. They actually include, as a 
 part of the wider moral view which is concerned with all im- 
 proprieties of deific character, the particular cases the impro- 
 priety of which is traceable to foolish exaggerations or impossible 
 fictions. The marvellous is by its very nature part and parcel of 
 the ethical irrationalism against which Xenophanes and his suc- 
 cessors lift their voices. Indeed, in the twenty-first fragment, 
 Xenophanes distinctly mentions certain marvels, such as the 
 battles of Titans, Giants, and Centaurs, which he contemptuously 
 calls fictions of the ancients (TrXda/xara roiv irporepcov) and 
 would exclude from the tales told at feasts for the entertain- 
 
 '* Jldm-a Ofo'is a.vidy)Kav "Ofi.r]p6s d' 'UaioSds re 
 
 6ffaa Trap avdpu)Troi<riv dvddea Kal ipbyoi icrrl^ 
 
 Kal irXtiffT i4>dtf^a.vT0 deCiv i6fp.i(TTta epya, 
 
 kX^itthv, fioi-x^vtiv re Kal aW-^\ovi diraTeveiv. 
 
 — Karsten, op. cit., I.Frg. 7. 
 " 'AXXa fipoTol SoK^vffi deovi ytwaa-dai — 
 
 Tr)v (T(f>tTip-r)v iadfjTa t ix^'-^ pjop<t>-fiv re S^fias re. 
 
 -Karsten I, Frg. 5. 
 
 '* 'AXX' efroi X«'P<^^ V f'X'"' P^^^ V^ X^j-res, 
 ^ ypiij/ai x^^P^'^'^'^ **^ ep7* reXeiv &irep Ai/dpes, 
 twiroi lUv 6' iirvoiffi, ^6es S4 rt ^ovfflv onoToi, 
 Kal re Oewv Id^ai iypa<t)Ov Kal ffu/xar iirolovv 
 Toiavd , ol6i> wep Kal avrol S^fxa^ elxov Sfwiov- 
 
 " VAi debs fv re Oeoiai Kal dvOpunroicri p-^yiaroi, 
 oire 5^^ai Ovr^rolaiv opx)Lio% oUre vb-qp-a. 
 
 —Karsten I, Frg. 6. 
 — Karsten I, Frg. 1.
 
 GEEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 21 
 
 ment of the company.^" But the conclusion of the fragment 
 (^Oecov 8e Trpofirjdeirjv alev^ etc.) shows that the objection to these 
 marvels was still ethical, — such battles were poor witnesses of 
 the justice of the gods. 
 
 Literary criticism is being trundled by philosophy. But it is 
 interesting to observe that this early promise of a literary 
 criticism occurs partly in the form of a judgment against the 
 marvellous and unbelievable character of much of the earliest 
 literature. Such a circumstance at least gives a notable genealogy 
 to any criticism which intends to investigate the use of the 
 wonderful in literature. 
 
 Empedocles, teaching the persistence of all things, and that 
 birth and death are only changes in the round, puts love in the 
 midst as the dynamic principle, and says that men call it Delight, 
 or Aphrodite : TrjOocrvvrjv /caXeoyre? iTrcovvfMov ^8' 'A<f)po8iTT]v.*^ 
 From the four elements and their combinations spring all things, 
 trees and men and women and animals, birds and fish, and the 
 gods themselves, long-living and richest in honor.^- These four 
 elements men call Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis.-^ In the 
 beginning, parts of animals sprang from the earth : ' ' many heads 
 sprouted up without necks, and naked arms went wandering 
 forlorn of shoulders, and solitary eyes were straying destitute of 
 foreheads."-* These parts, wandering about, came together in 
 haphazard fashion, whence all sorts of strange forms, — double- 
 faced, double-breasted, man-like before and ox-like behind, or the 
 bodies of men with the head of cattle.-^ And of the making of 
 men and women, of the conflict of love and strife in forming all 
 these and the universe in general, many more examples might 
 be drawn from Empedocles' IIEPI $Y2Efi2. Throughout the 
 fragments of this work (Diels enumerates one hundred and 
 
 *" OtjTi fidxcLS SUTreiv Tit'tii'ojv ov8i TiyavTiiji' 
 ovdi Tt KevTavpwv^ irXafffiara tQv irpoT^pojv, 
 ij (TTcio'tas, 0X€56i'as toFs ov5^v xPV^^^ tveari- 
 Oewv 5k TrpojUTj^e^Tj;' aliv «xf' oi'yo-ST)v. — Karsten I, Frg. 21. 
 
 21 Diels, Frg. 17. 
 
 22 7b., Frg. 21. 
 
 23 Ih., Frg. 6. 
 
 24 ih., Frg. 57, Tr., SjTnomls, The Greek Poets, Vol. I, Ch. VII. 
 
 25 lb., Frg. 61.
 
 22 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 eleven) is evident the rationalizing tendency illustrated in the 
 quotations above. "With something of allegory, as in the ease of 
 the Four Elements just noted, there is a great deal of theory, 
 physical and metaphysical, which replaces the old fabulous cos- 
 mology. It is especially interesting to observe at what pains he 
 is to account for the marvellous mixed-forms of legend and 
 tradition. 
 
 But this rationalizing tendency, in which he is quite at one 
 with the early natural philosophers, illustrates but one side of 
 the character of this strangest of men. If this were his only side, 
 it would perhaps be more proper to deal with him in company 
 with the allegorists. Those other and more interesting aspects of 
 the man, by virtue of which he stands out from the shadows of 
 the past as a romantic figure crowned with fillets and luxuriant 
 garlands, walking in majestic purple through "the great city hard 
 by the yellow stream of Acragas" — as a reveller in mysticism 
 and magic, whom Gorgias often saw at his secret rites — as a 
 thaumaturgical pretender, half -charlatan and self-confessed 
 god, — those are the characters of the man built forth in his 
 KA0APMOI. Here, indeed, between the two aspects of the man, 
 is a strange contradiction. As Rohde puts it: "Empedokles 
 vereinigt in sich in eigenthiimlicher Weise die niicliternsten 
 Bestrebungen einer nach Kraften rationellen Naturforschung 
 mit ganz irrationalem Glauben und theologischer Speculation. 
 Bisweilen wirkt ein wissenschaftlicher Trieb auch bis in 
 den Bereich seines Glaubens hiniiber. Zumeist aber stehen in 
 seiner Vorstellungswelt Theologie und Naturwissenschaft un- 
 verbunden neben einander. "-" Symonds has hit off this con- 
 tradictory character of the man to still better effect. There are 
 men, as he says, "in whom two natures cross — the poet and the 
 philosopher, the mountebank and the seer, the divine and the 
 fortune-teller, the rigorous analyst and the retailer of old wives' 
 tales. But none have equalled Empedocles, in whose capacious 
 idiosyncrasy the most opposite qualities found ample room for 
 co-existence, who sincerely claimed the supernatural faculties 
 which Paracelsus must have only half believed, and who lived 
 at a time when poetry and fact were indistinguishably mingled. 
 
 26 Rohde, E., Psyche, Leipzig 1903, II, 174-175.
 
 GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 23 
 
 and when the world was still absorbed in dreams of a past golden 
 age, and in rich foreshadowings of a boundless future."-^ 
 
 And it is before the wonder-side of this man, before this 
 nature which is all compact of love for the marvellous, that we 
 naturally pause in the history of wonder. For the criticism of 
 the marvellous no contributions can be found in what remains to 
 us of the great Lustral Poem. Still, Empedocles is a name of 
 prime importance in the development of a criticism of the won- 
 derful. The contradictions in the character of the man give a 
 living example of the opposing forces at work in the mass of the 
 people of that century. And from these opposite forces — the 
 one, a gathering impetus of rationalism, invading the ancient and 
 ever-ready credulity of the other — contemporary criticism derived 
 its nature, — somewhat timid and tentative, rarely as clear and 
 certain as the cry of Xenophanes, and with its stricter science 
 ever offset by a copious mysticism. Again, the figure of Emped- 
 ocles is an illuminating introduction to the teachings of his 
 greater but younger contemporary, Plato. Because of their con- 
 tradictions of character a comparison may be drawn between 
 these two. Their rationalizing doctrines are to be reconciled with 
 their mysticism and belief in the marvellous by remembering the 
 nature of the times in which they lived — transitional, engaged in 
 the breaking up of mythology into its separate disciplines of 
 philosophy, religion, and science — and by remembering also that 
 they were -rationalizing a popular mythology beyond which they 
 caught glimpses of a still greater marvel. 
 
 The transition, then, from Empedocles to Plato, is easy. 
 Postponing for a moment the consideration of Plato's criticism 
 of the use of the marvellous in literature, we may examine the 
 contradictions in his general attitude toward the more fabulous 
 elements of the culture of his time. 
 
 Upon Plato,*^ living in an age that was beginning to deny its 
 mythic fancies and yet was ready to wonder at the alleged marvels 
 and miracles of an Empedocles, and content to admit that strange 
 man's claim of divinity, the clouds of mythology do indeed still 
 
 27 Symonds, Grlc. Poets, I, Ch. VII. 
 
 28 References to Plato are as follows: Greek text, — paging and letter- 
 ing of Stcphaniis; translation, — Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, 5 vols., 3d ed., 
 by volume and page.
 
 24 STUDIES IX THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 rest.-" In his attitude, or rather, to be exact, his attitudes, 
 toward dreams, ghosts, magic, clairvoyancy, witchcraft, the 
 existence of the gods, and mythology in general, there is an un- 
 certainty, a blowing now this way, now that, which may indeed 
 be partly explained by those natural changes in belief and out- 
 look that take place in the course of an individual's intellectual 
 development, or by those variations in exposition called esoteric 
 and exoteric, the cause of which is the necessity of tempering the 
 preachment to the capacities of different audiences : or it may be 
 repeated, by those fond of the saying, that it is often difficult to 
 determine which is Plato 's opinion, which that of an interlocutor. 
 But the nice parallel between this particular philosopher's ap- 
 parent indecision, which at times permits direct contradictions,^" 
 and the unsettled state of the minds of men in general of that age, 
 is too alluring and obvious to be passed over. For a fact, the 
 prevailing psychosis of Plato, whenever he regarded the mar- 
 vellous, was not of that clear and stubbornly insistent make found 
 in our experimental philosophers : it was rather of that type in 
 which an imagination subtly apt to mystical beauties exists side 
 by side with an intellect keenly on the leash for strict and search- 
 ing criticism. Poet-philosopher he was; and in that, too, he was 
 a child of his age. 
 
 A few examples may illustrate this indecision of attitude 
 toward the marvellous. Toward dreams, for instance, and 
 divination by dreams, Plato seems to have exhibited in general 
 a discouraging f ront^^ ; moreover, the Timaeus gives for them a 
 material explanation.^- Yet Plato represents Socrates as rightly 
 very scrupulous concerning the behest of the dream that bade him 
 to "make music. "^^ Of ghosts, and other apparitions, to change 
 the illustration, his speech is almost uniformly slighting, and 
 in an unbelieving tone.^* Yet in the second example {Phaedo, 
 81) he makes direct use of the popular belief in order to lend 
 
 zejowett, III, 421. 
 
 80 Compare Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Lib. I, § XII. 
 
 sijowett, III, 493-494 {Timaeus 71-72); V, 297 (Latvs 909-910). 
 
 32 7b., Ill, 465 {Timaeus 45-46). 
 
 33 7b,, II, 198 {Phaedo 60). Compare Plutarch, On Hearing Poems, §2. 
 
 34 76., V, 120, 297 {Laws 738, 910); II, 224 {Phaedo 81). Compare 
 also III, 493 {Timaeus 71).
 
 GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 25 
 
 weight to his theory. Indeed, this passage shows well the poetic 
 and imaginative method of Plato, by which he establishes rela- 
 tions between popular superstitions and his o^vti philosophical 
 speculations, while discrediting wholly, or in part, the supersti- 
 tions. Magic, clairvoyancy, and witchcraft, he thinks, belong to 
 the prophets and priests, who may know more about them than 
 common people. They are things concerning which it is hard to 
 know anything for certain. Plato is not quite prepared to 
 denounce them as pure deception and illusion. But their practice 
 and belief by the common people is roundly condemned, and in 
 another place a material explanation of the whole matter is 
 offered.3^ Plato believes in gods, demi-gods, and heroes. Yet he 
 speaks ironically of the popular belief in them, and says that we 
 know their names, nay, their very existence, only from what the 
 poets fable of them. Their names are the inventions of men. We 
 know nothing of them. And yet as a philosopher he argues at 
 length for their existence, and says the ancients were nearer than 
 the moderns to the gods.^« In prophecy, and in madness of the 
 inspired sort, the "noblest of the arts," he also believes.^^ Of 
 mythology he holds that much is a picture of the probable, not of 
 the actually real. In accordance with this belief he does not hesi- 
 tate to devise myths of his own for didactic purposes. Again, he 
 would account for some part of myth by attributing to the 
 ancients a figurative way of speaking. But this suggestion of 
 rationalization remains abortive; and Plato professes he has no 
 time to waste upon the foolishness of the allegorists. Yet, to 
 what in mythology appears to him ethically unfit, he objects as 
 untrue. He is concerned, indeed, less with the strictly marvellous, 
 than with the ethically base in custom and manner, word and 
 performance. Gorgans and Pegasi he calls "inconceivable and 
 portentous natures," but he does not clearly object to their 
 employment in tales.^® 
 
 35 7b., Ill, 493-494. Compare p. 409; V, 322. Compare V, 28, 296; 
 III, 43. ' f , , , 
 
 36 /b., Ill, 76; II, 120-121; V, 96, 100, 108, 120, 122, 183, 231, etc.; 
 Index under demi-gods, etc.; I, 340-341; III, 528, 45; IV, 55; V, 270, 275ff. 
 
 37 lb., I, 450, 473. 
 
 ssRep. 614 ff., Statesman 269 ff., PJiaedrus 259, Gorgias 523, etc.; Theae- 
 tetus 180, cf. Ill, 61, 493; II, 78-79; III, 60 ff.; V, 421; III, 75, 307 ff.: 
 I, 434; III, 530-531. > > , > ,
 
 26 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 It is this ethical objection to the unfit, to that which degrades 
 the ideal of deity and the moral fibre of the youth, that gives 
 Plato his point of view for the literary use of fiction. 
 
 With Plato the quarrel between poetry and philosophy reaches 
 its most serious phase. The poets, from whom alone, says Plato, 
 the existence of the gods is known,^^ and who "have ever 
 been the great story-tellers of mankind,"*" are formally and 
 categorically accused of "telling lies, and, what is more, bad 
 lies." "But when is this fault committed?" asks Adeimantus. 
 Socrates answers: ""Whenever an erroneous representation is 
 made of the nature of gods and heroes, — as when a painter paints 
 a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original." 
 As examples of such fictions Socrates mentions the stories of 
 Uranus and Cronus, the battles of the giants, the binding of 
 Here by Hephaestus, Zeus' punishment of Hephaestus, the 
 battles of the gods in Homer,*^ ' ' and innumerable other quarrels 
 of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives." In due 
 order, then, are given a list of particulars in which the poets have 
 offended. They have not hallowed the name of God, but have 
 made him an author of evil ;*- they have represented God chang- 
 ing and passing into many forms, as a magician might do, 
 whereas God never changes from his perfection of form;*' nor 
 would God make by witchcraft any such false representation of 
 himself or another as the poets represent him doing when he 
 sends the lying dream to Agamemnon ;** Homer and the other 
 poets have represented the world below in a most discouraging 
 light ;*^ they have also pictured the heroes, and even the gods, as 
 pitifully weeping or foolishly laughing,*" as untruthful, and in- 
 temperate to the degree of indecency and impiety;*^ witness the 
 Aphrodite episode, or Achilles' treatment of Hector's corpse at 
 the tomb of Patroclus, or "the tale of Theseus, son of Poseidon, 
 
 •i« Rep. II, 365E. 
 
 *<>Iiep. II, 377D. 
 
 *i liep. II, 377.378. 
 
 *2 Rep. II, 379-380; cf. Democritus, Diels, Frg. 175. 
 
 *3R€p. II, 380-381. 
 
 **Rep. II, 381-383. 
 
 ii^Rcp. Ill, 386-387. 
 
 *<--Rep. Ill, 387-389. 
 
 *T Rep. Ill, 389-391.
 
 GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 27 
 
 or of Peirithous, son of Zeus, going forth as they did to perpetrate 
 a horrid rape ; or of anj' other hero or son of a god daring to do 
 such impious and dreadful things as they falsely ascribe to them 
 in our day. "*^ " And let us further compel the poets, ' ' Socrates 
 continues, "to declare either that these acts were not done by 
 them, or that they were not the sons of gods; — both in the same 
 breath they shall not be permitted to affirm. ' '*^ 
 
 Such is the list of formal accusations preferred by Plato in 
 this famous trial of the poets. It is hardly necessary to point out 
 that the basis of the charge in each case is the same ethical objec- 
 tion to immoral representations of deity that had been stirring 
 during the previous two centuries. •^•' Here the hints of Pindar, 
 the clarion cry of Xenophanes, and the murmurings of Heracli- 
 tus are gathered and expanded with due premeditation. 
 
 But the immediate purpose of the prosecution gives what 
 may be called an economic air to the ethical expostulation. The 
 tremendous influence exercised in the ancient Greek state by 
 poetry made it necessary, when there was in contemplation a 
 republic which was designed to be " an imitation of the best and 
 noblest life,"^^ to deliberate carefully upon the question of the 
 position of the poet in the prospective city. Plato decides that 
 the untruthful, impious, and blasphemous habits of the poets, 
 illustrated in the charges brought against them, do not conduce 
 to the moral welfare of the youth and citizens of a republic. But 
 a state cannot stand firm or reach its highest possibilities if its 
 youth are to be educated by lies and abominations in place of a 
 pure and sublime representation of the goodness and justice of 
 the gods. That is an economic, to say nothing of a moral, im- 
 possibility. Plato, therefore, to insure the stability of his state 
 
 48jowett, III, 75. 
 
 49 Loc. cit. 
 
 60 Indeed, Plato himself is careful to explain that he objects to certain 
 fictions of Homer and the other poets ' ' not because they are unpoetical, 
 or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical 
 charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who 
 are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death." (Rep. 
 Ill, 387A, Jowett III, 69.) The passage well illustrates the inveteracy of 
 Plato's moral view. Fair writing that renders bad fiction pleasant to the 
 popular (notice the implication) ear is no excuse for the existence of the 
 passage. All the worse! 
 
 51 Laws VII, 817A.
 
 28 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS. 
 
 in the truth and purity of its youth, to realize economic ad- 
 vantage from etliioal incorruptibility, provides in his ideal city 
 for "a censorship of the writers of fiction" (^inLaTaTijTeov toi? 
 
 This economic censorship of the poets, however, is not intended 
 to repress all fiction. "Let the censors receive any tale of fiction 
 which is good, and reject the bad." Plato's quarrel with a tale 
 is not begun because the tale is untrue, but because it is impiously 
 untrue. "We will desire mothers and nurses to tell their 
 children the authorised ones (i.e., fictions) only. Let them 
 fashion the minds with such tales, even more fondly than they 
 would the body with their hands; but most of those which are 
 now in use must be discarded. ' '^^ And again, speaking of myth- 
 ology, he says, ' * Because we do not know the truth about ancient 
 times, we make falsehood as much like truth as we can, and so 
 turn it to account."^* Such a recognition of the good uses of 
 fiction shows clearly enough that whatever may have been Plato's 
 real belief touching the m>i;hs, he approved of their use in litera- 
 ture so long as a careful censorship set before the public only 
 those tales calculated by their moral propriety to elevate the 
 minds of the people. Moreover, Plato's own repeated invention 
 and use of the fable for purposes of instruction, one of the most 
 striking features of his teaching,^'* is proof obvious of his moral 
 approval of such literary usage. 
 
 There is then, in a word, not only an ethical objection to 
 fiction, but also an ethical recommendation. In such recom- 
 mendation lay the germ of a possible development of an aesthetic 
 theory of the technical propriety of fiction ; but the negating zeal 
 attendant upon the prohibition was so great as to quite over- 
 shadow the promise latent in the more positive permissicm. It 
 remained for a more prosaic successor and keener analyst to take 
 that technical step from the ethical commendation. 
 
 52JBep. II, 377B. 
 
 63 Sep. II, 377C. 
 
 ^*Eep. II, 382D. 
 
 60 67., e.g., the myth of Er {Republic X, 614ff.), or of the creation of 
 man (Protag. 320Cfif.), or of the soul (Phaedr. 24r)-2.')7), or of the origin 
 of love (Symp. 191, 192). For others, see Jowett, Index, Vol. V, 475, sub 
 Myth. For Plato's expressed attitude ("Myth more interesting than ar- 
 gument") toward these fictions, see Protag. 320C; Jowett IV, 431-433.
 
 GREEK CEITICISM OF FICTION AND MABVEL. 29 
 
 Finally, in this economic-ethical consideration of fiction in 
 general, what of the marvellous, that particular kind or degree 
 of fiction ? In many cases, the battles of the giants, for instance, 
 or Hephaestus' capture of Aphrodite and Ares, the objectionable 
 fiction possesses elements that are obviously marvellous ; more- 
 over, strictly speaking, all god-stories are instances of marvellous 
 fiction, and Plato himself so calls them in the Euthyphro.^^ But 
 Plato does not, as we have noticed, object to all the fictions of 
 mythology; nor, where there are elements that stand, by contrast 
 to the very matter-of-fact conduct of much in mythic fable, as 
 strikingly wonderful, is the casus belli the marvel so much as the 
 moral. In two of the charges preferred against the poets there is 
 indeed mention of particular marvel-elements; and the mention 
 is in each case accompanied with a slur. * * Shall I ask you whether 
 God is a magician, and of a nature to appear insidiously now in 
 one shape, and now in another?" asks Socrates.^" And a little 
 further on he follows the matter up with a second question : 
 "But although the gods are themselves unchangeable, still by 
 witchcraft and deception they may make us think that they 
 appear in various forms ?"^® Magic and witchcraft are, indubit- 
 ably, marvels ; but in spite of the slur with which they are men- 
 tioned, and in spite of Plato's denunciation elsewhere^^ of their 
 practice, no distinct objection to them qua marvellous and im- 
 
 5G Soc. May not this be the reason, Euthyphro, why I am charged with 
 impiety — that I cannot away with these stories about the gods? and there- 
 fore I suppose that people think me wrong. But, as you who are well in- 
 formed about them approve of them, I cannot do better than assent to your 
 superior wisdom. What else can I say, confessing as I do, that I know 
 nothing about them? Tell me, for the love of Zeus, whether you really 
 believe they are true. 
 
 Euth. Yes, Socrates; and things more wonderful {davfiaa-iurfpa) still, 
 of which the world is in ignorance. — Euthyphro 6A, Jowett II, 79-80. 
 
 5- Eep. II, 380D. 
 
 ^»Bep. II, 381E. 
 
 50 Cf. Eep. X, 602C-D; Laws X, 909-910; Laus XI, 933. In a pas- 
 sage in the Eepublic {Eep. II, 364-367), Orphic magic is denounced, and 
 those passages in the poets which teach that the gods may be controlled 
 by the arts of men, are deprecated. But the objection is there, again, not 
 to the marvel, but to the immoral influence of such passages upon youthful 
 minds. {Eep. II, 365A.) Indeed, Plato himself, though fully aware of 
 the unnaturalness of magic and the like, and inclined to disbelief ( vid. 
 Laws XI, 933A), was yet by no means sure such things were wholly illu- 
 sions. ' ' Now it is not easy to know the nature of all these things (sorcer- 
 ies, incantation, magic knots, etc)," he continues in the passage just noted. 
 * ' Nor if a man do know can he readily persuade others to believe him. ' '
 
 30 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 possible is raised here. In the Fhacdrus, in a passage to which we 
 shall recur in speaking of the allegorists, Plato speaks of Gorgons 
 and Pegasi, Hippocentaurs and Chimeras dire, "and numberless 
 other inconceivahh and portentous natures. '"^° But there is no 
 literary criticism in the passage. 
 
 The sum of the matter, then, is that Plato, in direct criticism 
 of the marvellous as such, offers no more than do his predecessors. 
 Like them, his objection is more to the ethically irrational than 
 the naturally impossible; and he surveys in his objections the 
 whole field of fiction rather than the particular territory of the 
 Avonderful. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that 
 that fiction is the fiction of myth and legend, of god-story and 
 hero-story, of the two primary and most important forms under- 
 taken by the marvelling activity. All such fiction is at heart 
 fabulous ; and, though religious belief in the myth, or an anthro- 
 pomorphic conduct of the story, may convert wonder to an 
 illusion of every-day reality, it yet remains true that a criticism 
 of such fiction, ethical at first, as is natural considering its 
 religious rather than re-creative force, is the field from which in 
 later, less believing, and more scientific days a true literary 
 criticism must spring. Plato sowed that field richly where the 
 Pre-Socratics had sowed before him. So far he was at one with 
 them. But he went a step further, as we have shown above. He 
 gave to certain fiction, to certain stories of those wonderful beings, 
 the gods, an ethical encouragement. He found for them an 
 ethical and economic legitimacy. And, moreover, that very 
 addition of an economic idea was a first step away from the 
 ethical bondage of literary criticism. It was a lay tendency 
 springing from the theological preoccupation of the time, and an 
 adumbration of a criticism which in becoming completely secular 
 would first achieve literary truth. 
 
 Thus, the quarrel between poet and philosopher, based upon a 
 religious or ethical consideration, came to a head in Plato by his 
 categorical expansion and uncompromising expression of that 
 consideration ; thus, too, in Plato, by his addition of an economic 
 reason, the first step awa^^ from the old theological (juarrel was 
 taken ; and thus, finally, after having re-sowed and newly marked 
 
 00 phaedrus 229E.
 
 GREEK CBITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 31 
 
 the field from which might spring a technical criticism of fiction, 
 Plato started the growth by an ethical commendation, which, in 
 turn, was succeeded by an aesthetic judgment from the mouth of 
 his great pupil. 
 
 But before proceeding to Aristotle, who will give us the first, 
 and almost the last word in the matter, so far as Greek criticism 
 is concerned, it is necessary to pause a moment and contemplate 
 two compromises offered in the quarrel of poet and sage by the 
 philosophers themselves. 
 
 In the first place, it was proposed that the myths were, 
 properly taken, allegories. By this means the morally shocking 
 and irrational elements could be explained away. To valuable 
 criticism this compromise, by launching an endless discussion and 
 interpretation of myths from the unchecked fancies of numberless 
 "umbratical doctors," was fatal. The absurdities to which the 
 allegorists became subject are too well known to make their 
 rehearsal here a matter of moment. The historian Phaborinus 
 says that Anaxagoras, in the fifth century before Christ, was the 
 first to declare the Homeric poems an allegory "composed in 
 praise of virtue and justice. ""^^ According to another report 
 Theagenes of Rhegium had that doubtful honor.''- Phaborinus 
 goes on to say that Metrodorus of Lampsacus,*'^ the friend of 
 Anaxagoras, carried this sort of interpretation further. Plato 
 mentions Glaucon and Stesimbrotus the Thasian, as sharing with 
 Metrodorus the allegorical method."* Plato himself, as we have 
 seen, found no time to investigate this theory of mythology, spoke 
 of it in slighting fashion, and believed it usually to be introduced 
 first when "cities have leisure.""^ Xenophon ridicules the alle- 
 gorical theory by making Socrates poke fun at the pedant 
 Niceratus (who can recite all of Homer). Socrates compliments 
 the pedant on being far above the public ballad-singers. 
 
 <^'^ Fragmenta E istoricorum Grcecorum (Miiller, C), III, 581, Frg. 26; 
 quoted by Diog. L. in his Life of Anaxagoras, § VII. 
 
 82 See Lobock, Aglaophamus 1, § 20 flf., where the matter of allegorical 
 interpretation is discussed at length. See also Wolf, Prolog, ad Horn., 
 CLXI. 
 
 03 Diels, Frag. Forsokr., p. 339. 
 
 6* Ion 530C; Jowett, T, 496. 
 
 ^^Phaedrus 229C-230A; Critias 110 A.
 
 32 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 "ArjXov ycip^ €(f>i] 6 ^coKpciTT]^^ OTL ra? xnrovoia'i ovk eiriaravraL. <tv 
 Se ^Trjcn/x^poTcp t€ kuI ^ Xva^ipidvhpcp koX aXXoi^; TroXXot? iroXii Be- 
 B(OKa<; apyvpiov^ coare ovSev ae rSiv ttoXXov a^icov Xe\7;^e."** 
 
 But in spite of ridicule**^ the doctrine flourished through a long 
 line of learned names. Among the Neoplatonists, to carry the 
 matter beyond our present date and have done with it, Porphyry 's 
 De Aiitro Nympharum is typical. The Emperor Julian, in the 
 fourth century after Christ, allegorizes the myths after the Neo- 
 platonic fashion in his orations To the So7i and To the Mother of 
 the Gods.^^ How the habit crept into Christian commentary, as 
 in Origen, and how there, as well as in secular literature,"^ it 
 persisted on through the Middle Ages (and is not dead yet), is a 
 story as monotonous as it is useless. 
 
 The second solution, or compromise, of the philosophical doubt, 
 may with convenience be mentioned side by side with the alle- 
 gorical solution, though it was not broached until after the death 
 of Aristotle. Euhemerus (whose date De Block^° puts approxi- 
 mately at 330-240 B.C.), with his well-known proposal to refer the 
 myths to human subjects, shows that by the time of Aristotle men 
 were ready easily to approach the subject from a strictly secular 
 point of view. Indeed, De Block thinks that Euhemerus did not 
 make even a serious, bona fide attempt at a solution. His purpose 
 was not, says De Block, to discover the truth through an impartial 
 study of the traditions concerning the gods: his work belongs, 
 rather, "dans cette categoric d'oeuvres hybrides ou la fiction 
 sert a developper et a vulgariser quelque systeme de philosophic 
 politique, morale ou religieuse."^^ In a word the book is a roman 
 philosophique, one of those fables of the philosophers or liistorians 
 discussed by Chassang,''- — such as Plato's Atlantis or Xenophon's 
 
 "« Xenophon, Banquet III, 6. Cf., also IV, 7, 8, — the celebrated 
 "onions and wine" passage. 
 
 «7 See, e.g., Plutarch, How to Hear Poems, § 4. Ed., Goodwin, "Morals," 
 Boston 1883, Vol. 2, p. 54. 
 
 «8 Tr., Thomas Taylor, London 1793. 
 
 60 Tzetzes, for example. See Saintsbury, Hist. Crit., I, 187. 
 
 70 K. De Block, tuhemdre, son Livre et sa Doctrine, Mons 1876. 
 
 71/6., p. 53. 
 
 72 Chassang, Hist, du Boman etc., Paris 1862.
 
 GBEEE CBITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 33 
 
 Cyropaedia. Nor, in all probability, was Euhemerus the first to 
 advance the theory that goes by his name.'^ 
 
 If indeed we are to regard the work of the allegorists and the 
 euhemerists as appertaining to literary criticism, and Saintsbury 
 remarks that the allegorical and rationalistic interpretation of 
 Homer probably constitutes the earliest Greek literary criticism,^* 
 we must at least acknowledge that so far as a consideration of the 
 legitimacy of fiction in fine literature and of its proper use and 
 management is concerned, neither school presents anything at all. 
 The purpose in the case of either discipline does not embrace such 
 a consideration in its purview. The purpose is less literary 
 than it is religious or ethical. Both schools are working under 
 the old moral impetus. And though they deal constantly with 
 tales of wonder, there is no sign of an attempt at philosophizing 
 over, or criticizing, the place of the marvellous in literature. In 
 offering their solutions of the impious and impossible in myth, 
 they, like Xenophanes and Plato, are testifying to a time when 
 the impossible, or at least the morally impossible, in literature, 
 was regarded as a moral blemish. Here they were at one with 
 other minds of their times. But, in going beyond an expostulation 
 to apply a solution, these two schools started an inquiry which in 
 course of time has become completely secular and scientific, and 
 bears as its ultimate fruit the present school of ethnological or 
 comparative mythology. For the Greeks, here, as elsewhere in 
 their literary criticism, the lack of a comparative view prevented 
 that realization of the actual nature and value of an element 
 which the criticism of the present has learned to appreciate from 
 the knowledge contributed by comparative ethnology. 
 
 After disposing of these two attempts at a solution of the origin 
 and purpose of the myths, the main course of the development 
 of a criticism of marvellous fiction may be resumed in the work 
 of Aristotle. The many-sidedness and penetration of the Stagi- 
 rite's mind is well illustrated by the fact that in spite of his 
 skeptical attitude as a scientist and philosopher toward the won- 
 
 73 De Block, op. cit., p. 65 ff. ; for the successors of Euhemerus, see 
 Decharme, P., La Critique des Traditions Eeligieuses ches les Grecs, Paris 
 1904, pp. 381-393. 
 
 74 Saintsbury, Hist. Crit., I, 10-11.
 
 34 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 derful, which is well illustrated by his remark concerning the 
 Theogouists' fabulous systems of philosophy to the effect that it 
 is "not worth while to consider them seriously, "'° he nevertheless 
 was able, as a literary critic, to survey quite seriously the place 
 of fiction and the marvellous (to Oavfiaarov) in literature. 
 Aristotle did not mix his points of view. Instead of declaiming 
 with Plato a moral anathema against the poets, or, like the 
 allegorists, proposing for literary faults some convenient panacea 
 distilled from an extra-technical source, Aristotle immediately 
 proclaimed that heretofore the sacred character and moral in- 
 fluence of Homeric and Hesiodic literature had in part prevented 
 pious criticism from seeing clearly. Against those who decried 
 poetry as a lie dealing with perversions, instead of representa- 
 tions, of facts, Aristotle boldly asserted that there is a poetic 
 truth differing from and transcending historical truth,^® and that 
 poetry properly describes not only what is, but also what is sg,id 
 or thought to be, and what ought to be." Indeed, so far did 
 Aristotle push this view, which has since become well known as 
 the doctrine of higher reality in art, that, as Professor Saints- 
 bury remarks,^* fiction and poetry were to him practically 
 coextensive and synonymous. Aristotle's elaboration of the doc- 
 trine need not detain us here. Professor Butcher, by the third 
 chapter of his Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, has 
 brought all students of the doctrine into his debt for an exhaus- 
 tive exegesis of those parts of the text which open out this view. 
 Merely for convenience it may be stated by way of reminder 
 that Aristotle, in answering the critical objection that the poet 
 is in the habit of describing the impossible or what is not true to 
 fact, holds that the impossible may be justified by an appeal to 
 
 "•'' It is also interesting in this connection to remember that lukewarm 
 attitude of Aristotle toward deity and other religious mysteries that won 
 for him among the early Christians a suspicious neglect. It is remarkable 
 that from Aristotle, who by reason of his scientific and materialistic char- 
 acter might have seemed far less likely to do justice in such an affair 
 than would one of his more imaginative predecessors, came the first real 
 .iuatification of fiction and the use of the fabulous in literature. Here, 
 indeed, is a plume in the hat of the empiricists! 
 
 70 Poetics IX, 2-6. 
 
 TT Poetics, XXV, 1. (All references to the Poetics arc to Butcher's edi- 
 tion: Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 3d. ed., 1902.) 
 
 'sEist. Crit. I, 31. Cf. Poetics IX, 1-3.
 
 GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 35 
 
 artistic requirements, higher reality (the "ought to be"), or 
 received opinion.''^ The irrational is justly censured when for its 
 introduction there is found no inner necessity.^" In a word, as 
 Aristotle puts it, with direct innuendo to Plato : ' ' The standard 
 of correctness is not the same in poetry and politics, any more 
 than in poetry and any other art."^^ 
 
 The twenty-fifth chapter of the Poetics, that involved piece of 
 writing in which this view of poetic fiction is expounded, marks 
 the birth of a true, technical literary criticism of fiction from the 
 lap of the moral and idealistic philosophy of the previous cen- 
 turies.*^ It w^ould be strange if there were no notice here of that 
 heightened or exaggerated degree of fiction called the marvellous. 
 Such a notice, in the brief note-book manner of the Poetics, is 
 found in the closing sections of the preceding chapter. The pas- 
 sage is of such importance as to demand quotation in full. The 
 author is engaged in noting the points of difference between Epic 
 and Tragic Poetry. After contrasting the length and metre of 
 epos and tragedy, he continues: "The element of the wonder- 
 ful (to Bav/xaa-Tov) is admitted in Tragedy. The irrational 
 (to aXoyov) , on which the wonderful depends for its chief 
 effects, has wider scope in Epic poetry, because there the person 
 acting is not seen. Thus, the pursuit of Hector would be ludicrous 
 if placed upon the stage — the Greeks standing still and not join- 
 ing in the pursuit, and Achilles waving them back. But in the 
 Epic poem the absurdity passes unnoticed. Now the wonderful 
 is pleasing: as may be inferred from the fact that, in telling a 
 story, every one adds something startling of his owti, knowing that 
 his hearers like it. It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets 
 the art of telling lies skilfully. The secret of it lies in a fallacy. 
 For, assuming that if one thing is or becomes, a second is or 
 becomes, men imagine that, if the second is, the first likewise is 
 
 -^Poetics, XXV, 17. 
 
 ^0 Poetics XXV, 19. 
 
 Si Poetics XXV, 3. 
 
 82 It is of course to be remembered that another stream of criticism — 
 grammatical and verbal, of Sophist and Rhetorician — which has not been 
 noted hero because contributing nothing to the subject in hand, was yet 
 instrumental in bringing to birth the general criticism of Aristotle, and 
 therefore, in some part at leaet, his particular criticism of fiction. Cf. 
 Mitchell Carroll, Aristotle's Poetics, C. XXV, Baltimore 1895, pp. 11-12.
 
 36 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 or becomes. But this a false inference. Hence, where the first 
 thing is untrue, it is quite unnecessary, provided the second be 
 true, to add that the first is or has become. For the mind, know- 
 ing the second to be true, falsely infers the truth of the first. 
 There is an example of this in the Bath Scene of the Odyssey.^' 
 
 "Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities 
 to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed 
 of irrational parts. Everything irrational should, if possible, be 
 excluded ; or, at all events, it should lie outside the action of the 
 play (as, in the Oedipus, the hero's ignorance as to the manner 
 of Laius' death) ; not within the drama, — as in the Electra, the 
 messenger's account of the Pythian Games; or, as in the IMysians, 
 the man who comes from Tegea to Mysia without speaking. The 
 plea that otherwise the plot would have been ruined, is ridiculous ; 
 such a plot should not in the first instance be constructed. But 
 once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood 
 imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity. Take 
 even the irrational incidents in the Odyssey, where Odysseus is 
 left upon the shore of Ithaca.®* How intolerable even these might 
 have been would be apparent if an inferior poet were to treat the 
 subject. As it is, the absurdity is veiled by the poetic charm with 
 which the poet invests it. ' '^^ 
 
 Professor Butcher in commenting on this passage remarks: 
 "The fiction here intended is, as the context shows, not simply 
 that fiction which is blended with fact in every poetic narrative of 
 real events. The reference here is rather to those tales of a strange 
 and marvellous character, which are admitted into epic more 
 freely than into dramatic poetry."®" Such an interpretation of 
 the passage is undoubtedly the right one. To Bavixaarov is an 
 expression reserved to this chapter; it does not occur in the 
 wider discussion of general poetic truth contained in the twenty- 
 fifth section. Moreover, at least two of the illustrations, that from 
 the Mysians and the following one from the Odyssey, have a 
 distinct element of marvel. But, for the rest, there is such a 
 
 83 See Butcher, op. cit., p. 172 note. 
 
 84 Od. XIII, 93ff. 
 
 85 Butcher, pp. 95-97 {Poetics XXIV, 8-10). 
 
 86 7b., p. 171. Cf., to the same effect. Twining, Aristotle's Treatise on 
 Poetry, II, 346ff (1789).
 
 GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MABFEL. 37 
 
 loose handling of the words davfxaarov^ aXoya^ and ahvvara 
 (the wonderful, irrational, and impossible) that it is hard not 
 only to determine the exact bearing of the different parts and 
 illustrations of the paragraphs, but even the exact meaning and 
 relations of the terms themselves. In spite of these difficulties, 
 which need not be enlarged upon here, these thirty-odd lines 
 contain well-nigh the entire gist of all Greek criticism of the 
 proper use of the marvellous in literature. Some seven points are 
 made. They must be emphasized in detail. 
 
 First of all, there are two general points, which in turn are 
 followed by five strictly technical observations. After the pre- 
 liminary statement that the wonderful is admitted in tragedy and 
 epos, the general nature of wonder is defined as that which relies 
 for its chief effects upon the irrational. Further than this 
 analysis of the major element Aristotle does not carry us; but 
 this simple statement, conveyed in a subordinate clause, is one 
 which the moral doctors in their haste refused duly to express 
 as the first step in a proper criticism of the subject. The frag- 
 mentary character of the essay is well sho\ATi by this rough and 
 and incomplete analysis of to Oavyiaarov. — Another general 
 remark is that which notes the universality both of the pleasure 
 in the wonderful and also of its practice by the raconteur. This 
 observation, taken with the previous generalization, constitutes 
 what is practically a hint toward the psychology of wonder; 
 and in spite of the commonplace character of the two points, they 
 yet present to the weary searcher for a definite and correlated 
 criticism a great promise. There is here a recognition of wonder 
 as a thing omnipresent in life and story-telling, and an admis- 
 sion of it to a criticism based upon the naturalness of that fact, 
 instead of an exclusion founded upon a moral preconception, or 
 upon a permission, like that of Plato's, which is grounded in a 
 political, non-literary economy. The air of free fact and open- 
 eyed observation is refreshing after the theological dust, even 
 though the manner is dryly scientific. 
 
 Of strictly technical points, the first in order of the paragraph 
 is the differentiation of the use of wonder (or at least of the 
 irrational, which seems to amount to the same thing) in the two 
 literary kinds, tragedy and epos. Here is something entirely
 
 38 STUDIES IN THE MAEFELLOUS. 
 
 new! The differentiation is psychological, as it should be. In 
 epic poetry there is wider scope for the irrational because the 
 epos, by presenting only words and associated images to the ear 
 and eye, falls short of the more uncompromising vividness and 
 reality of tragedy, which presents its scenes in actual, concrete 
 forms. In the epic "the person acting is not seen"; therefore, 
 many a minor absurdity, which would become glaringly ap- 
 parent in the more realistic presentation of the stage, escapes the 
 notice of the reader of the epic tale. 
 
 ' ' Segnius irritant aninios demissa per awreni, 
 
 ' ' Quam quae sunt oculis sub jecta fidelibus, et quae 
 
 ' ' Ipse sibi tradit spectator. ' '87 
 
 But it is Homer who most of all has led the way in skilful 
 epic lying. This historical hint, so perfectly free from a puri- 
 tanical cast, so urbanely recognizing the nature of art, is im- 
 mediately succeeded by an attempt to grasp the master's secret 
 for successful mendacity. The vicious circle which Aristotle 
 adduces is one that IMrs. Radcliffe was over-fond of caricaturing 
 in the superstitions of her menial characters.®^ In its serious 
 application lies the secret of the TrpSyrov i/reOSo?, — that first 
 assumption in fiction from which, once allowed, all other im- 
 possibilities in the tale flow so naturally as in turn to produce 
 an illusion of truth in the first falsehood. Twining cites 
 the observation of Hobbes that "probable fiction is similar 
 to reasoning rightly from a false principle." The enunciation 
 of this cardinal principle concerning the nature of fiction and 
 the use of the wonderful, drawn as it is from psychological 
 observation and actual practice, runs close to the heart of the 
 matter. 
 
 From the above follows the next technical principle, — a rule 
 for the guidance of the poet, and the delimitation of the field 
 
 87 Ars Foetica, 11. 180-183. 
 
 88 "But they do say," cries Annette, "that something has been seen, in 
 the dead of night, standing beside the great cannon, as if to guard it. ' ' 
 
 "Well! my good Annette," replies the heroine, "the people who tell 
 such stories are happy in having you for an auditor, for I perceive you 
 believe them all." 
 
 "Dear ma'amselle! I will show you the very cannon; you can see it 
 from these windows! " 
 
 "Well . . . but that does not prove that an apparition guards it." 
 
 "What! not if I show you the very cannon! Dear ma'am, you will 
 believe nothing." — I'he Mysteries of Udolpho, Chap. XIX.
 
 GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 39 
 
 of the irrational in tragedy. To the famous epigram irpoac- 
 peladat re Set ahvvara eiKora fxaXkov t) Svvara cnridava ("the 
 poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possi- 
 bilities," as Butcher neatly translates), which Aristotle by 
 repetition brings into chief importance among his observations 
 on fiction, no added emphasis is necessary. It is the first and 
 strongest enunciation of one of the cardinal points in the theory 
 and practice of fiction. The limitation of the irrational to space 
 without the plot is another example of Aristotle's differentiation 
 of the use of the fictitious according to the literary kind involved, 
 a distinction which many a later critic has unpardonably for- 
 gotten. It is in itself a further proof of Aristotle's habit of 
 generalization from empirical observation, and of his avoidance 
 of vapid and irresponsible theorizing. 
 
 The last observation of technique recalls the 'Charis Doc- 
 trine' of Pindar :^^ the absurdity is so veiled in poetic beauty 
 that the sense of the former is lost in the appreciation of the 
 latter. This is the aesthetic point of view par excellence; and 
 Aristotle comes a step nearer than Pindar to admitting that the 
 beauty of the thing legitimizes its impossibility. There is here 
 no solemn warning that "the days that follow are the wisest 
 witnesses," — only a slight slur in the "we must accept it." 
 Aristotle, for all his science and experimenting, was a truer lover 
 of Homer than his more imaginative teacher. 
 
 To these criticisms of the wonderful and irrational contained 
 in the twenty-fourth chapter, one important notice from the 
 twenty-fifth must now briefly be added. Among the justifica- 
 tions of fiction, as we saw, was the matter of popular belief and 
 tradition, the aW ovv (^acn ('thus-men-say') doctrine, as con- 
 veniently enough it may be called. It was under this justifica- 
 tion that Aristotle placed the supernatural. "This applies to 
 tales about the gods. It may well be that these stories are not 
 higher than fact nor yet true to fact : they are, very possibly, 
 what Xenophanes says of them. But anyhow, 'this is what 
 is said,' ""^ If there is a sufficient body of belief for the 
 matter, let it pass ! This apology for myth, coupled as it is with 
 
 8» See above, p. 18. 
 
 80 Poetics XXV, 7.— Butcher, p. 101.
 
 40 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 the name of Xenophanes, who carries us back to the old philo- 
 sophical objection, brightly signalizes at the close of our account 
 of Aristotle that philosopher's impartiality and penetration, of 
 which we spoke in the beginning of this section."^ Though in- 
 clined to approve the anthropomorphic charge of the great 
 Eleatic, the greater Stagirite is not blind to the propriety of the 
 god-stories from a literary point of view : in the course of his 
 masterly, quite empirical, and strictly technical inquiry into 
 the place of the wonderful in poetry and the proper conditions 
 of its emplojonent, he has not neglected to put in their proper 
 position, under the account of fiction, ra irepl dewv^ — the tales 
 about the gods ! This is perhaps the crowning truth, and most 
 valuable disillusionment of old preconceptions, contributed by 
 Aristotle to the new literary criticism of the wonderful begun by 
 him. From the old philosophical criticism, from the ethical and 
 educational prepossessions, has growm at last a literary theory, 
 which properly and inevitably includes a special theory of fiction 
 and the fabulous, — the two last, however, still somewhat confused 
 in a multiplicity of terms (^Oavfiaarov^ aXoya^ aSvpara^ airiOava). 
 The new critical theory was carried forward in most dis- 
 appointing fashion by the various schools of philosophy and 
 rhetoric. In nothing is their work more disappointing than in 
 the matter of fiction. But it is to be remembered that there was 
 no straw wherewith to make bricks. "The whole of Greek 
 Poetic," says Professor Saintsbury, "was prejudicially affected 
 — and the affection has continued to be a source of evil in all 
 criticism since — by the accidental lateness of prose fiction in 
 Greek literature.""^ Without a definite body of fiction to 
 stimulate the theory of fiction it was not to be expected that the 
 latter would make any great strides. The three centuries between 
 Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus are bare enough of 
 critical texts of any kind, while for our purposes even the 
 work of the industrious Dionysius offers but a passing in- 
 terest. In the sixth chapter of the De Thucydide occurs a 
 notice interesting for its bearing upon the relation of history to 
 fiction. Between history and poetry there had been, as Pro- 
 
 01 See above, pp. 101-102. 
 
 02 Hist. Crit. 1, 192.
 
 GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MABVEL. 41 
 
 fessor Butcher observes, no feud at first, as between poetry and 
 philosophy.®^ Homer, to the Greeks, was the minute historian of 
 the Trojan war. The Pre-Socraties have left no hint of a quarrel 
 in this matter. Even Plato, in a matter of history, is ready to 
 praise Homer as speaking the words of God and nature.®* 
 "Aristotle himself speaks of the myths as history; the incidents 
 they narrate are facts (ra yevofieva); the names of their heroes 
 are 'historical' [yevofxeva ovofiara) as opposed to fictitious 
 (Treirot.Tjfieva) names. "®^ Yet he ^vas also able to point out 
 the difference betwen historical and poetic truth.®" With the rise 
 of historical prose that distinction naturally grew; it was the 
 distinction between history and fiction. And now, three hundred 
 years later, Dionysius cries out fiercely against the admission of 
 marvellous fictions into serious history. The Halicarnassian says 
 that Thucydides excels the superior historians in two respects, — 
 first, in his arrangement of material; "altera," (I give the Latin 
 translation) "quod fabulosum in suos libros nihil induxit, neque 
 in eam partem deflexit, ut multitudini fraudem et tanquam 
 imposturam faceret. quo in genere superiores omnes peccauerant ; 
 qui Lamias commemorarunt nescio quas in siluis et saltibus, e 
 terra prodeuntes ; et Nai'das in terra atque aqua pariter degentes 
 ab inferis profectas, pelago innatantes, semiferas, cum hominibus 
 coeuntes, et ex mortali diuinoque concubitu semideam sobolem, et 
 alia quaedam, quae nostra aetas, ut incredibilia planeque delira, 
 contemnat. "®^ The discussion is carried on in the two following 
 chapters. In the seventh the author notices how" the false creeps 
 into history through the successive repetitions of verbal tradi- 
 tion. The Introduction to the Antiquitates contains other 
 matter regarding his idea of history. But the above quotation 
 is sufficient to bring to our attention that other source of hostile 
 criticism of fiction — the historical conscience — the growth of 
 which is usually one of the earliest testimonies to the differentia- 
 tion of a prose fiction from historical narrative.®® 
 
 93 Op. cit., p. 401. 
 oiLaws III, 680-682. 
 85 Butcher, p. 402 (Poetics IX, 6-7). 
 90 See above, p. 102. 
 
 o"! Dionys. of Hal., ed. I. I. Eeiske, Leipzig 1777, De Thucyd., § VI. 
 98 Compare, e.cj., the reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of 
 the Britons. See Morlcy's English Writers, 3d. ed.. III. -i'.
 
 42 STUDIES IN THE MAEFELLOUS. 
 
 In the first century after Christ, Plutarch and Longinus are 
 the great names for our purpose. The work De Elocuiione {irepi 
 ep/xr]V€ia<;) ^ which goes under the name of Demetrius Phalereus, 
 and may have been of the first century before Christ or the first 
 century after,®" offers nothing beyond a faint recognition of the 
 rhetorical use of the wonderfully exaggerated in climax/"" of 
 the impossible in the field of variety and charm (the Charis 
 Doctrine^"^), and of the fable when appositely introduced.^"^ 
 Plutarch, more talkative, often wandered toward the strange and 
 prodigious. Julian^"^ mentions the Mythical Tales of Plutarch, 
 which are now lost. Evidently the amiable moralist could 
 inveigh against superstition^"* while penning the romance of 
 Theseus,^"'* or the frequent asides of the fabulous found in the 
 Quest ions. '^°^ But his criticism of the use of the wonderful in 
 literature is found in the famous essay on How a Young Man 
 Ought to Hear Poems.'^°'^ 
 
 In this paper, Plutarch, while adopting the old moral view 
 of the dangers of poetry, and warning youth against the pitfalls 
 of fiction and fable in the poets, at the same time is more inclined 
 to speak of dangers than of positive iniquities, and even goes so 
 far as to elaborate something of a philosophy of fiction. In his 
 attempt to show how a young person must view and understand 
 the poets there is almost a defense of the fabulous in literature. 
 There are, he says, two sources of fiction in poetry: there are 
 poets who lie willingly, and others who lie unwillingly. "They 
 do it wnth their wills, because they find strict truth too rigid to 
 comply with that sweetness and gracefulness of expression, which 
 most are taken with, so readily as fiction doth." Fiction can 
 always avoid distasteful truth by substituting pleasing make- 
 believe; and not even the devices of rhetoric, diction, and the 
 
 »8 Demetrius on Style, ed. W. E. Eoberts, Cambridge 1902 ; see pp. 49-64 
 for discussion of date and authorship. 
 
 100 lb., § 52, p. 97. 
 
 101 lb., §§ 124-127, pp. 129-131. 
 
 102 7b., §§ 1.57, 158, pp. 145-147. 
 
 103 Julifin, Ag. the Cynic Heradius, 227A. 
 10* iforais, Socrates' Daemon, §9. 
 
 lOB Lives. 
 
 106 E.g., Eoman Questions, Nos. 5, 21. 
 
 107 Goodwin 's ed. of the Morals, Boston 1883.
 
 GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 43 
 
 like, can compare with it in giving elegance and grace to a com- 
 position. "In poems we are more apt to be smitten and fall in 
 love with a probable fiction than with the greatest accuracy that 
 can be observed in measures and phrases, where there is nothing 
 fabulous or fictitious joined with it." To him, as to other Greek 
 critics, fiction and poetry are almost synonymous terms. "For 
 though we have known some sacrifices performed without pipes 
 and dances, yet we own no poetry which is utterly destitute of 
 fable and fiction.'.' The verses of the philosophers are accounted 
 speeches which have "borrowed from poetry the chariot of 
 verse. " In a word, ' * the witchcraft of poetry consists in fiction. ' ' 
 But wherever there occurs anything absurd about the gods or 
 virtue, the youth who knows this nature of poetry will not have 
 his belief unduly affected. When he meets with any such mar- 
 vellous story as that of "Neptune's rending the earth to pieces 
 and discovering the infernal regions, he will be able to check his 
 fears of the reality of any such accident.""^ 
 
 Unwilling fictions, Plutarch would have it, are those which 
 "express the judgment and belief of poets who thereby discover 
 and suggest to us the ignorant or mistaken apprehensions they 
 had of the Deities." Often they put upon these erroneous 
 beliefs fictitious colors to recommend them to their fellows. But 
 "almost everyone knows nowadays that the portentous fancies 
 and contrivances of stories concerning the state of the dead are 
 accommodated to popular apprehensions, — that the spectres and 
 phantasms of burning rivers and horrid regions and terrible 
 tortures expressed by frightful names are all mixed with fable 
 and fiction, as poison with food. ' ' Here, again, the youth is com- 
 forted by the knowledge that it is not the nature of poetry to 
 search out exact truth, and that touching such things as these it 
 is after all impossible to know anything at all for a certainty. ^°* 
 
 It will be noticed that Plutarch is less kindly disposed 
 toward this second kind of fiction. But in both cases, and this 
 is the great point to be observed, the author solves the moral 
 difficulty not by a censorship, such as Plato would have estab- 
 lished, but by going to poetry itself and discovering there that 
 
 108 Op. cit., II, pp. 45-47 (§2). 
 100/6., pp. 47-49 (§2).
 
 44 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 the nature and purposes of literary truth (though he does not 
 name the principle as Aristotle did) are different from those of 
 moral veracity. Here, indeed, is a philosophy of fiction. Proba- 
 bility, as he observes,"" is the nature of poetic truth ; and to this 
 remark, which is almost a statement of the psychological basis 
 of fiction, is added"^ a discussion of the imitative nature of 
 poetry, from which the nature and usage of fiction are deduced. 
 The force of imitation, he says, lies in probability; hence poetic 
 fiction does not, so far as it presents what in view of the facts of 
 human nature is probable, depart altogether from truth.^^^ As 
 regards the purpose of poetic truth, there is the clear statement 
 at the outset that strict truth is ''too rigid to comply with that 
 sweetness and gracefulness of expression which most are taken 
 with." For beauty and grace, for the purpose of Pindar's 
 'Charis,' for variety and multiplicity of contrivance wherewith 
 "poetry, waiving the truth of things, does most labor to beautify 
 its fictions,""^ — for these appeals to sense and imagination, does 
 poetry adorn itself in fiction. "Variety bestows upon fable all 
 that is pathetical, unusual, and surprising, and thereby makes it 
 more taking and graceful ; whereas what is void of variety is un- 
 suitable to the nature of fable, and so raiseth no passions at 
 all.""* But he has put all this in one most informing phrase — 
 for our search, a phrase immortal, side by side with Pindar's 
 Xapt'i — ' * the witchcraft of poetry consists in fiction. ' ' 
 
 Thus, with a professed disapproval of the allegorical method 
 of solving the moral problem of fiction, and by confessedly going 
 to the poets themselves for their own interpretation,"** Plutarch, 
 though an inveterate moralist, took much the same step as the 
 scientist Aristotle; and he went even further than the Stagirite 
 in carefully and explicitly linking the principle of fiction to 
 that of imitation through probability, and indicating more 
 
 110 See above, p. 111. 
 iii§§3ff. 
 
 112 7b., p. 66, § 7. 
 
 113 lb., p. 66, § 7. 
 
 11* Loc. cit. 
 
 115 Ih., § 4. It must be admitted, however, that in this searching of the 
 poets for their own interpretations he lays himself open in § 4 to the charge 
 of making "a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's."
 
 GREEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 45 
 
 clearly the aesthetic function of variety subserved by the fable. 
 But he made no advance in the matter of definitely separating 
 the ordinary fiction of artistic narration from that particular and 
 stranger aspect of the thing called marvellous. His examples 
 include what is distinctly wonderful and portentous, as may be 
 seen from the quotations above ;^^*' they also include, side by side 
 with these, fictions of the lesser, more ordinary kind. The whole 
 burden of the discourse, however, points rather toward the 
 former than the latter, — rather toward the exaggeration that 
 surprises, than toward the minor verisimilitude, the complete 
 illusion of which leaves us undisturbed. 
 
 The De Siihlimitate^'^'' offers two testimonies toward the 
 criticism of the marvellous. First, it carries on the discussion, 
 already observed in Demetrius,^^^ of the use of wonderful ex- 
 aggeration to heighten the effect of sublimity and climax. 
 Examples of such sublimity are quoted from Homer; their 
 effect is said to be overpowering. Yet, in the next breath, the 
 old moral view stalks across the stage. "But although all these 
 things are awe-inspiring, yet from another point of view, if they 
 be not taken allegorically, they are altogether impious, and 
 violate our sense of w^hat is fitting. ' '^^^ In spite of this umbrati- 
 cality, however, the author has the penetration to point out that 
 in the case of marvels the poet must be granted greater license 
 than the orator. In recommending the use of images to gain 
 sublimity, it is held that the image [^avraa-ia) has one purpose 
 with the orators (that of vivid description, ivdpyua) , another 
 with the poets (that of enthrallment, eWXT^fi?).'^" The poets 
 have a tendency to fabulous exaggeration, and they transcend 
 the credible at all points. In oratory the image should always 
 have reality and truth. ^^^ 
 
 This distinction between poetical and oratorical imagery, 
 with its allowance to the former of something of marvellous 
 
 116 See above, p. 111. 
 
 117 Ed., W. E. Roberts, Cambridge 1899. For date, see p. 16; author- 
 ship, pp. 1 ff. 
 
 118 See above, p. 110. 
 
 119 Op. cit., § IX, 6, 7. 
 
 120 Ih., § XV, 2. 
 
 121 lb., §XV, 7, 8.
 
 46 STUDIES IN TEE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 exaggeration, though given with an air of some doubt, as Pro- 
 fessor Saintsbury remarks,'-- is nevertheless a valuable contribu- 
 tion to the theory of the wonderful. It is also to be noted that this 
 is a distinction based on empirical evidence, — not upon philo- 
 sophical generalization. 
 
 The second testimony of the De Suhlimitate is contained in 
 the famous comparison of the Iliad and the Odyssey.'-^ This is 
 the general proposition : the use of marvellous tales in literature 
 is the sign of a declining genius. The Odyssey suggests this 
 observation. The special token of Homer's old age and declin- 
 ing powers is held to be a love of marvellous tales {tcx^lKoixvOov). 
 "You seem to see [in the Odyssey] the ebb and flow of greatness, 
 and a fancy roving in the fabulous and incredible, as though the 
 ocean were withdrawing into itself and was being laid bare 
 within its own confines. (14) In saying this I have not forgotten 
 the tempests in the Odyssey and the story of the Cyclops and the 
 like. If I speak of old age, it is nevertheless the old age of 
 Homer. The fabulous element (to /xvOlkov) , however, prevails 
 throughout this poem over the real. The object of this digres- 
 sion has been, as I said, to show how easily great natures in 
 their decline are sometimes diverted into absurdity, as in the 
 incident of the wine-skin and of the men who were fed like swine 
 by Circe . . . , and of Zeus like a nestling nurtured by the 
 doves, and of the hero who was without food for ten days upon 
 the wreck, and of the incredible tale of the slaying of the suitors. 
 For what else can we term these things than veritable dreams of 
 Zeus?"'^* Here, indeed, our wonder is that the hardships of the 
 hero and the slaying of the suitors should be thought absurd. 
 We, few of us, are yet so sophisticated as to perceive absurdity 
 behind these marvels. The author's condemnation is, of a truth, 
 sweeping enough. Childishness! That is the judgment offered 
 by the reputed Longinus when the question is one of the employ- 
 ment of marvels in literature. We shall find the criticism 
 repeated seventeen hundred years later. 
 
 i^^Hist. Crit., I, 166. 
 
 123 Op. cit., § IX, 11-15. 
 
 124 Tr. Roberts, pp. 66-69.
 
 GEEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 47 
 
 The remaining notices of Greek criticism of the marvellous 
 are of little importance, and should be discussed briefly. The two 
 great names after Aristotle — Plutarch and Longinus — are suc- 
 ceeded by a roster to which belong hardly any other than the 
 names of minor show-rhetoricians, from Dion Chrysostom of 
 Plutarch's own century, to Julian in the fourth; under Byzantine 
 criticism Professor Saintsbury in his History of Criticism men- 
 tions only three Greek names, — Photius of the ninth, Tzetzes of 
 the twelfth, and John of Sicily of the thirteenth century. Several 
 of the recurrent subjects upon which these critics exercised their 
 ingenuities, and which touch the subject of the marvellous more 
 or less indirectly, may be mentioned. Of direct contribution to 
 the subject there is practically nothing. 
 
 The old quarrel between Plato and the Poets is not lost to 
 sight. Maximus Tyrius^^^ discusses "Whether Plato was right 
 in banishing Homer from his Republic?", and endeavors to 
 harmonize poetry and philosophy. Sextus Empiricus, the phil- 
 osopher, maintains that the sayings of the poets are harmful, 
 useless, or of but little use.^^e 
 
 The interpretation of myth and mythic elements by rational- 
 ization and allegory continues. Dion Chrysostom accounts for 
 the artists' representation of the sun and moon in human form 
 by attributing to those bodies an intelligence which the artist can 
 adequately represent only by foregoing realistic fiifir]aL<; and 
 symbolizing them, instead, in human form. This symbolism, he 
 says, is far above that of the crude barbarians who see the gods 
 in the form of animals.^" Maximus Tyrius recommends the 
 allegorical interpretation of the poets. In the matter of the 
 fictitious nature of poetry the same writer says that poetry is 
 "based on fictions as to its arguments. "^-^ 
 
 Philostratus cannot away with Homer's airCOava. He remarks 
 that for heroes to be 8€/ca7r7;;^€i? is pleasant enough in mythology, 
 
 125 Ed., Reiske, 2 vols., Leipzig 1774. I have not been able to gain 
 access to the books, and have relied on Professor Saintsbury 's informa- 
 tion {Eist. Crit. I, 117). 
 
 120 Ed., Fabricius, Leipzig 1840, Vol. II, pp. 114, 115 (Adversu^ Gram- 
 maticos, Lib. I, Cap. XIII, §§292-296). 
 
 ^^'' Dion Chrysostom, ed., J. De Arnim, Berlin 1893, Disc, xii (' OXvairinds) , 
 §§56ff. (Vol. I, 171ff.). 
 i28ifisf. Crit, I, 117.
 
 48 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS. 
 
 but as a matter of fact unbelievable. This hint of two possible 
 points of view is followed by a long jeu d' esprit on the evidences 
 of giants, — an excuse for a collection of marvellous tales.^^* 
 Sextus Empiricus flatly declares that poetry is absolutely useless 
 so long as it deals in feWi? tcrTO/aiat?."" 
 
 But the mass of discussion among these rhetoricians, so far as 
 the wonderful is concerned, is taken up with the discussion of the 
 orator's use of the fable (^fivdo<i). All the Progymnasmata 
 ('Composition-Books,' as Professor Saintsbury calls them^^^ 
 discuss the proper use of the Aesop-like fable for rhetorical 
 illustration and variety; and the discussions become as tiresome 
 and useless for our purposes, as do the other divigations of the 
 rhetoricians for the student of general literary criticism. This 
 minor type of the fable, a rhetorical type of fiction, and, in one 
 sense, of the marvellous, was already centuries old. Aristotle 
 discusses fables as a division of proof by examples, and cites as 
 illustrations Stesichorus on Phalaris, and Aesop at Samos. He 
 remarks that fables are suited to popular oratory, — an echo of the 
 disesteem in which the wonder-tales were held by the cultured."* 
 Demetrius, as we have already observed, recommended the 
 piquant use of fables. 
 
 Turning to Walz'^^ we find the rhetoricians differentiating 
 fivdo'i and Scqyrjfia. MvOo'i for the orator is a short story, false 
 (^|revB^<i) , but probable (Tri'^ai/o?). !!&)<? B'av <y4vono Tridavof; 
 *'Av ra TrpoaijKovra Trpdy/xaTa rot? TrpoacoTroi'i airoSiBco/jLev 
 (Hermogenes, Cap. I). The hi-qyrifxa^ on the other hand, must 
 be eKdeaiv irpdyfiaTO'i <y€yov6TO<; ^ ?) o)? yeyovorof (Hermog. 
 Cap. 2). The fable is used by the orator to illustrate and drive 
 home his point, but o ixvdo<; nroiriTOiv fxkv TrporfKde (Apthonius I) ; 
 and was used by the ancients, as e.g., by Hesiod rov Trj<; aT]86vo<; 
 eliroiv {Epy. 201) -(Hermog. I and Theon. HI) . Thus, a relation 
 is suggested between the fable of the orator and the allegorical 
 use of myths by the poets. The iJLv0o<i is called Sybaritican, 
 
 i'^^ Fhilostratus, ed., Kayser (Teubner). Heroic Dialogue, §§ 667, 668. 
 
 130 Op. cit., loc. cit., § 278. 
 
 131 m.st. Crit., I, 96. 
 
 132 Aristotle, Rhetoric II, 20 (tr., Well. Ion, p. 182). 
 lasWalz, Ehetores Graeci, Stuttgart, etc. 1832.
 
 GREEK CEITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 49 
 
 Cilician, or Cj'prian, according to its origin; but to Aesop most 
 are attributed (Hermog. I). It is of three kinds and uses: 
 TO fiGv iari Xo'ytKov^ to Be tjOikov^ to 8e /j-lktov (Apthonius I). 
 Examples for the orator's use are conveniently appended. 
 
 All this is at any rate an acknowledgment, a recommendation, 
 of a literary, distinctly rhetorical (in the ancient sense of the 
 term) use of fiction, and, by the way, of the marvellous. The 
 fables given as examples contain elements of wonder. Here was 
 the evolution, at an early time and long continuing, of a distinct 
 and technical type of marvellous narrative; and, what is most 
 noteworthy, it was a development within prose composition, — a 
 sort of incidental, illustrative use of prose fiction. With it there 
 went a critical theory, — something that did not accompany the 
 geographical romances of Plato, Euhemerus, and Diodorus,^^* or 
 the fictions of Philostratus.^^^ 
 
 Julian (c. 331-363 A.D.) undertakes, in the oration against 
 the Cynic Heraclius,^^" to trace the genealogy of the fables, but 
 supposes that they, like the other kinds of art, were invented by 
 the people among whom they are found ( § 2 ) . These fables 
 were adapted to the child-like intelligence of earlier generations ; 
 but the poets added the apologue (6 alvo<;) , which differs from the 
 fable in that while the latter is addressed to children, the former 
 is intended for men, — for their enlightenment as well as for their 
 pleasure ( § 3 ) . The Oration continues, in a fashion equally un- 
 profitable for us, with a discussion of the place of m^i;hography 
 with reference to morality and theology, the kinds of mystery- 
 fables and their comparison, the pedagogy of Plutarch in the 
 matter, and concludes (§§ 17 ff.) with an example of the fable. 
 The whole discussion is religious rather than literary, and is all 
 under the neo-platonic view. It serves as a type of the rhetorical 
 and mystical discussion of fable, but contributes nothing to the 
 theory of fiction or wonder. 
 
 Of the three Byzantines noted by Professor Saintsburj-, the 
 testimonies are equally without value. The Bibliotheca of 
 
 134 See Chassang, Histeire du Roman, Part 2, Ch. IV. 
 
 135 See Chassang, Appollonius de Tyane, Paris 1862. 
 
 ^SG Emperetir Julien, (Euvres Coinplclcs, tr., E. Talbot, Paris 1863. Text 
 ed., Hertlein (Teubner).
 
 50 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 Photius^^^ includes notices of quite a number of works of fiction, 
 or collections of wonderful tales, but the comment upon them is 
 without significance."* Tzetzes and John of Sicily offer nothing. 
 
 The gist of Greek criticism of fiction and the marvellous 
 has now been presented : the present chapter may be brought to 
 its conclusion by a brief summary of the more general results of 
 the inquiry. The mere mentioning of the following points will be 
 enough to indicate their derivation from the facts already pre- 
 sented, and their bearing upon the problem of the marvellous. 
 
 (1) Greek criticism of the marvellous is for the most part an 
 undifferentiated element in Greek criticism of the fictitious in 
 the poets. In most of this criticism there seems to be little or no 
 change of emphasis when the illustrations pass from the minor 
 aspects of fiction to the decidedly marvellous. Both are criticized 
 in like fashion in the same breath. In some cases, however, 
 notably in Aristotle and Plutarch, the primary reference seems 
 to be to the distinctly prodigious. 
 
 (2) Greek criticism of the fictitious arises through a criticism 
 of Greek mythology. This myth-criticism begins with a moral 
 expostulation with the impieties and improprieties of many of the 
 marvellous details of the god-stories, extends to a moral attack 
 upon the fiction of mythology and of the poets in general, and is 
 given something of an economic aspect by Plato, who is also the 
 chief supporter of its ethical character. This criticism is de- 
 livered by the philosophers, historians, and, in less degree, by 
 some of the poets themselves. 
 
 (3) Various solutions are offered of the difficulties and per- 
 
 isT Photius, Migne, Patrologia Graeca, Vols. 3, 4 (103, 104). 
 
 138 Vol. 3, Col. 414, 475. Photius attributes a certain school of fiction 
 (lamblichus, Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Damascius) to Lucian and 
 Lucius. In Col. 478 is his opinion of the school. His notice (Col. 413) 
 of AAMA2KI0T HEPI RAPAAOSfiN AOFOI (consisting of four books, one 
 each on the following subjects, — of incredible fictions, of incredible stories 
 aV;out demons, of incredible tales of souls apjicaring after death, of in- 
 credible things of nature) introduces to our notice a work which had many 
 companions in antiquity. Several of these, collections of marvellous 
 anecdotes, have been edited by A. Westermann, raradoxographoi, Bruns- 
 wick 1839. The most famous of them all is Pseudo-Aristotelian IIEPI 
 GATMASinX AKOTZMATON, ed. Beckmann, Cottingcn 1786. Cf. with 
 these the M ythoc/raphoi Graeci, ed. Westerman, Brunswick 1843.
 
 GBEEK CRITICISM OF FICTION AND MARVEL. 51 
 
 plexities raised by the impious and fictitious (marvellous) ele- 
 ments in mythology. Eationalization, allegory, euhemerism, are 
 broached; they are all philosophical and do not recognize the 
 problem in any other light than that of philosophy and religion. 
 
 (4) Inasmuch as the moral criticism and the philosophical 
 solutions are necessarily based upon Homer and Hesiod, these 
 poets themselves, and, by analogy, all poets, are censured and 
 censored. Thus, a criticism of poetry, that is to say, literary 
 criticism itself, begins to develop out of the ethical criticism of 
 marvel and fiction. But so long as the ethical preoccupation 
 continues literary criticism does not realize its own separate ends. 
 
 (5) At last, with Aristotle, a real literary criticism develops, 
 which is divorced from moral philosophy. This new criticism, in 
 turn, attacks the problem of fiction, and especially the marvellous 
 in fiction, as a purely literary problem. An aesthetic has suc- 
 ceeded the ethical outlook. Thus is developed the theory of poetic 
 truth, under which the marvellous assumes its proper place. 
 
 (6) The successors of Aristotle mix the real literary criticism 
 he established with the older moral expostulation and interpreta- 
 tion. Plutarch is the most important name after Aristotle. 
 
 (7) Throughout the course of critical commentary run cer- 
 tain minor doctrines, as they have been called, w^hich gather 
 force by repetition. Such are the * Charis-doctrine ' (Pindar, 
 Aristotle, Demetrius {De Elocutio), Plutarch, etc.) ; and the 
 doctrine of sublimity and climax, closely related to, if not 
 identical with, the 'Charis-doctrine' (Demetrius, Longinus). 
 Both these doctrines, by justifying the use of the marvellous for 
 the literary purposes of beauty and force, contribute to the 
 aesthetic liberation of the wonderful. 
 
 (8) Finally, it may be remarked that these facts concerning 
 the development of a literary criticism of the marvellous, illus- 
 trate at the same time a stage in the history of the marvellous. 
 To describe that stage would be to repeat the details of the 
 rise of that new Greek consciousness by which the marvels of a 
 believed religion passed through the transitional epoch of ethical 
 distrust and criticism, to the condition of accepted aesthetic 
 illusion. Literature then inherited the marvellous a second time, 
 — not, as at first, from religious faith, but from an aesthetic 
 reconciliation of fact and fiction.
 
 52 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 
 
 Inadequacy of previous descriptions of wonder — States 
 allied to wonder: (1) surprise, astonishment, and curiosity; 
 (a) surprise differentiated logically, as in sudden and unusual 
 experiences; (b) surprise differentiated physiologically, as in 
 short and long "circuits"; (c) passing of surprise [through 
 astonishment, at times] to curiosity and wonder; (d) relations 
 of curiosity, explanation, and wonder; (e) six typical cases; 
 
 (f) differentiation of the improbable and the impossible, and 
 their relations to wonder and marvel and to the six typical cases; 
 
 (g) the marvellous: (2) belief and wonder; (a) definition; 
 (ft) degree of belief consonant with wonder; (c) the ridicu- 
 lous; (d) belief and the standard of ideal possibility: (3) 
 imagination and the marvellous: (4) fear and marvel: (5) 
 pleasure and marvel. — Summary. 
 
 In spite of the large part that wonder has played in the 
 history of ideas, especially in the realm of religious thought 
 and belief, and although its genetic relation to reflection and 
 philosophy was a truism in the days of Plato^ and Aristotle,^ 
 its serious investigation has hardly reached beyond the descrip- 
 tive stage in which Descartes left it in his Traite des Passions.^ 
 Bain is only a little fuller in his description than Descartes. 
 "Surprise and wonder," he says, "are due to the clash of op- 
 posing states; the intrusion of something extraordinary or un- 
 familiar, through which is incurred a shock that may be con- 
 
 1 Plato, Theaetctus, § 155. — ' ' For wonder is the feeling of a philos- 
 opher, and philosophy begins in wonder. ' ' 
 
 2 Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 2, 9 (Bekker). 
 
 3 Art. LIII, L 'admiration: — Lorsque la premiere rencontre do quelque 
 objet nous surprend, et que nous le jugcons etre nouveau, ou fort different 
 de ce que nous connaissions aujjaravant, ou bion de ce que nous siipposions 
 qu'il devait etre, cela fait quo nous I'admirons ot on soinnios otones; ot 
 pour ce que cela pout arriver avant que nous connaissions aucuncment si 
 cot objet nous est convenable ou s'il ne 1 'est pas, il me somhlc quo 1 'ad- 
 miration est la premiere de toutes les passions: et ello n 'a point de con- 
 trairo, k cause quo si 1 'objet que so presonte n'a rien on aoi qui nous sur- 
 prcnne, nous n 'en sommes aucunemont emus, ot nous le consid^rons sans 
 passion.
 
 TRE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEE. 53 
 
 sidered as something beyond mere sensation."* It is perhaps 
 somewhat unfortunate that the intrusion of the unfamiliar 
 object should be regarded as a state of mind in conflict with 
 another pre-existing state; for one must ask where the strange 
 state originated, whence it gathered its support and "fringe," 
 and if, when once constituted, it is not by itself the wonder 
 or surprise. Moreover, why the extraordinary or unfamiliar 
 image should be felt as an intrusion, and how it is so felt, are 
 questions nicely glossed, or at any rate rendered all the more 
 tantalizing by the vague phrase, "through which is incurred a 
 shock that may be considered as something beyond mere sensa- 
 tion. " A little further on Bain recurs to the subject in con- 
 nection with his definition of novelty. Novelty he explains as 
 the superior force of stimuli at their first application.^ On 
 the other hand, wonder, he avers, is founded on relativity, and 
 involves more than simple novelty. While surprise is one degree 
 beyond novelty as being a shock which is not only novel but 
 also unexpected, involving contradiction and conflict, wonder, 
 on the other hand, contains surprise with the new effect of con- 
 templating something that rises above human experience and 
 that elevates us to a feeling of superiority. Often, though, the 
 object of contemplation may be something that falls decidedly 
 beneath the ordinary.® — But we may easily question these dicta 
 on novelty and surprise; and the relation between surprise and 
 wonder seems too glibly stated. 
 
 The newer psychology, with its less essay-like character, is 
 almost equally vague upon the subject of wonder. The simple 
 character and early appearance of the emotion, hinted at by 
 Descartes, are insisted upon by Wundt^ and by Preyer.^ Sully 
 writes: "The intense craving for the wonderful, the love of 
 the marvellous, has something of an intoxicating effect, and 
 paralyzes the impulses of inquiry. But in its moderate degrees 
 the emotion of wonder is the natural stimulus to further in- 
 quiry. Wonder lives by isolating the new fact or circumstance 
 
 * Bain, TJie Emotions and the Will, London 1875, p. 69. 
 
 5 Op. cit., p. 83. 
 
 6 7d., p. 85. 
 
 7 Physiol. Psychol, II, 18, 332. 
 
 8 Die Seele des Eindes, Leipzig 1890, pp. 108, 134.
 
 54 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS. 
 
 from the familiar order of experience."^ "Wonder, he further 
 remarks, is a more complex affair than surprise, and implies 
 comparison and recognition of contrast. "What is wholly new 
 or unexpected always surprises us, but does not necessarily 
 excite wonder. "^° The notice continues with a few words upon 
 the pleasurable aspect of w'onder and also upon its relation to 
 fear and admiration. In conclusion, its complex nature in ref- 
 erence to intellectual emotion is set forth: it involves fixing of 
 attention at the stage of surprise, discrimination further on, 
 may interfere with inquiry, but often is the starting point for 
 discovery. As cap-stone to such a general and unsatisfactory 
 account. Professor Dewey's statement may well be quoted here. 
 "It may come about that we grow so used to our customary 
 environment that we feel wonder only when the shock of sur- 
 prise strikes us, but the normal healthy attitude of the mind 
 is wonder at all facts, familiar or novel, until it has mastered 
 their meaning and made itself at home among them."" 
 
 Professor James' notice is equally vague, and even more 
 meagre, though it does suggest, as another line of inquiry, the 
 instinctive sensory susceptibility of animals to novel stimuli. 
 "Already pretty low down among vertebrates," he says, "we 
 find that any object may excite attention provided it be only 
 novel, and that attention may be followed by approach and 
 exploration by nostril, lips, or touch." (Intervene some remarks 
 upon curiosity and fear as antagonistic principles in such ex- 
 ploration.) "Some such susceptibility for being excited and 
 irritated by the mere novelty, as such, of any movable feature 
 of the environment must form the instinctive basis of all human 
 curiosity, though, of course, the superstructure absorbs contri- 
 butions from so many other factors of the emotional life that 
 the original root may be hard to find. With what is called 
 scientific curiosity, and with metaphysical wonder, the practical 
 instinctive root has probably nothing to do. The stimuli here are 
 not objects, but ways of conceiving objects; and the emotions 
 and actions they give rise to are to be classed, with many other 
 
 Sully, Outlines of Psychology, London 1885, pp. .'522, 523. Tlie italics 
 are mine. See below, p. 65. 
 10 Loc. cit. 
 "J. Dewey, Psychology, 3d. ed., N. Y. 1899, p. 304.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEE. 55 
 
 Eesthetic manifestations, sensitive and motor, as incidental fea- 
 tures of our mental life. ' '^- To this valuable suggestion — ' ' ways 
 of conceiving objects" — we shall recur below.^^ 
 
 Ribot's^* contribution to the subject is as suggestive as any 
 and as sketchy as all. He starts with an "instinct, a tendency, 
 a craving" — the "primitive craving for knowledge" (conserved 
 by selection in the struggle for existence) — and finds its first 
 stage of development to be surprise. Surprise is "a special 
 emotional state which cannot be traced back to any other, consist- 
 ing of a shock, a disadaptation, * * * without contents, with- 
 out object, save a relation." From this first stage he differen- 
 tiates wonder as a second. Surprise, he says, is momentary, a 
 disadaptation, and is without objective material. Wonder, on 
 the other hand, is stable, a readaptation, and possesses as its 
 material some strange or unaccustomed object. It is the awak- 
 ening of attention. The third stage is the interrogation, "What 
 is it? What is the use of it?", and consists in mental assimila- 
 tion. Finally, thinks Ribot, the transition to the disinterested, 
 non-utilitarian period is "through the natural, innate inclina- 
 tion of the human intellect towards the extraordinary, the 
 strange, the marvellous. "'^^ 
 
 In this account there is, to be sure, a suggestive analysis of 
 the relations of surprise, wonder, and curiosity; and the term 
 disadaptation, in spite of its linguistic aw^kwardness, is as con- 
 venient as it is illuminating. Wonder, however, and the won- 
 derful, seem mixed in the suggestion of an instinct toward the 
 marvellous; the subjective nature of wonder is confused with 
 its objective reference.^^ Moreover, the psychological genealogy 
 of the marvellous is not given. He does not say that the descent 
 is from innate curiosity through surprise, wonder, and inter- 
 rogation; but simply adds a fourth stage of disinterested curi- 
 osity by postulating another innate, unnamed mental tendency 
 toward the "extraordinary, the strange, the marvellous." 
 Surely, this is a loose statement. It may be that the author's 
 
 I'W. James, Psychology, II, 429. 
 
 13 See below, e.cj., p. 66. 
 
 14 Eibot, Psychology of the Emotions, Lomlon 1897, pp. 36S-371. 
 
 15 Italics are mine. 
 10 See below, p. 69,
 
 56 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 idea is that the love of the marvellous is disinterested curiosity : 
 but even so he is forced to hedge on the word "disinterested";^' 
 and so we are no nearer a clear view of the matter. Even 
 impersonal interest is a questionable phrase when applied to 
 the interest in the marvellous; for the old utilitarian, struggle- 
 for-existence curiosity must in its investigations often have been 
 as unconscious of self-accruing gains as is the curiosity of a 
 modern chance visitor in mediumistic circles. Curiosity, indeed, 
 is as often the vice of the idle as the virtue of the active, — a 
 truism with us no more than with our proto-savages, — a fact with 
 human beings no more than w^itli other animals. Finally, in 
 postulating this instinct toward the marvellous, Ribot gives us 
 no hint as to its nature, — whether, e.g., it be simple or complex. 
 What, may be asked at once, is its relation to the impulse to 
 exaggerate, or to the phenomena of belief or awe?^* 
 
 The rather astonishing failure of the professed psychologists 
 to explicate the important subject of wonder leaves the field 
 open to original remark; and, in view of the present need of a 
 clear and systematic view of the wonder state, it may not be 
 presumptuous for a layman to hazard a few observations on 
 his own responsibility. 
 
 That wonder, like joy and hope, care and anger, is not the 
 name of a single process, but rather of a class, "in which a 
 large number of single affective processes are grouped because 
 of certain common characteristics,"^^ is a statement that invites 
 conviction. Indeed, the complexity of the psychical processes 
 in this case is undoubtedly the very fact that has daunted in- 
 vestigators; but the common experience of the state, its tremen- 
 dous importance in the history of ideas and institutions, espe- 
 cially in those of a religious and literary nature, together with 
 its affiliations with certain of the simplest and most ancient of 
 human psychoses, might easily convert the timidity of empir- 
 ical observation to the enthusiasm of a real hope of beginning 
 the eclaircissement of a field of human phenomena that are as 
 
 IT Op. cit., p. 371. 
 
 18 For other mention of wonder see: A. T. Ormond, Dictionary of 
 Phi1o.<!ophy and Psychology, II, 820-21 (a definition concerned mostly with 
 the religious aspect of wonder) ; G. T. Ladd, Psycholoqy, 1894, pp. 540- 
 541; G. Spiller, The Mind of Man, London 1902, p. 270. 
 
 le Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, Eng. tr., Leipzig 1902, § 13.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WON DEE. 57 
 
 intense in interest as they have been important in development. 
 The best approach to the matter will lie through an examina- 
 tion in detail of certain states closely allied to wonder; and 
 through a decision, in the case of each such state, as to the 
 nature of the alliance. For, on the one hand, any attempt more 
 precise than this to draw up a typical state of wonder must be 
 doomed to failure because of the uniqueness, in variation, of 
 all particular states of wonder; while, on the other hand, the 
 proposed approach will, by its many-sidedness and frequent 
 perspective, naturally afford a series of checks and counter- 
 checks for determining the presence or absence of wonder states. 
 By contemplating the relations to wonder of surprise, curiosity, 
 belief, imagination, fear, and pleasure, there may be gained 
 from a purely descriptive beginning a suggestion for the analysis 
 of complex wonder states into their elements, and also a hint 
 of the physiological processes or conditions upon which their 
 prevalence depends. 
 
 Long ago Descartes indicated the primitive and elemental 
 character of surprise by placing it first in the order of the 
 "Passions, "-° though he confused surprise and wonder in the 
 usual fashion. The presence of the state in animals, where it 
 appears with all the air of simple and immediate motor reac- 
 tion, at once establishes its nature as being far from complex.-^ 
 What more simple, more immediate, than tlie startled movement 
 of wild creatures, say a herd of deer, when surprised in their 
 native haunts? Hit a drowsy dog with a well-aimed stone; 
 the jump of surprise appears quite involuntary, almost a pure 
 reflex. There are scarcely any other feelings, except the gen- 
 eral ones of physiological pleasure and pain, that have to the 
 same extent immediateness of response for their central char- 
 acter, and completeness of motor activity for their peripheral 
 expression. So strong indeed is the latter characteristic that it 
 persists even into those cases where the surprise has become 
 chiefly significant as a distinctively mental phenomenon. The 
 somatic reverberation of the Eureka of the staid scientist is a 
 matter of humorous comment! 
 
 20 See above, p. 120, note 3. 
 
 21 Cf. Eibot, as cited above, p. 123, note 14.
 
 58 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 But what is this thing called surprise? How is it called 
 forth ? It may be said to follow from the interruption of a phys- 
 ical or mental state, or both, by the sudden or by the unusual. 
 If a loud explosion should break in upon me as I am writing 
 these words, or if some one should noiselessly steal up. behind 
 me and close his hands over my eyes, the suddenness of either 
 experience would engender a state of surprise. On the other 
 hand, the German servant-girl would fall into a similar state 
 if the Czar of all the Russias were to announce to her by crier, 
 with due regard to mitigating the sudden nature of the news, 
 the unusual circumstance that he was about to interrupt her 
 ordinary duties with a morning visit. The novelty of such an 
 intention would occasion a surprise only second to that which 
 one might experience upon being set down in the land of Brob- 
 dignag. Or, to take an example that will combine both the 
 sudden and the unusual, as in the majority of cases they are 
 combined, who can look out now from the modern tavern-porch 
 at the Grand Canon of the Colorado without picturing the thrill- 
 ing surprise of Cardenas and his Spaniards when, as they 
 
 advanced slowly over the mesas, suddenly, without the slightest 
 hint of warning, they stood upon the brink of that endless, cas- 
 tellated chasm, doubly unusual, supremely unique, to the won- 
 dering eyes of those old conquistadores who for weeks had seen 
 nothing but endless plain and mesa. In a word, it is the un- 
 looked for, the unexpected, whether because of its suddenness 
 or its unusualness, that, breaking in upon a state of conscious- 
 ness not in train for its adaptation, occasions surprise. To use 
 Ribot's ugly but convenient word, it is the disadaptation re- 
 sulting from the unexpected that produces the feeling under 
 consideration. 
 
 But there is more to observe upon a closer view. In the 
 first class of the examples just given — i.e., in the class that may 
 be termed the "sudden" — the explosion, or the merry joker, 
 afford stimuli that are simple, direct, and physical; and the 
 surprise is easily described as the involuntary response to the 
 physical shock. For such a reflex there needs no play of any 
 save the lower of the central nervous ganglia. But in the second 
 class of examples — the unusual — though there is still a physical
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 59 
 
 character to the stimulus, it is no longer a matter of simple 
 and direct shock obtaining an immediate reflex from the lower 
 centers. If the Governor of the State should visit me this morn- 
 ing, the mere sudden appearing of the man — that, is the mere 
 sudden view of him physically — would be the least of the sur- 
 prise, would quite possibly enter into it not at all; but the 
 mental recognition of the new relation so established, of the 
 unusualness of such a visit, would give almost the entire content 
 of the surprise. This reflection upon a relation involves a 
 course far other than the simple, direct course of the surprise 
 occasioned by the explosion: the center now concerned is the 
 chief ganglionic center of all, the cortex itself.-" The action 
 here is over an indirect and long circuit; and is exceedingly 
 complex as compared with the short circuit of the explosion 
 experience which, instead of rising to the hemispheres, passes 
 from the sense-organ to some lower nerve-center and out to the 
 muscles. The two processes are represented by Professor James' 
 diagram of the two types of reaction." 
 
 We have thus two general cases of surprise, differentiated 
 by both logical and physiological means : the sudden type, in- 
 volving the short circuit of reaction; and the unusual type, in- 
 volving the long circuit of reaction and the cognition of novelty. 
 It might be convenient to call the former 'physical surprise,' 
 and the latter 'mental surprise.' Moreover, it may be noticed 
 in passing, that mental surprise, as involving a concept, affords 
 material for a wider expression, literary or otherwise, than 
 the mere motor response or inarticulate cry of physical surprise. 
 
 A step further. In either case the shock is often so great 
 as to produce an intense duration of surprise, or, stating it in 
 terms of the organism, a state approximating temporary nerv- 
 ous paralysis. This may take place with, or without, the added 
 ingredient of fear; and is generally denoted by the stronger 
 term, astonishment: "struck dumb with astonishment" is the 
 common phrase.-* This must not, however, be confused with 
 
 22 Cf. Sully, as quoted above, p. 54. 
 
 23 W. James, Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 98. 
 
 24 It might be well to insist here upon a differentiation of terms. ' Aston- 
 ishment' might be limited to the nervous effects of this paralysis, — 'amaze- 
 ment' to its mental effects.
 
 60 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 wonder. Often it may be hard for the individual to differen- 
 tiate the two, — to say when he passes from astonishment to 
 wonder; yet the condition implied in the former is anything 
 but wonder. It involves a complete cessation of all activity, a 
 blankness of mind, and a statue-like rigidity of body, which pre- 
 clude per sc all possibility of any activity. On the other hand, 
 wonder, though it lacks the vi\'id acti\'ity of definite reasoning, 
 is by no means a complete cessation of mental activity. Un- 
 certainty, not the paralysis of amazement, characterizes wonder. 
 Johnson was not at pains to distinguish the two when in the 
 Barribler-^ he described wonder as "a pause of reason, a sudden 
 cessation of the mental progress"; and, again, as the "gloomy 
 quiescence of astonishment." 
 
 But the state of surprise, whether it passes into astonishment 
 or not. is in either case too spasmodic to keep its character long. 
 Activity and change are as characteristic of surprise as is im- 
 mediateness of effect. The duration of any one state is limited. 
 What state or states may succeed? 
 
 Consider first the sudden, or physical, case of surprise. If, 
 after the shock, weak or severe, the mind is brought into opera- 
 tion, the surprise or astonishment passes somewhat insensibly, 
 that is gradually, into a new state. Without such succession 
 of mental activity the shock would entirely pass off in motor 
 discharge, — die away in diminuendo of physical reverberation 
 like the lessening waves of a tone vibration; with such activity 
 of the mind, there supervenes upon the involuntary attention 
 won by the shock a new state, the insignia of which are a tend- 
 ency toward voluntary attention and the framing of the ques- 
 tion, "What was it?" Where before the whole process was 
 one of mere neural activity, of what has been called the short 
 circuit, the new state means the establishment of the longer loop. 
 The mind is endeavoring to assimilate the physical experience 
 to its fund of similar experiences, — to relate it, to make adapta- 
 tion succeed disadaptation. 
 
 Of two sorts, however, may be this attempt at adaptation. 
 The mind may be ready with some answer or hypothesis whereby 
 the explosion, to keep the former example, may be accounted 
 
 ^^Eamblcr, July 9, 1751.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 61 
 
 for. The powder works have blown up again! Or cannon 
 are saluting some officer of state! Perhaps it is the blasting 
 for the new tunnel ! The marshalling of these and similar rea°- 
 sons, the weighing of them in evidence, the passing from one 
 to another and back again in search of the real cause, supple- 
 menting them by further inquiries, by telephoning and con- 
 sulting newspapers,— all this is patently what is known as curi- 
 osity. But if, on the other hand, the mind is ready with no 
 answer or hypothesis ; or if, instead of definite hypotheses, only 
 the vaguest of dim hints of possible causes flit ghost-like 
 across the mind, and disappear irrevocably into dimmer shad- 
 ows; or, finally, if the mind lacks sufficient evidence for deter- 
 mining which of its hypotheses is correct, and so remains 
 puzzled and at a comparative standstill,— the condition is one 
 of wonder: wonder as to what is the cause, or as to which of 
 several probable causes is the real one. Similarly, in the ex- 
 ample of the eyes being suddenly covered by the hands of one 
 stealing up behind, whenever there is, or so long as there is, 
 a possibility of discovering who the wag was, the curiosity of 
 the victim is uppermost. But if, conceivably, there should 
 occur no name of a probable perpetrator, or if one be at his 
 wit's end to choose amongst many possible names, a state of 
 wonder may be supposed to supervene. Moreover, it should be 
 noted that in either case — though we cannot say in any case 
 of wonder— yet in either of these cases, or in cases similarly 
 constituted of sudden shock,— let the solution be once given, 
 the wonder disappears immediately. It was another powder 
 mill smashed up! Good, nothing strange there! Or it was 
 blasting in the hills ! Ah, so ! And the wonder dwindles away. 
 The only possible exception to this rule would be such as would 
 cause immediately another condition of surprise, and that a 
 condition of the second or "unusual" class. If, for instance, 
 the reply were, ''It was the falling over of Ut. So-and-so into 
 the bay," a new and greater state of surprise, consequent upon 
 the nnusnalnoss of such a proceeding, would succeed the former. 
 Three cases, or degrees, of the unusual may be observed: 
 first, what I shall call 'mere rarity'; second, improbability; third, 
 impossibility. 
 
 The unusual that is merely rare, and the unusual that is so
 
 62 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 unusual, to speak colloquially, as to be improbable, are easily 
 euough differentiated in concept. Particular examples are 
 often apt to shade both ways. The visit of the Czar to Gretchen, 
 for instance, might, with a slight stretch of judgment, be taken 
 as an example of either case. But finding a land of giants is 
 so much more improbable than the Czar's visit to Gretchen that 
 beside it the visit seems only a case of rarity. For the purpose 
 of the argument, it may be assumed that the Gretchen incident 
 is an example of mere rarity. A captious reader may, in what 
 follows, substitute for Gretchen the winning of a prize in the 
 lottery, or, perhaps, the discovery of an honest alderman! 
 
 Suppose, then, that of a fine Sunday morning Gretchen is 
 employing her motor activities in the ancient and honorable 
 vocation of sweeping and dusting! The chances are, of course, 
 ten to one that her surprise upon opening the door and hearing 
 of the intended visit of the Russian autocrat w^ll durate to a 
 prolonged paralysis of the ordinary functioning of politeness. 
 Even the actual appearance of the Emperor himself will hardly 
 avail to break that spell of Teutonic immobility. But Gretchen 
 is more than astonished: she is amazed. The unusualness of 
 the visit has been recognized mentally, and the mental surprise 
 has been so great as temporarily to arrest the comparing and 
 assimilating functions of her mind. The states of wonder and 
 curiosity will follow, as in the previous case of physical sur- 
 prise, with this difference, — that, whereas in the former case 
 the supervention of curiosity and wonder involved a switching 
 on of the longer loop of reaction, here, on the other hand, the 
 activity of mental surprise has already established that circuit. 
 The indices of the succeeding states are still the same, — vol- 
 untary attention, in place of involuntary attention, and inter- 
 rogation. As long as there is a hope of successfully answering 
 the question, the state of curiosity may be said to endure; with 
 bafflement, to coin a convenient word, wonder succeeds. It is 
 not hard to picture Gretchen 's excited review of possible causes 
 for such an unheard-of visit, or her curious listening at key- 
 holes and badgering of her betters, until, forcibly repressed, 
 her sources of information shut off and her hypotheses wildly 
 vertiginous, she relapses into either a second amazement or the 
 gentler state of helpless wonder!
 
 THE PSYCROLOGY OF WONDEB. 63 
 
 The inter-relations of the characteristic of mere rarity 
 (which by a familiar trick of the mind attaches itself to the 
 objective stimulus^"), of the presence or absence in the mind 
 of explanatory hypotheses, and of wonder, are somewhat com- 
 plex. But the multitude of particular examples may be reduced, 
 I think, to six t}T)ical cases. 
 
 1. Where a seeming rarity ceases with the giving of the 
 explanation. — In this case wonder ceases immediately; and the 
 subject, in discovering that the rarity was only a cheat of seem- 
 ing, feels himself the victim of a trick. — Suppose, for example, 
 that in the course of excavating for the foundations of a "sky- 
 scraper" a laborer came across, many, many feet beneath the 
 surface of the ground, a spherical, curiously marked object, 
 which he at first took for a human skull, but which on closer 
 examination proved to be merely a piece of rock. The wonder 
 of the first moment would quickly vanish in something like 
 amusement or disgust at the curio. On the other hand, any 
 wonder at the curious similarity of the rock to a human head 
 would resolve itself into Case 4, mentioned below. 
 
 2. Where an actual rarity still remains after the explana- 
 tion has been given. — In this case wonder is retained, but with 
 a gradually decreasing vividness. — Suppose, again, that the 
 object found by the laborer really was a human skull, but that 
 later-^ it was explained, upon investigation, that the skull was 
 the fossilized remainder of a prehistoric man of the Bronze 
 Age. Evidently the explanation leaves the object still a rarity, 
 and the wonder experienced at the discovery of the rarity 
 durates after the explanation. This duration of wonder, how- 
 ever, does not invalidate our original assumption of the relation 
 between wonder and ignorance; for, true to the nature of that 
 assumption, the wonder in this case is subject to a gradually 
 decreasing vividness. That skull, placed on the laborer's mantel- 
 piece, would soon cease to be to the laborer himself the object 
 of wonder it was at first. To understood rarity one becomes 
 accustomed. Time and knowledge both weary the wonder. 
 
 -0 Compare above, p. 55. 
 
 2'^ Often the explanation is given first, the rarity itself occurring later. 
 Thus, one may have stuilied all there is to be known about volcanoes; yet 
 his first sight of an actual eruption will cause him something more than 
 surprise and other than curiosity.
 
 64 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 3. Where the rarity is lost, altJiough no explanation is ascer- 
 tained. — Here the rarity is lost by the multiplication of similar 
 objects. Wonder dies a speedy death under this circumstance. — 
 If such skulls were found daily and in all parts of the city, 
 or region, even though there were no sure explanation, they 
 would soon cease to be regarded as wonderful. 
 
 4. Where the rarity remains, and no explanation is given. — 
 In this case there is no multiplication of the objects of rarity; 
 and the sense of wonder keeps only a precarious life because 
 it is subject to the corroding effect of time. — For instance, one 
 such skull might have been found and ignorantly guarded by 
 the laborer against all publicity and chance of explanation. 
 The wonder, then, would first rise, and later wane, describing 
 a curve, as it were. At length a period would be reached when 
 the wonder, while yet present at more and more infrequent 
 intervals of special reflection, would be but pale or altogether 
 absent for the greater part of the time. 
 
 5. Where rarity is kept, but one or more hypotheses, indefi- 
 nitely felt or definitely presented, are disregarded, left unex- 
 plored, — the mind refusing to concentrate upon them because 
 it prefers the idleness of wonder to the exertion of curiosity. 
 Often — perhaps because of the natural inertia of the mind, or 
 it may be because of what Ribot so vaguely calls the innate love 
 of the marvellous — often the mind deliberately prefers the ab- 
 sence of explanation. To this case we sliall return when speak- 
 ing of the pathology of wonder.^^ For the present we need 
 only suppose that the laborer was an imaginative, credulous fel- 
 low, much given to mysteries and miracles — perhaps a religious 
 fanatic — who deliberately disregarded the explanation of his 
 find as a fossil remain, and held it instead to be a saintly relic 
 revealed to him for his particular and secret advantage. In a 
 credulous community such an object might easily find its way 
 into the sacred relics of the church.^® Here, also, belong the 
 
 2« The pathology of wonder will bn (liscuss('(l in another paper. 
 
 20 Compare Johnson's excoriation of the ignorant and lazy intellect 
 which prefers the ease of wonder to the labor of reason : ' ' What they 
 cannot immediately conceive, they consider as too high to be reached, or 
 too extensive to be comprehended; they therefore content themselves with 
 the gaze of folly, forbear to attempt what they have no hope of performing, 
 and resign the pleasure of rational contc^mplation to more pertinacious study 
 or more active faculties." — The Eamblcr, July 9, l?/)!.
 
 TEE PSYCnOLOGY OF WONDER. 65 
 
 "wonder, and no end of wondering" that the ignorant, super- 
 stitious mind experiences when it attributes some rarity in 
 experience "to ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend." Expe- 
 riences of the sort are, of course, multiplied and magnified in 
 the telling; and so they soon progress into absolute impossibili- 
 ties, and travel out of the realm of experiential rarity and won- 
 der into that of 'literary' marvel. Dr. Beattie, speaking of 
 second sight among the Highlanders, quotes the following poem, 
 with the remark that "what in history or philosophy would 
 make but an awkward figure, may sometimes have a charming 
 effect in poetry." 
 
 * * E 'er since of old the haughty Thanes of Ross 
 
 (So to the simple swain tradition tells) 
 
 Were wont, with clans and ready vassals throng 'd. 
 
 To wake the bounding stag, or guilty wolf; 
 
 There oft is heard at midnight, or at noon. 
 
 Beginning faint, but rising still more loud 
 
 And nearer, voice of hunters and of hounds. 
 
 And horns, hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen, 
 
 Forthwith the hubbub multiplies; the gale 
 
 Labours with wilder shrieks, and rifer din 
 
 Of hot pursuit; the broken cry of deer, 
 
 Mangled by throttling dogs; the shouts of men, 
 
 And hoofs thick-beating on the hollow hill. 
 
 Sudden, the grazing heifer in the vale 
 
 Starts at the tumult, and the herdsman's ears 
 
 Tingle with inward dread. Aghast he eyes 
 
 The mountain's height, and all the ridges round; 
 
 Yet not one trace of living wight, discerns: 
 
 Nor knows, o'eraw'd and trembling as he stands, 
 
 To what, or whom, he owes his idle fear. 
 
 To ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend; 
 
 But wonders ; and no end of wondering finds. ' 'so 
 
 6. Lastly, and perhaps to a philosophic mind most signifi- 
 cant, as it is most general, is the case where both rarity aud 
 lack of explanation are created for any object in the vniverse 
 by isolating it in thought from its environment. — It requires 
 but the focusing of the attention exclusively upon any one thing, 
 however humble or mighty, from a blade of spear-grass to Sirius 
 
 ^'^ Albania, a poem. London 1737, folio. Beattie, J., Essays on Poetry 
 and Music, Edinb. 1778, p. 185.
 
 66 STUDIES IN TUE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 himself, in order to render that object a supernal and unac- 
 countable wonder. Divorce the commonest detail from its shel- 
 tering cluster of accustomed relations, and the sense of being 
 baffled in the face of questions of nature and origin is so over- 
 whelming that, though a thousand times and more the thing 
 may have been tacitly accepted and used as a perfectly under- 
 stood object, yet the entire mystery of life itself is felt to be 
 gathered into its particular circle. 
 
 On Earth, in Air, amidst the Seas and Skies, 
 
 Mountainous Heaps of Wonders rise; 
 
 Whose tow 'ring Strength will ne'er submit 
 To Reason's Batt'ries, or the Mines of Wit.^i 
 
 The significance of the case is w^ell summed up by Lazarus: 
 *'In der nothwendigen Isolirung der Betrachtung liegt die 
 psychologische Ursache fiir die Anschauung des Wunders als 
 solehen, daher aber kann jede einzelne Naturerscheinung wie 
 ein "Wunder auf den Besehauer wirken, wenn er die Betrach- 
 tung absichtlich isolirt. . . . Sobald wir aber dasselbe Ding 
 in seinem realen Zusammenhang mit anderen sehen, verschwin- 
 det das Gefiihl des Wunderbaren. Die wissenschaftliche Be- 
 trachtung kennt kein Wunder, weil sie die Erscheinungen nie- 
 mals isolirt, stets nach den Ursachen sucht und auch die nicht 
 sogleich gefundenen stets mit Gewissheit in anderen endlichen 
 Erscheinungen voraussetzt. "^- The last statement is, of course, 
 exact only in an ideal fashion. Even scientific curiosity, as we 
 have observed, is hardly ever so well trained as entirely to give 
 over wondering at the rare in its fields of experience. 
 
 It is necessary to pause a moment for the purpose of pro- 
 viding against any misconception of the relations between won- 
 der and curiosity that might arise from a treatment so schematic 
 as the one hitherto adopted. For the purposes of clear exposi- 
 tion the state of wonder has been represented as though it were 
 alwaj's subsequent to states of curiosity. Now, while the apogee 
 of wonder is indeed reached after the failure of curiosity to 
 find a solution, the lesser degrees of wonder do not always and 
 only occur subsequent to the attempts of curiosity. On the con- 
 
 31 Matthew Prior, An Ode, 1688. 
 
 32 M. Lazarus, Das Leben der Seelc, Berlin 1883, I, 299.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF irONDEE. 67 
 
 trary, wonder may often precede curiosity. A momentary obliv- 
 ion of hypotheses may allow wonder the position of priority. 
 Eeason may be caught napping, and so the field momentarily 
 may be left to wonder. This case is somewhat subject to con- 
 fusion with the fifth of the six typical cases above — the case 
 where inertia of mind prefers the quiescent condition of wonder 
 to the energetic search for reasons. Still more confusing is its 
 relation to astonishment; and it is probable that the majority 
 of cases where wonder is thought to precede curiosity are really 
 cases of that temporary paralj^sis of mental function we have 
 called amazement. 
 
 Again, wonder and curiosity exist side by side. If wonder, 
 in its aspect of baffled reason, may be partially defined as the 
 feeling-tone of the failure to adapt rationally a new relation to 
 the fund of old relations held in memory, it logically follows 
 that every attempt at adaptation, every passing in trial of suc- 
 cessive hypotheses, will be attended with the sense of partial 
 failure, and, therefore, with the feeling of incipient wonder. 
 Moreover, this momentary failure of each successive hypothesis 
 adumbrates a final failure of all hypotheses, — the possibility of 
 an ultimate, complete bafflement. This is indeed the rule of 
 experience. So closely do stages of lapsing wonder and tenta- 
 tive hypothesis follow one upon another, that the ordinary mind 
 does not distinguish between them, as is clearly witnessed by 
 the confusion of wonder and curiosity in the common phrase "I 
 wonder what this is?"; or "I wonder if this is right, or that?" 
 Such phrases are constantly used while curiosity is in full 
 swing; and to say '*I wonder what this is," is equivalent to 
 saying "I am curious to know what this is." The phrase un- 
 consciously attests the fact that wonder and curiosity are after 
 all inextricably intermingled, — if they are not two aspects, the 
 one emotional and the other intellectual, of the same process. 
 Wonder is primarily an emotion of the mind — the sensory ac- 
 companiment, as it were, of the mental and motor activities of 
 curiosity. It reaches its acme when the mental attempt at adap- 
 tation, having failed, exists only potentially as a suspense of 
 the faculties engaged in the adaptative processes.
 
 CS STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 But that pause of the faculties, that suspense of the pro- 
 cesses, that moment of complete wonder, is itself recognized by 
 the mind as one of its characteristic states, and remembered as 
 such. Thus, and the point is extremely important, wonder be- 
 comes a concept. The emotion receives its conceptual baptism; 
 and henceforward it is recognized as an intellectual category. 
 From this double nature of wonder — its experience as an emo- 
 tion and its recognition as a conceptual state — have come the 
 extreme confusion of its contradictory usages as a term, and 
 the difficulty of its analysis and psj^chological description.-''^ 
 
 The concept of wonder, when once established, is liable, 
 especially in uneducated minds, to frequent and immediate as- 
 sociation with all unusual stimuli. A strange creaking of doors 
 at night, tappings at the window-sill or at the bed-post, the 
 creepy sensations of fear itself at such times, immediately call 
 up the wonder concept ; and associations so formed issue in the 
 various forms of spiritual superstition. Indeed, it may be said 
 that in such superstition the association of unusual experiences 
 with the wonder concept has, by long repetition, become im- 
 mediate and habitual, if not instinctive. Rational curiosity plays 
 but small part in such a state of mind ; indeed, rational curiosity 
 is throttled by superstition. In this and similar ways the won- 
 der concept comes to be employed so repeatedly and universally 
 that it is often felt to have an existence of its owm in the scheme 
 of things — to be an entity, or law of exceptions, from which 
 proceed all that is unusual, improbable, or, according to ordi- 
 nary rule, impossible. And, finally, the readiness with which 
 the concept comes to be applied reacts upon its stimulus, so 
 that many a minor circumstance, which otherwise might have 
 escaped notice, comes to be felt as extraordinary. 
 
 33 This double nature of wonder explains the peculiar relations of won- 
 der to the corroding effect of time. On the one hand, because of the 
 extremely transitory nature of that suspense which gives the emotional 
 acme of wonder, the emotion is entirely subject to the deadening effects 
 of time; on the other hand, the idea of wonder remains, is dimmed by 
 time far more gradually, and is capable of resuscitation or reinvigoration 
 at any moment. Of course, the reinvigoration of the idea is usually at- 
 tended with a more or less acute resurrection of the emotion; but in this 
 case the stimulus is, as it were, second-hand (being the memory of a 
 state, and not the original state itself), and so can rarely revive the emotion 
 in its original intensity.
 
 TEE PSYCHOLOGY OF TV ON DEE. 69 
 
 In turn, to create the further confusion of gods and miracles, 
 the mind, by its usual mj-thological trick of externalizing its 
 workings in nature, has dubbed the stimuli of the wonder state 
 wonderful — has personified its own feelings of itself in external 
 events and appearances, and then has explained the former by 
 the latter on the old magical fallacy that like causes like. Such 
 unconscious reasoning in a circle is still a part of our present- 
 day mythology. 
 
 But superstition, and gods and miracles, are carrying the 
 argument beyond the consideration of the eases of mere rarity 
 into the higher degrees of the unusual. It is possible now to 
 turn to these higher degrees. 
 
 The unusual that is improbable demands first attention. 
 
 It is to be noted, at once, that the improbable is more often 
 told, than experienced ; for actual experience clouds improba- 
 bility with the tangibility of an occurrence, and reduces its 
 character to one of mere rarity. Consequently, the improbable 
 is usually encountered in the tales of others, or in the imaginative 
 retrospection of the teller himself. In literature, therefore, which 
 in some of its forms is a worked-over tale, the improbable may be 
 expected to thrive as in its native tropics. There, too, its con- 
 ceptual character, its character of an inference from the rule of 
 experience, will find its expression in the crafty marshalling of 
 experiences not by the laws of natural chance, but by the judg- 
 ment of the artist. 
 
 In the second place, it must be at once conceded that the 
 inferential character of the concept of improbability may con- 
 tain on the bare face of it a skepticism bj'^ no means favorable 
 to wonder. Thus, for example, the very pronouncing as im- 
 probable the tale of the Czar's visit to Gretchen may intimate 
 a disbelief which would sooner ridicule the tale than see its 
 wonder. Improbability, as a judgment advanced with definite 
 assurance, certainly produces laughter rather than wonder. 
 
 But, on the other hand, the nature of improbability is by 
 no means constant. Its concept is subject always to the change 
 incident to its relative character. Tlie individual who realizes 
 this fact more or less clearly, or who temperamentally is in- 
 clined to wavering convictions, not seldom advances the ridi-
 
 70 STUDIES IN THE MAHVELLOVS. 
 
 cule of improbability with very feeble assurance. Constantly 
 feeling that the improbable is not impossible, but that it may 
 be only a higher and rarer degree of the unusual, he is by no 
 means ready to indulge in hasty ridicule. To him the improb- 
 ability increases the wonder. His mind, very likely, has already 
 developed a readiness to apply the wonder concept. Therefore, 
 the hesitancy of mental adaptation, which the improbable 
 arouses in him, is brought into immediate association with won- 
 der. And it is the very contradictory nature of this vacillating, 
 undetermined state of mind, where judgment varies from a 
 half-hearted assertion of skepticism to the undecided feeling of 
 wonder, and back again, that serves best of all to keep the state 
 of wonder alive and vivid. But of that further, when the re- 
 lations of belief and wonder are considered by themselves. 
 
 Here it must be added that when the improbable is taken 
 in this sense, as a higher and rarer degree of the unusual, its 
 relation to curiosity brings out a new aspect which should be 
 strongly emphasized. In all cases so far considered, both those 
 of suddenness and rarity, there has always been the possibility 
 of a state of curiosity intervening between the stimulus and 
 the wonder state; and the curiosity has depended, as it always 
 does, upon the attempt at mental adaptation. With the baffle- 
 ment of that attempt, wonder has succeeded. But in the case 
 of the distinctly improbable (a Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde story, 
 for instance; or, better still, the story of a trip to the moon 
 and back: supposing, in both cases, no explanation is offered 
 of the circumstances) the immediate recognition of the wild 
 divergence from the probable tends to abbreviate, or even, in 
 some cases, entirely abrogate, the state of curiosity in favor of 
 one of wonder or marvel. Within the bounds of belief the 
 very improbability clouds the effort of curiosity to find a suffi- 
 cient explanation, and gives in advance a sense of the abortive- 
 ness in which the effort must end. Afterwards, to be sure, the 
 habit of curiosity, the forlorn hope of gaining some clue to the 
 more than remarkable condition, may occasion some effort, more 
 or less abortive, toward finding a solution. But the stronger 
 the improbability, the less hope there is in such effort. At any 
 rate, the effort is in the great majority of cases secondary to 
 the wonder state.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 71 
 
 The relation of improbability to explanatory hypotheses, and 
 to the feeling of the marvellous, may be summarized in five 
 cases corresponding to the first five of the six cases in which 
 the relations of rarity to explanation and wonder have already 
 been tabulated.^* For the sake of clearness the phraseology of 
 the former passage is copied here verbatim. 
 
 1. "Where a seeming improbability ceases with the giving of 
 the explanation. — In this case marvelling ceases immediately; 
 the subject, in discovering that the improbability was only a 
 cheat of seeming, feels himself the victim of a trick. Mrs. Rad- 
 cliffe's marvels are of this sort. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, 
 for instance, the Something behind the veil in Montoni's castle, 
 the weird singing in the woods of St. Clair, and Ludovico's dis- 
 appearance, are but three of numberless cases where a marvel 
 lasts through many chapters only to be explained tamely as a 
 most matter-of-fact affair when one's suspense has reached the 
 breaking point. It is impossible to keep up a show of marvel 
 when the explanation reveals the rarity as an imposition. 
 
 2. Where an actual improbability still remains after the 
 explanation has been given. — In this case marvelling persists, 
 but, in general, with a gradually decreasing vividness. In Haw- 
 thorne's Rappacini's Daughter, the wonderful Beatrice is at 
 last understood as one who "had been nourished with poisons 
 from her birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued 
 with them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in 
 existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich per- 
 fume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have 
 been poison." — "Is this not a marvellous tale?" asks Baglioni. — 
 Yes, a marvel to explain a marvel; or, as it may be stated, an 
 improbability still an improbability after the explanation ! It 
 need hardly be pointed out that the objection that this explana- 
 tion does not scientifically and exactly explain anything, is 
 quite beside the mark. Under most circumstances, other things 
 being equal, the very lapse of time will produce a gradual 
 weakening of the feeling of the marvellous in this case. 
 
 3. Where the sense of improbability is lost, although no ex- 
 planation is ascertained. — Here the sense of improbability is lost. 
 
 3* See above, pp. 63 ff.
 
 72 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 because, by the multiplication of similar improbabilities, we lose 
 the very sense of their improbability. IMarvelling dies a speedy 
 death under this circumstance. The constant repetition of im- 
 probable prowess upon the part of the heroes of fairy-stories, 
 the endless rehearsal of the improbable doughtiness of the 
 knights in Le Morte d' Arthur (provided, always, one is read- 
 ing credulously like a child, and providing, also, one's reading 
 is continuous enough to realize the repetition) have undeniably 
 a dulling effect upon our capacity for marvelling. The effect 
 is analogous to that loss of the sense of the marvellous that 
 would ensue in real life could we conceive of Beatrice Rappa- 
 cinis becoming as common as Mary Smiths. Even though there 
 were no more explanation than accompany the Mary Smiths, 
 these Beatrice Rappacinis could not be felt as marvellous. 
 Repetition establishes probability, fact ; it destroys improbability. 
 4. Where the sense of improbability is kept, and no explana- 
 tion is presented. — In this case there is no multiplication of the 
 objects of improbability^ ; and the feeling of the marvellous keeps 
 only a precarious life (unless complicated by other emotions, such 
 as fear^^), because it is subject to the corroding effect of time. 
 To refer to Hawthorne's tale again, one might be forced so 
 constantly to live with, or see, the beautiful but baleful Beatrice, 
 that, although one never learned her secret, the marvel of her, 
 while yet recognized at intervals of special reflection, would be 
 hardly felt, or altogether absent, for the greater part of the time. 
 In literature, the case is represented by the curve of marvelling 
 — first rising, and then, with time, falling — which credulity 
 describes in repeated readings of Beo^vulf's fight with Grendel, 
 or of the slaying of Goliath by David, or of the destruction of 
 the palace by Samson. After imagination has played its part 
 and intensified the marvel, after the marvel has become a well- 
 known story, often repeated, thoroughly familiar, — its pristine 
 power is dimmed, not to be revived except under peculiar and 
 infrequent circumstances. But the marvel that springs from 
 the improbable has a greater initial force and a slower decline 
 than the wonder that springs from mere rarity. 
 
 35 See below, p. 90.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEB. 73 
 
 5. Where improbability is kept, but one or more indefinite 
 hypotheses, vaguely felt, are disregarded, left unexplored, — the 
 mind refusing to concentrate upon them because it prefers the 
 idleness of marvelling to the exertion of curiosity. — Often — 
 perhaps because of the natural inertia of the mind, or, it may be, 
 because of what Ribot so vaguely calls the innate love of the 
 marvellous — often the mind deliberately prefers the absence of 
 explanation. For the present, an example may be drawn from 
 Tieck's tale of The Goblet as translated in Carlyle's German 
 liomance.^^ When Old Albert places the beautiful gold cup 
 between himself and Ferdinand, and the wonderful form begins 
 to rise from it, mist-like, gradually clearing in outline, many 
 a reader would fain forget the indicated explanations of auto- 
 hypnosis and suggestion in order to revel in the rarity of the 
 show. Or Aylmer's tricks of legerdemain, in Hawthorne's tale. 
 The Birthmark, though confessedly the work of a cunning sci- 
 entist familiar with the mirror-tricks of illusion, are yet, by 
 many a mind, too strongly felt as wonderful to allow any hunt- 
 ing up of the half-forgotten chapters of a text-book on physics. 
 
 The contrary-to-fact degree, or stage, of the unusual, which 
 begins to make its appearance with the improbable, rises to its 
 height in the next aspect of our subject, — the impossible. With 
 the impossible, as with the improbable, belief is a necessary 
 prerequisite to the wonder state. But it will be better to post- 
 pone the discussion of belief to a separate category, and to 
 assume for the present that the impossible may and does even- 
 tuate in wonder under the tutelage of whatever may be the 
 proper degree or kind of belief. 
 
 When the divergence from the rule of experience is carried 
 into the realm ordinarily designated as the impossible, there is 
 a perfect absence of the rational hypotheses of curiosity by the 
 very nature of the case. Witches, hobgoblins, land of faery, 
 Joshua's ruling of the sun, Circe's magical pranks, the descent 
 of Orpheus to Hades, — these, and all their kind, suggest rational 
 hypotlieses only to comparative mythologists. Wonder and 
 spirits are here supreme. This is wonder's own stronghold: 
 
 Carlyle, German Romance, ed. II. D. Traill, N. Y. 1901, I, 369.
 
 74 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 the outposts are the improbable; the citadel is the impossible. 
 From outpost to citadel the story of wonder extends as in a 
 climax, until upon the citadel itself we behold, in an apotheosis 
 of wonder, the dead risen to life and time turned backward in 
 its course. The world is filled with magicians and their famil- 
 iars. Scop and trouhadour sing of enchantment. We more 
 than wonder. We marvel. 
 
 Here, then, at last, is the marvellous. It stands at the apex 
 of a general tendency away from the ordinary, which, after taking 
 its rise in small matters of sudden stimuli, and passing on 
 through a multiplicity of grades of the merely rare, finally cul- 
 minates in the higher reaches of the improbable and impossible. 
 The marvellous is a step out of reality. Because of that very 
 fact, the marvellous naturally belongs rather to the tale of 
 imagination than to the reality of physical adventure. What 
 but telling can involve the marvellous, — what but that telling 
 which sooner or later finds its way into the form of literature? 
 Illusions and hallucinations, or, from a different point of view, 
 miracles and visions, are the only exceptions to this rule of the 
 unexperienced; and they, because of the supreme individual 
 necessity' of telling them to one's fellows, also must soon find 
 themselves brought into literary form, or some precursory con- 
 dition of such form. It is strange enough, and a fact that can- 
 not be insisted upon too strongly, that the very passing out of 
 actual fact, the very escape from hypothesis, is what throws the 
 marvellous into the arms of literature. Here is indeed to the 
 front the lying genius of words, — that wondrous capability that, 
 judged from a moral point of view, afforded Greek philosophy, 
 as we have already seen, the all too pious beginning of a literary 
 criticism of the marvellous.^^ 
 
 37 Present usage of the term marvellous illustrates this character of 
 impossibility. Nowadays, the marvel j)ar excellence is the tale of spirit- 
 ualisin, the alleged feat of clairvoyance, the miracle of the Church. These 
 things, directly contrary to usual experience, transcending the possible as 
 we ordinarily conceive the possible, are the things that we now commonly 
 term marvels. True, we say such and such a piece of acting is "marvel- 
 lously well done"; but the very attempt, of which we are conscious, to 
 reach after the most superlative word in our effort at that polite compli- 
 ment, is x)roof in itself of the exaggeration of circumstance to which the 
 word strictly belongs. "Wonderfully well done," would be the truer 
 phrase, signifying "rarely well done"; marvellous should be reserved for 
 those cases that smack decidedly of the improbable and impossible.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WON DEE. 75 
 
 In the rising plane of wonder states established by the gradual 
 ascent from suddenness and mere rarity to the improbable and 
 impossible, it would be very convenient if we could draw a divid- 
 ing line across the middle and call all states and stimuli belong- 
 ing to the lower half — the sudden and unusual classes — wonder- 
 ful; and all states and stimuli belonging to the higher half — the 
 improbable and impossible — marvellous. This limitation of terms 
 is, in fact, here proposed; and henceforth, throughout this book, 
 the terms will be used, technically, under this limitation. That 
 for such a technical distinction there is some warrant in the 
 general use of the words, is at once obvious from the previous 
 discussion of usage.^® Marvellous is indeed a heavier term than 
 wonderful, and contains in its fringe of sublimer and more awful 
 association the warrant for such a limitation. 
 
 But to return to our analysis. The careful reader may have 
 discovered an apparent flaw in the reasoning of the last para- 
 graph but one. INIiracles and visions were there cited as excep- 
 tions to the rule that marvels cannot be experienced, and yet, 
 in the .same breath, they were put forward as examples of the 
 impossible. The marvellous seems with a vengeance to have 
 carried us beyond the bounds of the logical. What can solve 
 this difficulty, and also, at the same time, remove another ob- 
 jection, which must have been felt by every mind, viz, that the 
 very impossibility cited destroys by its irrationality the sense 
 of the marvellous and substitutes that of the ridiculous? The 
 answer is not far to seek. Surprise, curiosity, — these have led us 
 to wonder. Our next clue contains the reply to the present diffi- 
 culty. Belief ! There is the factor in the wonder-complex which 
 steps into the logical breach, renders the impossible possible to 
 experience, and drives the ridiculous from the citadel of marvel. 
 Belief makes all things possible without destroying the magic 
 land of the impossible. It does this by its own irrationality. By 
 accepting as real what reason warns it is impossible, belief is 
 
 ■■"* See above, pp. 8-13. One can hardly use the long phrase 'the emotion 
 of marvelling' each time it is necessary to speak of that emotion. For this 
 reason, it has been necessary to e.xteml the meaning of the word 'marvel' 
 to designate the 'emotion of marvelling'; just as 'wonder' designates the 
 'emotion of wondering.' 'Marvel,' with this new meaning, will often be 
 found in the following pages.
 
 76 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 enabled to keep the sense of the impossible while denying it. 
 As Principal Jevons remarks, "the tenacity with which a belief 
 is held does not vary with the reasonableness of the belief or 
 the amount of evidence for it ; but, on the contrary, those people 
 are usually most confident in their opinions who have the least 
 reason to be so. "^^ Thus, while to unbelief visions are hallu- 
 cinations and miracles are illusions, they are to belief particular 
 realities that do not destroy the general concept of impossibility. 
 And as such they, and their like, are marvellous, — not ridiculous. 
 The impossible, says belief, is possible in rare cases, perhaps 
 in very rare cases. In one word, it is through belief that im- 
 possibility comes to be regarded as the supreme case of the un- 
 usual, or of rarity. 
 
 Thus belief makes marvel,*" — that is, clears the way for the 
 development of marvel. But marvel also makes belief. The 
 vividness with which a miraculous event first stirs the emotion 
 of wonder, before the mind has busied itself logically with sug- 
 gestions of irrationality and doubt, has much to do with the 
 perpetuation of the belief in the miracle. Other things being 
 equal — that is, supposing in a given individual the rational 
 index remains constant under a series of suggestions of the 
 miraculous — the greater the initial emotion of wonder, the more 
 durable will be the belief in the miracle. This follows from the 
 general proposition that vividness in any emotion tends to in- 
 duce a belief in the reality of the object or supposed cause of 
 the emotion. Familiar examples of this general truth are found 
 in the emotional make-believe of children, where the very vivid- 
 ness of the emotions aroused tends always to give the zest of 
 reality to the childish fiction ; and in the illusion of the stage 
 or the novel, where, again, the vivid emotional participation 
 of the spectator or participant temporarily cheats him into a 
 belief in the reality of the dramatic fiction. Who has not read 
 some weird and awful book*^ far into the wee hours of the night 
 and had his fear of vampires and were-wolves so vividly aroused 
 
 30 F. B. Jevons, Introd. to Eistory of Bdigion, London 1902, p. 20. 
 <o Cf. above, note 38. 
 
 •♦1 Like Bram Stoker's The Vampire, for instance, or Robert Chambers' 
 The King in Yellow.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEE. 77 
 
 that he has found himself half-believing, for a moment, those 
 horrible fictions, and starting nervously at ghostly tappings of 
 the breeze on the window lest they might be the mysteriously 
 fascinating call of the vampire? What so subtly persuades us to 
 the illusion of reality' as this intense play of emotions? Pain 
 inveigles us into belief in the very desperate reality of the suf- 
 ferings of Lear and Othello; joy persuades us unawares into 
 belief in the rollicking reality of Falstaff. 
 
 The very simulation of emotions by those who are dramat- 
 ically inclined leads such actors into a confusion of fact and make- 
 believe, until they can with difficulty tell when they are acting 
 and when not. The emotions are always attached to objects: 
 when the emotions are intensely active the mind naturally as- 
 sumes the objects, and assiunes them as real because the emo- 
 tions are real. This is the "sympathetic magic" of the emotions. 
 
 Wonder, therefore, or marvelling, to speak more strictly, as 
 one of the emotions, will, when vividly stirred, produce this 
 tendency to belief. Let the individual once experience the 
 glamor of a great marvel; let him once feel the ecstasy of the 
 Herculean demi-god whose powers transcend ordinary physical 
 limitations; let him once take part in the voyage to the Hes- 
 perides, in the cleansing of the Augean Stables, in the magic of 
 Jack the Giant Killer, in the quest of the Graal, in the mystery 
 of Parzival, — and his belief in the reality of these powers and 
 adventures is so in love with itself that, against his own mind's 
 later and calmer suggestion of irrationality, he will cry out, like 
 Tertullian, '^ possible quia impossible est." Have not the marvels 
 of the church always been a chief ally in gaining the belief 
 of a certain class? The air of awe and sublime wonder in a 
 stately cathedral overtakes even the mind of the skeptic, and he 
 finds himself, under that glamor, moving faintly back to the 
 belief of his childhood. Lost in marvelling at the legerdemain 
 of the Hindu fakir, we forget for a moment that what we see is 
 not real."*- Who does not marvel at Wagner's Parzival until 
 his imagination is gripped with a great reality? even though it 
 
 42 Of course the "seeing" is a stronger ally of belief than the mar- 
 velliug; biit the marvelling also persuades us. What we feel seems real, 
 as well as what we see; and here the feeling, the marvelling, is occasioned 
 by what we see.
 
 78 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS. 
 
 be the transcendeutal persuasiou that there is a reality, a real- 
 ness, to the spiritual truth emboclied there? Is not the very 
 transcendental character of that persuasion of reality the very 
 cry of TertuUian? just the marvel-bred assumption of another 
 infinite world, not limited, like this world, by the possible? 
 Other minds find themselves half-believing in the marvellous 
 reincarnation drama in Rider Haggard's two books, She and 
 Ayesha. So the tale of examples might progress indefinitely. Nor 
 is it claimed here that in every example the vividness of the 
 marvel alone produces the impulse to a belief in the reality of the 
 object; such impulses are of course complex. But it is claimed 
 that vivid marvelling aids that im]nilse mightily. 
 
 What admits of this initial vividness of marvel is, of course, 
 a certain show of probability, — just the show that will be suf- 
 ficient at first to impose upon the degree of rationality possessed 
 by the individual. "Probable impossibilities," says Aristotle, 
 "are to be preferred to improbable possibilities."*^ "When this 
 condition is united with a great initial intensity of marvel, even 
 the sternest of logical minds wavers, and remembers fearfully 
 that after all we move in a world unknown, against a black 
 background of infinite possibility. ^Marvel makes belief, and 
 belief makes marvel: they act upon each other in a circular 
 fashion — a vicious circle, maybe — but a circle surely! 
 
 Let us consider again the necessity of belief to marvel. Be- 
 lief is, indeed, necessary to all cases of wonder, particularly to 
 the marvellous; but only in certain degrees or measures is it 
 consonant with the continuance of that emotion. We have al- 
 ready noticed the ridicule that results, instead of marvelling, 
 when the impossible encounters perfect disbelief. To such dis- 
 belief a unicorn is a stimulus to impatience and raillery, and 
 the marvellous is a synonym for the exploded beliefs and fancies 
 of crude ages or uneducated masses. Indeed, there exists, 
 through the medium of belief, a curious relation between the 
 marvellous and the comic. The two are quarrelsome first cousins, 
 as it were. Given a belief of some sort — actual or poetic — in 
 the improbabilities and impossibilities of medieval romances, 
 and wonder and marvel stand forth claiming our serious delight 
 
 ■»- See above, p. 39.
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEB. 79 
 
 and reverence; but given a disbelief in the same objects— in 
 magical swords, and astonishing prowess, and miracles of the 
 Graal — and immediately the mockery of Cervantes routs the 
 marvellous with a flapping of windmills. To Butler the wonder- 
 prating Puritan becomes a Hudibras; Swift sneers out his dis- 
 belief in The Tale of a Tuh. All marvels become comic when 
 deserted by belief; but all comedy by no means becomes mar- 
 vellous when nurtured by a careful belief. Thus, the underlying 
 pretension of the marvellous — its basic weakness of the fictitious 
 and of an imaginative, a priori assumption — is exposed, in con- 
 trast to the greater, simpler truth of comedy. Comedy is the 
 cure of the marvellous, its natural antidote — the antidote found 
 in close proximity to the dangerous object, just as in the field 
 (it used to be said) nature always arranges poison and antidote 
 side by side. 
 
 But the individual who passes from the intellectual stage 
 that ridicules the older marvels, to the further stage of a seri- 
 ous, philosophical skepticism, is, curiously enough, again on 
 the road to marvel. When the universe becomes one great hesi- 
 tation, and doubt, or even agnosticism, confronts the mind at 
 every turn, there comes stealing back upon the heart the sense 
 of everlasting mystery and wonder. The skeptic has purified 
 the mystery of life of its anthropomorphic thaumaturgy, but in 
 doing that he has cut loose from certain relations that pretended 
 to explain things by man-conceived marvels: the original mys- 
 tery — more mysterious than the man-made marvel — confronts 
 him forever. He finds himself in the position of philosophic 
 wonder, already described above as the sixth case under 
 the relations of rarity, explanation, and wonder." Indeed, the 
 historical and psychological course of the development of won- 
 der may be said to reach from anthropomorphic thaumaturgy, 
 through the burlesque and parody and satire of that thauma- 
 turgy, on to the philosophic wonder of the serious skeptic or 
 agnostic. 
 
 But full and perfect belief is only less dangerous to the mar- 
 vellous than full disbelief. For by full belief the marvel is 
 quickly assimilated, is associated in a hierarchy of similar im- 
 
 <■* See above, p. 65.
 
 80 STUDIES IN THE MAEFELLOUS. 
 
 possibilities, and so is laid open to the constant danger of losing 
 its anomalous character and of blunting its uniqueness in the 
 mass of the fully accommodated. The impossibility ceases act- 
 ively to be felt as such. The extreme case of this sort is that 
 of the undeveloped or uncritical miiul that has accepted marvels 
 as matters of fact, relying implicitly upon authority, — as a child 
 in his religious belief, or a savage in his traditions. To the 
 unlearned mind, incapable of conceiving of transgressions of 
 natural law, no conception of impossibility as such is possible. 
 Minor wonder such a mind may experience when rarities in its 
 narrow daily experience occur; but marvels of creation, demi- 
 urgic power, and the like, suggest no further wonder than that 
 accompanying the sense of exaggerated power.*'* Such a mind 
 may wonder, but it cannot marvel. 
 
 Somewhere, then, between absolute disbelief and perfect be- 
 lief, somewhere in the region of alternating doubt and belief,*" 
 but with the greater weight on the latter, lies that degree or 
 sort of belief that is the greatest abettor of wonder and marvel. 
 
 Before leaving this important clue of belief it will be well 
 to summarize the relations of belief to the five cases of improba- 
 bility drawn up above.*^ 
 
 I. Very often the exploration of an improbability reduces 
 the case of improbability to one of mere rarity. The mysterious 
 disappearance of Ludovico,*® for instance, from the haunted 
 room in the castle, seems due to the awful influence of the un- 
 quiet spirits who were supposed to infect the chamber. But 
 when this improbability, or impossibility, is explained, some 
 chapters later, by the information that certain bandits had been 
 in the habit of entering the room through a secret tunnel and 
 
 45 See below, p. 94. 
 
 48 If the term belief were generally understood to mean just this alter- 
 nation, the greater part of this attempt at specification of meaning would 
 of course be unnecessary. Professor Baldwin argues that "a conflict 
 between the established, the habitual, the taken for granted, on the one 
 hand, and the new, raw, and violent, on the other hand, is necessary to 
 excite doubt, which is the preliminary to belief." (J. M. Baldwin, Men- 
 tal Development, New York 1000, p. .32.3 and Note 1.) But the confusion 
 between philosophical, scientific, and popular uses of the word appears to 
 make necessary an extended statement of the relation of "belief" to 
 wonder and marvel. 
 
 47 See above, pp. 71-73. 
 
 48 See above, p. 71.
 
 TRE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEB. 8J 
 
 making it their rendezvous, and that they had carried off Ludo- 
 vico through this tunnel, the improbability is at once reduced to 
 the rank of a mere rarity. Such reductions in rank leave the 
 improbability in one or the other of the first two cases of mere 
 rarity.*^ 
 
 (a) Now, if one's belief has been excited by such a spurious 
 improbability as that of the spiriting away of Ludovico,^** the 
 explanation that shows that the improbability was really only a 
 cheat of seeming, leaves the believer annoyed at the trick that has 
 been played upon him, — often so annoyed that he loses not only 
 his first marvel, but also any wonder that otherwise might have 
 attached to the rarity of the unsuspected and skilfully 
 hidden tunnel. Disbelief in the improbability, on the other 
 hand, would only have its attendant ridicule of the mystery 
 aggravated by the explanation of the marvel's spurious char- 
 acter. 
 
 (b) In the case of Rappacini 's daughter,^^ where the improb- 
 ability of her weird beauty is "explained" by the further im- 
 probability of her diet of poisons, the very retention of the 
 attitude of marvelling is dependent upon one's belief in the sec- 
 ond improbability^ Otherwise the explanation would not ex- 
 plain, but would only heap further ridicule upon a circumstance 
 already under smiling suspicion. The explanation of improba- 
 bility by improbabilities is illogical ; but belief is not cast down 
 by the lack of logic, and out of the irrationality springs the 
 marvel. 
 
 II. (a) Where no explanation of the improbability is given, 
 full belief in the improbability practically reduces all possible 
 cases of unexplained improbability to the third ease above,'^- — 
 where familiarity with the marvel destroys its emotional sugges- 
 tiveness. In romance, full belief in the improbable prowess of 
 the Christian conquerors of the Saracens renders that prowess 
 almost as matter-of-fact as does its constant repetition. The 
 sense of contrast with modern feats of arms is always present, 
 
 49 See above, p. 63. 
 
 80 Case No. I, above, p. 71. 
 
 51 Case No. II, above, p. 71. 
 
 52 See above, p. 71.
 
 82 STUDIES IN THE MAEFELLOUS. 
 
 but the sense of that difference, and its imaginative apprecia- 
 tion, are dulled alike by endless repetition of the marvel and 
 by an absolute, matter-of-fact belief in its reality. Again, full 
 belief in Beatrice Rappacini — with absolutely no question or 
 doubt — would be equivalent, practically, to living among a J\Iary- 
 Smith-multitude of Beatrice Rappacinis. 
 
 (6) A vacillation of belief and doubt (i.e., belief proper) 
 in connection with an unexplained improbability, results in an 
 extension of the fourth case." That case, it may be recalled, is 
 the one where the sense of the improbable is not lost by an 
 ascertained explanation, but eventuates in a marvel which is 
 subject to the corroding effect of time. Now, belief in improba- 
 bility is of course necessary to a sense of the marvellous. But, 
 on the other hand, a belief in the marvel may involve quite defi- 
 nitely the irrational hypothesis of spiritual or other super- 
 natural power. If so — if belief applies this hypothesis to the 
 explanation of the original improbability — we have as an ex- 
 planation what may itself be regarded as an improbability or 
 impossibility. An improbability "explains" an improbability. 
 Such a twist to the case carries us over at once into the second 
 case, just mentioned; and, in turn, as a result of the high degree 
 of rarity involved, there is also a tendency to arrest that case's 
 rule of the decreasing vividness of the marvel. Moreover, the 
 marvellous circumstance associated with the greater marvel of 
 spiritual or magical power is always and easily susceptible of 
 revivification. A great variety of circumstances are continually 
 ministering to the revival of the marvel of the spirit. Belief 
 and its supernatural marvel may tire at times, may nod, and 
 mumble their creed; but they are only napping, — they are not 
 dead. Hope, humbug, and the belief in the supernatural spring 
 eternal in the human breast. 
 
 (c) Full disbelief in an unexplained improbability naturally 
 results in a spirit of ridicule that ekes out what it lacks of 
 explanation of the improbability, and of confirmation of its 
 own skeptcism, with a continual and repeated satire. Unable 
 to congratulate itself upon its own acumen, as in \ho. case 
 of the spurious marvel of Ludovico's disappearance, and rather 
 
 •''3 See above, p. 72.
 
 TEE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDEE. 83 
 
 inherently weakened by the continual suggestion of "it might 
 have been, " disbelief nevertheless makes a successful front against 
 the impossible by at once denying in toto the possibility of super- 
 lawful forces and agencies; and it lends the influence of this 
 skeptical position toward the impossible to its disbelief in the 
 improbable. Here, of course, belong the great marvel burlesques 
 of the world. From Don Quixote to A Yankee at King Arthur's 
 Court, the fun-making progresses in varied measure and kind; 
 but always behind the ridicule, and usually untouched by its 
 Rabelaisian hand, lie the greater "impossibles," which can never 
 be disproved or explained. As soon as the unbelieving spirit 
 touches these it becomes of necessity serious and dreadfully in 
 earnest, — a first step back, as has already been said, to the won- 
 der-view of the universe ; and the entering, too, of the sixth typ- 
 ical case of marvel. 
 
 Finally, to come to the end of the clue of belief, it need 
 only be said that what has been observed of the relation of belief 
 to the improbable is also true of its relation to the impossible, 
 with a certain intensification of all the processes, due to the 
 higher degree of "rarity" involved in the impossible. The fol- 
 lowing tables will serve to clarify those inter-relations of wonder, 
 marvel, rarity, explanation, improbability, impossibility, and 
 belief that have already been taken up under the six typical cases. 
 
 A. MERE RARITY— EXPLANATION— WONDER. 
 
 I Seeming rarity ceases with giving of explanation: wonder 
 
 ceases immediately. 
 
 II Actual rarity still remains after explanation has been given : 
 
 wonder retained, but with gradually decreasing viv- 
 idness. 
 
 III Rarity ceases, although no explanation given : wonder speed- 
 
 ily lost. 
 
 IV Rarity persists, and no explanation given : wonder gradually 
 
 lost with passing of time. 
 
 V Rarity kept, explanations disregarded: wonder in strong 
 
 ascendency. 
 
 VI Rarity gained by isolation of phenomenon from its rela- 
 
 tions : wonder in strong ascendenev.
 
 84 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 ? 
 B. SENSE OF IMPROBABILITY— EXPLANATION— BELIEF- 
 MARVELLOUS. 
 
 I Sense of improbability, followed by explanation: often re- 
 
 duced to mere rarity. Case I or II under A. — Com- 
 pare, also, p. 81, above. 
 
 II Sense of improbability, no explanation : 
 
 (a) with full disbelief: ridiculous, instead of marvellous. 
 
 (6) with full belief: matter of fact, instead of marvel- 
 lous. Similar to ease III under A. 
 
 (c) with vacillation of belief and doubt: marvellous, sim- 
 ilar to Case IV under A., but with greater initial 
 force and slower decline. 
 
 C. SENSE OF iSlPOSSIBILITY— EXPLANATION— BELIEF- 
 MARVELLOUS. 
 
 I Sense of impossibility, followed by explanation : often re- 
 
 reduced to mere rarity, Case I or II, under A. — Com- 
 pare, also, p. 81, above. 
 
 II Sense of impossibility, no explanation : 
 
 (a) with full disbelief: ridiculous, instead of marvellous. 
 
 (6) with full belief: matter of fact, instead of marvel- 
 lous. Similar to Case III under A. 
 
 (c) with vacillation of belief and doubt: marvellous, sim- 
 ilar to Case IV under A, and Case II (c) under 
 B ; but with far greater initial force and far slower 
 decline than in either of those cases. 
 
 One of the chief characters of the marvellous may now fitly 
 be described. The belief in the impossible, when felt as a logical 
 inconsistency, leads always to the adoption of a subterfuge that 
 in turn opens the way to new and ever wilder marvels. The 
 inconsistency is universally obviated by supplying an ideal 
 standard of possibility. "Not probable or possible as things 
 go in this world," runs the remark, "but quite so in another 
 and more spiritual world!" Thus belief ekes out the paucity 
 of fact. "Uncertainty," as Bain says, "is the realm of ideal 
 possibility, the scope for imaginative outgoings."^"* 
 
 ''* Bain, Emotions and the Will, p. 222.
 
 TEE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 35 
 
 The free fashion in which the marvellous disports itself iu 
 the ideal realm of imagination is the most notable of its man- 
 ners. And if here its retainers are the powers of imagination, 
 its courts and show places are the creeds of religion and the 
 poetry of literature; for the realm of the ideal may belong to 
 poetical belief or to the faith of the pious enthusiast. In it 
 there is freedom,— freedom of all third dimensional limitations. 
 Spirit rises from flesh. And this assertion of an ideal freedom 
 in connection with the marvellous, or, it may be said, by the 
 marvellous, is the very circumstance that recommended the re- 
 finement of medieval and other marvel to the thirsting souls of 
 the patriots and literary revolutionists of Romanticism. No 
 wonder that the patriots of Germany nursed and flaunted their 
 sense of marvel! It was for the freedom in which those mar- 
 vels moved and had their being— not for the mere novelty and 
 strangeness of headless horsemen and singing trees— that those 
 ardent, anarchistic souls longed. Here too was the reason why 
 the slower, saner spirit of Wordsworth " marvellized " nature 
 and the commonplace; and in doing so he showed himself as 
 true a romanticist as Coleridge, though he went to no medieval 
 font for his subject and took no part in the wild Schwdrmerei 
 of the world beyond Cumberland. He had tried the much- 
 vaunted, revolutionary freedom, but had found a better one at 
 Rydal Mount, more to his liking and Dorothy 's.^^ 
 
 The unfettering of imagination in this realm of ideal belief 
 demands the weight of separate mention, for any description 
 of wondering that neglected to emphasize the part played by the 
 inventive faculty in heightening the feeling of wonder would not 
 
 55 Professor Charles Mills Gayley, in his classes at the University of 
 California, has long preached the desire for freedom as the solvent for 
 the Romantic movement; and it is with great interest, therefore, that I 
 have found myself in this independent search into the marvellous again 
 and again brought face to face with just this Eeimweh for an ideal 
 freedom. {Cf. Gayley, C. M., Hep. Eng. Com., New York 1903, vol. I, 
 Introduction, Hist. View of Eng. Com., pp. xx, Ixxxvii, et passim.) 
 Indeed, upon reflection, Professor Gayley 's observation has the simple 
 inevitability of the truth. Nor can I refrain from appending the 
 following quotation from Lazarus: "Hieraus erkliirt sich psychologisch 
 hinlanglich, weshalb das Wunder des Glaubens liebstes Kind ist; der 
 Glaube ist Sehnsucht nach dcm Unendlichen, und hier driingt sich die 
 Vorstellung des Unendlichen unmittelbar bei der Erscheinung eines End- 
 lichon auf. Dies ist die Bedeutung des ^Yunders und ohue sie wjiren die 
 Wirkuugen des Wunders sclbst wuuderbar. '' — Lazarus, op. cit., p. 29S.
 
 86 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 deserve its name. Imagination not only creates the marvel of 
 story and chanson, but is itself the creature of wonderment. The 
 enthralled percipient feels the stirrings, oftenest vague, and so 
 the more impressive, of all his imaginative being, and the aver- 
 tissement of self that ensues is one of the dearest, as it is one 
 of the most familiar of the attendants in the train of wonder. 
 Subtle, it is, too; possibly subtlest of the allurements of this 
 complex emotion ; and therewith is revealed one of the chief 
 reasons for the normal and almost universal desire, if not 
 appetency, toward experiencing the emotion. In another chap- 
 ter, when we turn more to the historical side, or phylogeny, as 
 it might be called, of wonder, the subject of imaginative activity 
 will receive its due consideration; but, for the present, three 
 points may be observed without fear of too frequent repetition : 
 the marvellous as a stimulus to imagination, the immediate 
 reaction of the state of marvelling, and the imaginative exaggera- 
 tion of the marvellous object itself. 
 
 Enough has been said to make clear and enforce the first point. 
 A baffled reason and the failure of hypotheses loose the wilder 
 freaks of mind. No longer held by a rational outlook, imagina- 
 tion is left with full title to the most riotous of living. No 
 vagary is too startling when the romance of other worlds 
 and higher powers, the authentication of the actual existence 
 of which is assumed by belief, is a perpetual challenge to the 
 invention of wizards and angels, centaurs and seraphim, apples 
 of Hesperides and trees of life. The marvellous is to the imagin- 
 ation what sleep is to dreams. Its very nature — its intangible- 
 ness, its puzzlement, its commerce with the unknown — is natur- 
 ally, perhaps physiologically, associated with the imaginative 
 function of the mind. Therefore it is, that, upon the establish- 
 ment of a state of marvelling by a particular object, all the 
 vague crowd of other marvels and former imaginations, rein- 
 forced by untold new levies, the spawn of the moment, flit upon 
 the mind with such instantaneous association and force of sug- 
 gestion that the marvel itself is increased a hundredfold. Thus, 
 eircle-wi.se, •"'" comes wonder stimulating imagination, the latter in 
 
 t-'J I have borrowed this term from Professor Baldwin 's ' ' circular- 
 imitation. ' ' Cf. Mental Development, pp. 133, 264.
 
 TEE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONDER. 87 
 
 turn reacting to heighten the wonder, which, again, spurs on 
 imagination still further ; and so on indefinitely. "We may suppose 
 these processes of mutual encouragement to persist until fatigue, 
 or another stronger demand, produces a change in attention. 
 Often, however, they are the means of ascension into mystical 
 trances, such, perhaps, as those of Swedenborg or Blake, — states 
 that should be studied in the light of what is known of auto- 
 suggestion and hypnosis. Such states, indeed, form a very 
 proper part of the data present to the hand of the student of 
 wonder for analysis and classification. They are the higher 
 limits of the subject, the marvels of wonder. Nor should they 
 be regarded as fruitless of empirical results. What more sug- 
 gestive, physiologically, than the dream of Eliphaz? 
 
 "Now a thing was secretly brought to me, 
 Aud mine ear received a whisper thereof. 
 In thoughts from the visions of the night, 
 When deep sleep falleth on men, 
 Fear came upon me, and trembling, 
 Which made all my bones to shake. 
 Then a spirit passed before my face; 
 The hair of my flesh stood up. 
 
 It stood still, but I could not discern the appearance thereof; 
 A form was before mine eyes: 
 There was silence, and I heard a voice, . . ."s" 
 
 It need hardly be pointed out now that one of the effects 
 of imagination is to magnify and exaggerate the actual cause, 
 objective or subjective, of the marvelling. The stimulating ob- 
 ject does not remain the same to the consciousness of the percip- 
 ient, but, in the course of all these heightening processes of a 
 subjective nature, is continually changing. What was at first 
 a minor circumstance looms large in a disordered field of marvel 
 and fancy. Fear itself scarcely magnifies its object more than 
 wonder, for it is imagination that is let loose in both cases. 
 Who has not given supernatural interpretations to purely nat- 
 ural effects, the agency of which happened for the moment to 
 be unknown? The inexplicable is immediately mj^sterious. 
 
 57 Job IV, 12-16. One need only turn to medieval saints' books to 
 find similar descriptions of visions that come in waking hours. Cf., Jones, 
 B. M., Studies in Mystical Edifiion. London 1909. For further treatment of 
 this subject, see below, Chapters III, IV.
 
 88 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 Knockings and table-turuings are immediately attributed to 
 spirits of the dead. I have known a whole family to turn spir- 
 itualists because of a mysterious tapping that was heard only 
 at meal-times, and that afterward proved to be the chickens strik- 
 ing the baseboards with their bills as they fed close to the house. 
 That family in its first surprise, its astonishment, its fruitless 
 search after causes, its unsatisfied curiosity, wonder, its fear, 
 imagination, and its final sense of marvel as belief in spiritual- 
 istic phenomena da\\Tied, afforded as vivid and typical a case 
 of w'ondering with all its allied and concomitant states as could 
 be desired. And in the course of it all the chance peckings of 
 a few domesticallj'^ inoffensive and greedy brown leghorns rose 
 to the height of direct communications from the Unknown. 
 
 Finally, a word about the clue of fear. Fear is often found 
 associated with the uncertainty of doubt and with the durating 
 sense of strangeness that characterize a well-developed state of 
 marvel. It is not hard to appreciate the naturalness of this 
 combination when the disturbing nature of the marvellous, its 
 lack of adaptation, is put side by side with the element of shock 
 from the strange and unkno\\Ti that so often is the cause of 
 fear. The relations between fear and the new and unexpected 
 are too well known to need any elaboration here, but a caution 
 in the matter is to be registered. Care must be taken to avoid 
 confusing the fear that is associated with wonder and marvel 
 and the fear that goes with surprise. Sully is in danger of 
 offending here when he says: *'0n the other hand, wonder is 
 related as a disturbing shock to the emotion of fear. "^® The 
 word shock, as it stands in the quotation, suggests the suddenness 
 and unpreparedness of surprise, rather than a durating sense 
 of strangeness. The intense shock, and the spasm of fear fol- 
 lowing it, are not conducive to wonder, but are rather directly 
 inimical to it. Dominant fear is apt to find the motor expression 
 of a rapid and headlong flight more congenial than the luxury 
 of static wonder. No! The real role of fear in wonder is a 
 subordinate part, — a standing in the background to lend to the 
 
 68 Sully, op. cit., p. 523.
 
 TEE PSYCHOLOGY OF WONBEE. 89 
 
 emotion richness and piercing vividness, or a lurking, fascinat- 
 ing possibility of danger. Not the shock itself, but the suspense 
 of insecurity, of an immediate peril, of shock impending, is 
 fear's contribution to wonder. And in the higher cases, where to 
 an object more impressive there answers a feeling of sublimity, 
 this contributive fear becomes awe, and promotes the religious 
 ecstasy of a Jacob at Bethel. 
 
 A sort of criterion of the amount of fear proper to a state 
 of wonder or marvel is furnished by the presence or absence 
 of pleasure derived from the fascination of fear. Too great 
 an impression of fear is signalized by pain. Indeed, the pleas- 
 urable characteristics of wondering are divided, probably, be- 
 tween the peculiar attraction of the fearful and the sublimer 
 gratification to be drawn from moving in the ideal freedom of the 
 marvellous ; though over and above these two there is to be men- 
 tioned, of course, that usual glamor of excitement that accom- 
 panies vivid activity of any mental or motor process. Certainly 
 these three categories cover the field of wonder-pleasure. Run- 
 ning through them all, a special aspect no more of one than of 
 another, is that sense of self-gratulation, that selt-avertisse77ient 
 we have already noticed in connection with the activity of the 
 imagination. °^ To be thrilling with hippogriffs and wishing- 
 mats, or with messages from the dead, or with the miracle of 
 the oil of St. Walburga,*'" or with the visions of Bohme, or with 
 the rending of the veil and opening of graves at the Passion of 
 Golgotha, — do not such experiences open outward the door of 
 these too earthly circumstances of ours and bring child or gray- 
 beard, pagan or Christian, upon the threshold of that richer 
 life, that grander power, which we all feel latent witliin us 
 because we seldom are what we can be, seldom live to our full 
 force, never realize our dreams of what we are and could be? 
 We are dulled by the ordinary ; the usual blunts our imagination 
 by making us indifferent to what we see daily: but when the 
 fascination of a subtle fear rouses us to nervous tension, or when 
 the impingement of the unusual, of the marvellous, becomes the 
 magic philter of a limitless freedom, do we not always feel that 
 
 59 See above, p. 86. 
 
 «o See Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, London 1902, pp. 298, 391.
 
 90 STUDIES IN TEE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 at last we are becoming individual, above the crushing and 
 demagnetizing forces of the commonplace? 
 
 The relation of fear to the fourth of the six typical cases 
 should be noticed. In that case, it will be remembered, rarity, or 
 improbability, persists, and no explanation is given : continuous 
 companionship with the weird beauty and strange influence of 
 Hawthorne 's Beatrice,^^ no explanation being vouchsafed, results 
 in the gradual diminution of the initial marvel. But if the marvel 
 — or the wonder, in the case of mere rarity being substituted for 
 the improbable or impossible — if the marvel be attended with a 
 fear that is lasting in character, this process of diminution may 
 be checked, or even converted into the exact opposite, — the exag- 
 geration of marvel. One of the best possible examples is Defoe's 
 picture of Crusoe's state of mind after his discovery of the 
 single, mysterious footprint on the sand of the lonely island. 
 Fear of assault at any moment kept the wonder of that footprint 
 vividly and continually before Crusoe's mind. 
 
 Thus, from whatever vantage we regard wonder, it reveals 
 itself as extending no further into human weakness and ignorance 
 on the one hand, than into the hopes and longings of the race 
 on the other. If we choose our approach from the "disadapta- 
 tion" of surprise, we either find the suddenness of physical 
 shock passing into a wonder of the lesser kind, the power of 
 which is gone as soon as ignorance of the cause is dissipated ; or, 
 where the surprise is occasioned by the unusual, and so involves a 
 mental discrimination, we detect a passing into a wonder of which 
 the power varies according to six cases when the unusuahiess is 
 mere rarity, or rises to the marvellous when improbability and im- 
 possibility are the contents of the unusual.®'^ Again, coming into 
 these processes, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, is curiosity, — 
 the attempt, peculiarly motor and teleological, at adaptation. 
 But, baffled, it exchanges its effort at a positive assimilation for 
 the best that wonder can afford, — a sort of negative accommo- 
 dation. But where the mind recognizes instantaneously that 
 
 61 See above, p. 72. 
 
 02 For fear of misunderstanding we must insist again that suddenness 
 and rarity are in the majority of cases co-existent. They are separated 
 only for the purpose of analysis.
 
 TEE PSYCHOLOGT OF WONDER. 91 
 
 there is no probable or possible solution, there is present imme- 
 diately the acme of wonder, marvelling. Nor should the similar- 
 ity of these states of intenser wonder on the one hand, to those 
 of astonishment or amazement on the other, be the subject of 
 confusion; the difference, often hard to detect, lies between the 
 paralysis-like cessation of function in the latter, and the puzzled, 
 dubitative, indecisive action of the former. But with the im- 
 probable still another element comes to view — the necessity of 
 belief — which in turn opens up the realms of imagination and 
 ideal freedom. Fear, with its fascination and intensifying 
 power, brings still another facet into play, and suggests the 
 pleasurable aspects of wonder. With these higher reaches of 
 subject and stimulus, the marvellous proper, aided by the free- 
 dom of imagination, and supported by an idealistic belief, makes 
 its climactic appearance in the field of literature. The imagina- 
 tive and idealistic functions have always marked that field for 
 their own exercise; it is now clearly seen to be also the field 
 that preeminently and distinctively affords to the marvellous 
 the peculiar conditions necessary to its growth. When wonders 
 become too idealized for the crowd, or too unreal for the material- 
 ist, they still find in literature an hospitable welcome at the 
 hands of the innumerable company of marvels long since domi- 
 ciled there, and, at recurring intervals, still regnant there. 
 And with every changing condition the colors of human signifi- 
 cance vary from the duller ones that accompany the familiar cases 
 of every-day wonder — the brief, winged moment of sudden 
 stimulus and pausing ignorance — to the flash of gold and veil of 
 purple that envelop the ecstatic vision of seer and mystic. 
 
 This description gives us certain more or less logical methods 
 of differentiating the various cases of wonder, and also the 
 various steps which lead from common wonder to the superlative 
 case of the marvellous. A certain artificiality of division in our 
 analysis and classification cannot be helped ; nor is it possible to 
 declare the exact formation of wonder. These points of view 
 have shown us constituent elements and suggested certain broad 
 classes; but the very come-and-go character of them all renders 
 it entirely beyond our power to prescribe the exact propor- 
 tion in which they make up what is called wonder or marvel.
 
 92 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS. 
 
 Each case is a ease to itself, — some with more of this and less of 
 that ingredient ; some omitting this to the same extent that they 
 exaggerate that element; some involving one order of sequence 
 of elements, others another. The description is a striking justi- 
 fication of Wundt's words: "The more composite a psychical 
 process, the more variable will be its single concrete manifesta- 
 tions. ""^ 
 
 Finally, to close our summary and comment, it will be noted 
 that a detailed description of wondering has not only resulted in 
 presenting for the emotion the same width and variety of field 
 that was found to be indicated by the popular use and definition 
 of the word (which was to be expected), but has also suggested, 
 by the marking out of a regular and natural gradation from the 
 simplest to the sublimest cases of wonder, the correctness of our 
 intuition that the histor}^ of words contains here a testimony 
 to the common origin psychologically of two sets of phenomena 
 — the rare but entirely possible on the one hand, and the pro- 
 digious, the hyper-physical, on the other — which have come in 
 the course of civilization to be regarded as not only widely 
 different, but also diametrically and significantly opposed in 
 origin."* 
 
 •Js Wundt, op. cit., p. 187. 
 64 See above, p. 13.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 
 
 What is wonderful to the primitive? — Difficulties in 
 answering — Subjective difficulty — Unreliability of data — 
 General description of primitive mind, custom, and belief 
 — Preliminary difficulties and objections — Vierkandt 's pic- 
 ture of primitive mind and belief — Points, in primitive 
 conditions, making against wonder: (a) no conception of 
 unexceptional regularity; (b) matter-of-fact character of 
 belief in spirits who cause rarities; (c) no impossibility 
 possible to primitive consciousness; (d) primitive curi- 
 osity not favorable to wonder; (e) primitive belief and 
 imagination not favorable to wonder; (f) magic as 'scien- 
 tific'; (g) animism — Points, in primitive conditions, making 
 for wonder: (a) segregated nature of gods; (6) of priest; 
 (c) of magician; (d) of magic as 'magical'; (e) of taboo; 
 (f) exaggeration — Summary. 
 
 In turning to the beginnings of wonder in primitive culture, 
 no difficulty need be experienced in collecting cases that to a 
 modern sophisticated standard of the usual and possible will seem 
 marvellous. Savage custom and belief are full of such. But a 
 difficulty of very real and almost insurmountable magnitude con- 
 fronts the student who w^ould know just how far these cases 
 appear wonderful to the savage himself. Between our judgment 
 and his there exists a gap as great as that between the architec- 
 ture of a steel-frame fireproof office building and the slight in- 
 flammable hogan of a Navajo. INIany a detail of his daily life, 
 undertaken by the savage in the torrid regions of Queensland, or 
 in the arctic wastes of Alaska, with the sang froid of a broker 
 reaching for his telephone, appears as strange to us as would the 
 "long-talk" of the broker's instrument to the savage. In their 
 customs of making rain or sunshine, and laying or raising the 
 wind, for instance, the members of savage society consider them- 
 selves endowed with powers we should regard as supernatural;^ 
 
 1 See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 2d ed., London 1900, I, 81-128. 
 Cf. also Jevons, Introd. to the Hist, of Eelig., 2d ed., London 1902, p. 16.
 
 i<4 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 but their ignorance of natural law and human limitation never 
 for a moment permits them any sense of wonder, and, to use the 
 words of Lewes when lie speaks of the ready acceptance by simple 
 minds of illusory hypotheses, ' ' marvels are not marvellous to them, 
 for ignorance does not marvel. ' '- It is no slight matter, therefore, 
 to be on guard against easily assuming that even the wildest 
 vagaries of primitive mind are J)0)ia fide eases of wonder from 
 the original point of view. The difficulty is of course a subjective 
 one. That is acknowledged at once. 
 
 Moreover, the savage himself is not present at the examina- 
 tion ; only his beliefs and customs as reported by more or less 
 trustworthy travelers, missionaries, and ethnologists, are in 
 evidence. Nor has the present writer had any greater experi- 
 ence with savage life than what, meagre enough, might be picked 
 up in several summers spent with Indians on the Navajo and 
 Ute reservations in southern Colorado. The sum of that experi- 
 ence represents but little beyond a full recognition of the constant 
 difficulty and error to which a foreigner's observation of savage 
 traits is liable because of the stubborn reticence or crafty sub- 
 terfuge of the native. The amount of absolutely false evidence 
 submitted by zealous but unskilled travelers or prejudiced mis- 
 sionaries, is a byword of every ethnological treatise. Truly, 
 betw'een the subjective nature of the problem and the drawbacks 
 of untrustworthy evidence, the difficulty seems almost invincible. 
 
 This second difficulty will be met in due time by a careful 
 selection of examples from books by professed and fully trained 
 ethnologists. Within the last ten years there has been, for- 
 tunately, a great increase in such material. But an attempt has 
 also been made to pave a way out of the first vexation. The prin- 
 ciples established in the previous chapter are in part the required 
 solution. There the description of wondering as we ourselves 
 experience it puts into our hands a very real standard to aid us 
 in the subjective puzzle. Thus, in view of that standard, we must 
 now note and emphasize the fact that the control of sun and rain, 
 to take the same illustration, appears no unusual power to our 
 savage ; it involves nothing of inexplicable suddenness, nothing 
 of mysterious rarity, nothing of impossibility. It is, on the con- 
 
 2 G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 3d eel., Loinlon 1874, I, 337.
 
 WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 95 
 
 trary, a usual occurrence, a custom, the habit of each individual. 
 Therefore, no sense of the marvellous is present to the performer. 
 Again, any Bushman hunter who finds himself returning to camp 
 late in the afternoon puts a lump of earth in the crotch of a tree 
 to retard the sun's decline.^ There is here, say those who have 
 observed such acts, no sense of performing a wonderful deed; 
 but our own examination into the processes of wondering would 
 have told us that immediately. The testimony of the observer is 
 only corroboration, — proof of the correctness of our principle. 
 Of course the application of the principles here, rests upon a 
 hidden premise, but one that requires bare mention in order to win 
 immediate acquiescence, — the premise that the primitive mind 
 works in the same fashion as the civilized mind. It is easy to cite 
 agreement with this obvious fact. Professor Tylor writes: "If 
 any one holds that human thought and action were worked out in 
 primaeval times according to laws essentially other than those of 
 the modern world, it is for him to prove by valid evidence this 
 anomalous state of things, otherwise the doctrine of permanent 
 principle will hold good, as in astronomy or geology."* Pro- 
 fessor Brinton devotes several pages to the matter, speaks of the 
 "cardinal and basic truth of the unity of action of man's 
 intelligence, ' '^ and is at pains to cite Granger,*' Post,^ Hartland,^ 
 Buchmann,^ Honegger,^'^ and Bastian,^^ to the same effect. 
 Spencer goes into the matter at length in his Principles of 
 Sociology;^- and Principal Jevons treats of it most conscien- 
 tiously.^^ 
 
 With this almost axiomatic truth once granted, there can be 
 no objection to applying our general principles of wonder to 
 
 3 E. M. Curr, llie Australian Race, I, 50. 
 
 4 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 4th ed., London 1903, I, 33. 
 
 5 D. G. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, New York 1899, pp. 
 6-10. 
 
 6 Granger, The Worship of the Romans, p. vii. 
 
 "^ A. H. Post, Grundriss der ethnologischen Jurisprudens, Bd. i, s. 4. 
 
 8 S. Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales, p. 2. 
 
 9 Buchmann, Zeitschrift fiir Vblkerpsychologie, Bd. xi, s. 124. 
 
 10 J. J. Honegger, Allgemeine Culturgeschichte, Bd. 1, s. 332. 
 
 11 Bastian, Grundsiige der Ethnologic, s. 73. 
 
 12 H. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, § 52. 
 
 13 Jevons, op. cit., Chap. TV.
 
 96 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 primitive culture. Ignorance, indeed, to recur to Lewes' phrase, 
 cannot marvel at what is not known to be unusual or impossible; 
 but ignorance is a relative matter, and as soon as there is any 
 mental development there arises per se the possibility of wonder. 
 In order, however, to apply our principles, we must know some- 
 thing of the general character of the primitive mind, of its ap- 
 proximate stage of knowledge and mental complexity ; something 
 of its general attitude toward its environment as expressed in 
 customs and beliefs. Otherwise, the usual could not be separated 
 from the unusual; nor could we determine at what point in 
 early consciousness the impossible takes its rise. It is proposed, 
 therefore, to preface the account of actual cases of primitive 
 wonder by a brief, general survey of the mental and emotional 
 characteristics, and most important traits of custom and belief, 
 that are universally found to distinguish primitive society. Such 
 a task might appear one of supererogation in view of all that has 
 been said upon this fascinating subject by Tylor, Lang, Spencer, 
 Frazer, and a multitude of others both at home and abroad, were 
 it not such an important step in the present line of argument. 
 Moreover, in summarizing the observations of the ethnologists 
 and folk-psychologists upon these general points, it will be pos- 
 sible to focus all the material upon the one particular point of 
 our inquiry; and thus, when we are ready to touch upon the 
 actual cases of wonder, there will be present not only a body of 
 general knowledge about customs and beliefs, to give us a standard 
 for separating the usual from the unusual, but also a certain 
 familiarity with the possible extent and chief directions of the 
 wondering activity in the savage's mind. Our a posteriori stand- 
 ard will be supplemented by the possibility of a priori reasoning. 
 At the outset of such a survey, one general objection, with 
 several aspects, becoming more and more serious of late, must be 
 engaged. Perhaps the learned have created a new mythological 
 hero, and named him Primitive ]\Ian ! Let us, therefore, they say, 
 confine ourselves to savage and barbaric men, to actual cases, and 
 leave generalization aside ! Who ever, it is objected, saw a primi- 
 tive man ? What is this primitive that you all talk about ? Where 
 is he, or when did he live?" "Primitive," answers Professor 
 Brinton, "to the ethnologist means the earliest of a given race or
 
 WONDER IN PEIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 97 
 
 tribe of whom he has trusty information. It has reference to a 
 stage of culture, rather than to time. ' '" Again, Professor Dewey 
 very wisely voices a further objection against that ethnological 
 method which throws together under a single classification data 
 drawn from societies in widely differing stages of development.^^ 
 Finally, it must alwaj^s be remembered that "specialized as they 
 are in correspondence wath our thoughts, our words do not rep- 
 resent truly the thoughts of the savage; and often entirely mis- 
 represent them."^'' Indeed, the whole difficulty of presenting a 
 general picture of primitive cultural conditions may be compared 
 with the attempts of moderns to epitomize the natural character- 
 istics of their own or of a foreign people. Bryce's American 
 Commonwealth, the efforts of Dickens, Arnold, or JNIax 'Rell at 
 national and racial portraiture, or the famous essay of Renan 
 upon the Semites, afford familiar examples of the mingled success 
 wholly unknown to the early savage, or else, in their equivalents, 
 and shortcomings of such work. How much more open to mistake 
 is the subject of primitive life, — with its distance, though it may 
 be less complex ; with the danger of too great generalization from 
 data of unlike strata, though the difference may be less than 
 between modern strata ; with the perpetual difficulty of apprecia- 
 tion and expression due to the fact that our very words are either 
 quite differently understood by him ! In spite of all these objec- 
 tions, however, the actual observations of tribes here and hordes 
 there are seen upon a careful scrutiny plainly to reveal certain 
 great tendencies; and these tendencies of character and custom 
 may be combined to present a sort of composite of so-called primi- 
 tive culture. Not any one actual, individual case, but the pre- 
 dominating tendency of a multitude of cases toward this or that 
 character or custom, is all that a self-conscious history or descrip- 
 tion of peoples can hope to give. There were romantic spirits 
 in the days of Pope and Swift, of Addison and Dryden — plenty of 
 them ; but the predominating tendency was nevertheless toward 
 an artificial classicism : there are keen, refiective, reasoning minds 
 among the Botocudo or even the Veddahs ; but the predominating 
 
 14 Op. cit., p. 11. 
 
 15 Dewey, J., Interpretation of Savage Mind (Psychological 'Review, 
 Vol. IX, No. 3, p. 217, May, 1902). 
 
 16 Spencer, Op. cit., § 116.
 
 98 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS. 
 
 mental tendency is one of sluggishness and stupidity. It is these 
 tendencies, then, let it be repeated, that are here combined to form 
 a typical picture of savage life. 
 
 Vierkandt" has summarized the attempts made by Remusat, 
 Gustav d'Eichthal, Karl von den Steinen, Klemms, Lippert, 
 Peschel, Bagehot, Ratzel, and Spencer to differentiate Kultur- 
 volker and Naturvdlker. His own account of the mythological 
 mode of thinking has been rendered in the following brief : "Sub- 
 jectively considered, the presence of contradictions is to be noted, 
 although there is a sort of logical coherence if certain peculiar 
 premises are granted. The primary difference between this 
 degree of thinking and the scientific lies, then, in a difference 
 of premises, which is found negatively in the absence of the con- 
 ception of unexceptional regularity, positively in the belief in 
 spiritual beings whose actions cannot be predicted by calcula- 
 tion and whose motives are whimsical. From the narrowness of 
 consciousness and the overwhelming power of the mechanism of 
 association it follows : (a) that consciousness abides by that which 
 is perceived by the senses. There is a lack of power to under- 
 stand anything at all abstract, hence all 'becoming,' which is 
 more abstract than objects. Thus, also, it is impossible to con- 
 ceive of 'spirit' aside from an objective entity. (6) That every- 
 where there is a joining of thoughts according to purely external 
 association. Consequently there is lacking a proper causal con- 
 ception, which has its starting point in the conformity of all 
 phenomena to law. Objectively, the following points are to be 
 emphasized: (a) propensity to personification; (6) the spiritual 
 as material; (c) processes are transformed into objects, and then 
 often personified, as sickness, disease, etc. ; (d) the cause of a 
 thing is never sought inside itself, but always externally, as 
 death; (e) there is no becoming and growing from within, but 
 only an external origin — "once upon a time" — no continuity, 
 but intermittent activity; (/) the whole has the properties of the 
 parts, and vice versa; (g) similar things have similar properties; 
 (h) things that originally went together, but were later sep- 
 arated, are still regarded as a connected whole. The entire 
 
 17 Vicrkandt, A., Naturvolkcr und Kulturvulkcr, Leipzig 1896, p. 1 ff.
 
 WONDEB IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 99 
 
 method of thought clearly rests upon the basis of mere objective 
 perception, — the world consisting of a collection of bodily things, 
 each body an independent being and homogeneous whole, with 
 unchangeable characteristics, but with the power of divisibility. 
 So there is no idea of inner causation or gradual evolution, but 
 only of personal causation, and the metamorphosis of one body 
 into another. "^^ 
 
 We may now pause before this picture of tendencies for the 
 purpose of comment and interpretation in behalf of wonder. It 
 should be noted, first of all, that primitive thought is not made too 
 simple. Our search for literary beginnings does not involve a 
 genetic study of mind; it carries us back only to a stage of 
 consciousness that is, relatively speaking, highly developed, — as 
 high in the scale of consciousness, perhaps, as the human species 
 is in the organic scale. And the long line of evolution before that 
 stage, the long line of progenitors of our articulate, verse-making, 
 ritual-dancing savage, gives indeed to the stage we are consider- 
 ing a de facto jejune and conservative condition of affairs and 
 customs, and, therefore, of ideas. The tyrannical force of complex 
 customs in totem, marriage, and religious ceremonies is a matter 
 of too common remark to require illustration here. In fact, as 
 Professor Baldwin says, * ' the relative force of convention, slavish 
 imitation, worship of custom, seems to have some relation to the 
 degree of development of a people. "^^ Primitive belief and 
 literature are not a sort of sudden, pre-historic Elizabethan 
 efflorescence ; they are the outgrowth of an immemorial past, of a 
 development slow, monotonous, laborious, and uninspired, — do 
 not rise unannounced in an age of great leavening and mental 
 freedom, but make their gradual appearance in the midst of con- 
 servatism, custom, and cast-iron habit. Primitive mind is not 
 synonymous with a world-freshness, with a dawning inspiration 
 and spontaneity of invention. The Weltanschauung of a people 
 in that stage is far more fixed by time and custom than the 
 religious belief of a New England Puritan. There is not that 
 division of labor and specialization of production that in more 
 
 IS For this summary I am indebted to an unpublished article by Pro- 
 fessor Max Margolis. For the original, see Vierkandt, op. cit., pp. 252-2.'38. 
 
 10 Baldwin, op. cit., p. 354.
 
 100 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 advanced coniinuuities produce a mental variety to match the 
 economic differentiation. All the conditions of their life tend 
 toward quiesence and uniformity. There is no rapid transit 
 and no knowledge of various climates and continents, customs 
 and peoples, to stir the savage mind ; no " European event ' ' — no 
 crusades — to begin a new life of state and thought. And yet, in 
 spite of all this, we of a self-conscious, critical, introspective age, 
 in looking back at the productions and characteristics of an 
 early era of culture, experience at the sight a sensation of novelty, 
 simplicity, spontaneity, invention : the things of that age are all 
 so far removed from the sophistication of the present! The 
 contrast is strongly evident to our imagination. But we then 
 proceed to attribute to that primitive age as its ovra character- 
 istics the very sensations we have experienced in contemplating 
 it. This is as fallacious and unscientific as it is subjective. 
 Primitive simplicity is not nearly so simple as we would have it ; 
 nor primitive belief so free, or primitive spontaneity so spon- 
 taneous, as they seem. 
 
 In all the activities that have to do with totemic ceremonies, 
 totemic legends, marriage and initiation and intichiutna rites, 
 churinga, magic, fetish- worship, and the like, we have the wit- 
 nesses of a mental reaction upon the external world that is dis- 
 tinctly over and above the mere physical demands for food and 
 drink and shelter. Moreover, these activities, especially in their 
 sacred and secret aspects, occupy an extremely large and serious 
 position in primitive life.-" We are not to pre-suppose, then, for 
 purposes of wonder, a total lack of phronemic development, or 
 even a very great lack. Centers of complex association and 
 inference, of memory-store with a strongly habituated action (for 
 all these rites are, as we have said, matters of cast-iron custom), 
 are to be granted. 
 
 The gap between the modern and the savage intellect lies 
 supremely in what Vierkandt calls the premises. There is no 
 conception of unexceptional regularity, says Vierkandt. That 
 there is no conscious concept I am disposed to agree; but that 
 there is no perception of irregularity in experience is quite 
 
 2" Cf. Spencer and Gillcn, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, New 
 York 1904, pp. 3.3, 34, 249 flp.
 
 WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 101 
 
 another thing. Unexceptional regularity in the action of the 
 laws of nature is something that all civilized peoples are as yet 
 by no means ready to grant; and savant as well as tyro often 
 finds himself marvelling : but exceptions in experience — rarities, 
 unusual happenings and forms — are as frequently present to 
 the savage as to the citizen, — perhaps far more so. That 
 these latter upon approaching the centers of stored experience 
 will produce surprise, is a statement that needs no extended 
 proof; for we have already noticed the simple and primitive 
 character of surprise. If beasts, creatures lower in the organic 
 scale than man, experience surprise at an interruption of their 
 habitual reactions, it follows necessarily that primitive man is 
 capable of the same feeling. The assumed stoicism of indifference 
 to surprise with which the savage wraps himself is entirely another 
 affair (as is also the rational surprise mentioned by Spencer)-^ 
 and is a sign in itself that his psychic life is subject to very high 
 and complex experiences of surprise. The real question is 
 whether his surprise can pass into wonder. All the conditions 
 are present, — the developed mental center and the reporting 
 facilities. Is there in the make-up of the savage anything to 
 prevent the natural progress to wonder? 
 
 There are facts of a character to prevent that progress. In 
 the first place, wonder as a well-established state involves, as we 
 have seen, a certain duration of attention. It is notorious that 
 the mind of the savage, like that of the child, is distinguished 
 by a reluctance to fix its attention for any protracted period upon 
 any single problem that is not immediately and concretely con- 
 nected with food-supply or some other equally urgent necessity.^- 
 The ease with which the attention of a child or a savage can be 
 diverted, the positive pain attending the attempt at severe mental 
 application, are matters not so remote from our own adult ex- 
 perience that we can fail to appreciate their naturalness in the 
 mind untrained by long, assiduous application. Spencer presents 
 the evidence thus : 
 
 "A passage which Sir John Lubbock quotes from Mr. Sproat's account 
 of the Ahts may be taken as descriptive of the average state: 'The native 
 mind, to an educated man, seems generally to be asleep. ... On his 
 
 21 Spencer, op. cit., § 45. 
 
 22 Cf. Vierkandt, op. cit., p. 259.
 
 102 STUDIES IN TEE MAEVELLOVS. 
 
 attention being fully aroused, he often shows much quickness in reply and 
 ingenuity in argument. But a short conversation wearies him, particularly if 
 questions are asked that require efforts of thought or memory on his part. 
 The mind of the savage then appears to rock to and fro out of mere weak- 
 ness.' Spix and Martins tell us of the Brazilian Indians that 'scarcely has 
 one begun to question him about his language, when he grows impatient, 
 complains of headache, and shows that he is unable to bear the exertion'; 
 and according to Mr. Bates, ' it is difficult to get at their notions on subjects 
 that require a little abstract thought. ' When the Abipones ' are unable to 
 comprehend anything at first sight, they soon grow weary of examining it, 
 and cry — What is it after all?' It is the same with Negroes. Burton says 
 of the East Africans, ' ten minutes sufficed to weary out the most intellectual, ' 
 when questioned about their system of numbers. And even of so com- 
 paratively superior a race as the Malagasy, it is remarked that they ' do not 
 seem to possess the qualities of mind requisite for close and continued 
 thought.' "23 
 
 In the second place, the other premise mentioned by Vier- 
 kandt interferes to change the processes of wondering as we are 
 familiar with them. The "belief in the influence of spiritual 
 beings whose actions cannot be predicted by calculation and 
 whose motives are whimsical,"^* causes a further interruption 
 of the progress to wonder. What happens objectively is this: 
 the rarity is immediately explained by reference to personal, 
 spiritual causation. "What takes place subjectively is the im- 
 mediate association of the rarity with the second premise. The 
 process, moreover, is perfectly logical : spirits produce all strange 
 things; this is a strange thing; the spirits have produced it. 
 The explanation is complete. The rarity, however, still exists; 
 but it is assimilated to a great class of rarities — those that are 
 the insignia of spiritual presences — and therefore any slight sense 
 of wonder that might have crept in is doomed to speedy extinc- 
 tion. The experience thus resolves itself into the second of the 
 six cases of rarity and explanation f^ and the result here is only 
 more precipitate than that already predicted, — a fading vivid- 
 ness of wonder. Moreover, the belief in these spiritual influences, 
 if it is so great as to amount to a universal premise, is of that 
 full and perfect nature which is hardly consonant with wonder.^" 
 Spirits, to such belief, are matters of fact; and their doings, also, 
 
 23 Spencer, op. cit., § 43. 
 2< See above, p. 98. 
 
 25 See above, p. 63. 
 
 26 See above, pp. 79-80.
 
 WONDER IN PBIMITIFE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 103 
 
 are matters of fact, which, while easily provocative of surprise, 
 even of astonishment, are scarcely conducive to wonder, even if 
 the savage's powers be equal to the concentration of attention 
 necessary to it. Unless some other tendency intervenes there 
 seems here but small chance of wondering. 
 
 Still less opportunity for marvelling ! For if there is no con- 
 ception of unexceptional regularity, and the belief in spiritual 
 powers is so absolute as to render them matters of fact, primitive 
 consciousness can conceive of nothing as impossible. Consequently, 
 the apotheosis of wonder, the marvellous, which rests upon a 
 belief in the impossible, is not to be expected within the realm 
 of early psychic experiences. Nor will a more careful regard of 
 the nature of the conception of unexceptional regularity bring 
 any more encouraging results. It might be remarked, for in- 
 stance, that this conception is a splendid example of the abstrac- 
 tion that is formed from the wearing down of a multiplicity of 
 concrete experiences, of that "true abstraction" that is "not a 
 singling out ; it is rather a paring down, a wearing off, an erosion, 
 due to the progress in adjustment which the organ has been able 
 to effect. "^^ Now, it might be continued, although the abstract 
 conception of regularity may not yet be formed, still, among the 
 concrete experiences that are on their way to a reduction to 
 such an abstraction, there must be acted out physically again 
 and again experiences that are tending in a contrary direction 
 because they are interruptions of regularity; and the opposition 
 between these interruptions and ordinary experiences must be 
 felt, if not conceived, as irregular and impossible. For instance, 
 a man who can do something no other man can do, or any 
 other similar anomaly in an order of experience established 
 by every-day motor and sensory activity, must be felt at once 
 as far transcending in power what the individual percipient 
 and his fellows can do or are in the habit of experiencing.-* 
 From such, it would be maintained, an incipient sense of the 
 
 27 Baldwin, op. cit., p. 328. 
 
 28 Cf. Jevons on the surprise resulting from the interruption of expecta- 
 tion or "the belief that what has once happened will in similar circumstances 
 happen again" (op. cit., pp. 17 ff.). The norm of experiental regularity 
 in the life of the primitive is thus contrasted with the animistic norm: 
 "In their higher generalizations, in what Powell calls their 'sophiology, ' 
 it appears that the primitive peoples are guided by animistic norms; they
 
 104 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 marvellous might be expected. But, though the observations 
 are undoubtedly correct, the inference is erroneous. Once 
 given such a case of irregular experience, it is open immediately 
 to the operations of spiritual explanation and loss of wonder 
 just traced in the two previous paragraphs ; what seemed to be 
 a new condition resolves itself at once into the former case. 
 Equally futile, then, with that of wonder, is the quest of the 
 marvellous in primitive mind, unless, as was stipulated before, 
 some other tendency intervenes to modify the operation of the 
 tendencies here represented as premises. 
 
 In order better to check the results so far established it will 
 be wise to examine the testimony as to the general trend of 
 curiosity, belief, and imagination among the ruder peoples. About 
 curiosity there has been a difference of opinion among authors. 
 Spencer,-^ while admitting the presence of strong curiosity 
 among the higher Polynesians, maintains that the lowest mental 
 state is characterized by "an absence of desire for information 
 
 make up their cosmological schemes, and the like, in terms of personal or 
 quasi-personal activity, and the whole is thrown into something of a dram- 
 atic form. Through the early cosmological lore runs a dramatic consist- 
 ency which imputes something in the way of initiative and propensity to 
 the phenomena that are to be accounted for. But this dramatization of 
 the facts, the accounting for phenomena in terms of spiritual or quasi- 
 spiritual initiative, is by no means the whole case of primitive men 's 
 systematic knowledge of facts. Their theories are not all of the nature 
 of dramatic legend, myth, or animistic life-history, although the broader 
 and more picturesque generalizations may take that form. There always 
 runs along by the side of these dramaturgic life-histories, and underlying 
 them, an obscure system of generalizations in terms of matter-of-fact. 
 The system of matter-of-fact generalizations, or theories, is obscurer than 
 the dramatic generalizations only in the sense that it is left in the back- 
 ground as being less picturesque and of less vital interest, not in the sense 
 of being less familiar, less adequately apprehended, or less secure. The 
 peoples of the lower cultures ' know ' that the broad scheme of things is 
 to be explained in terms of creation, perhaps of procreation, gestation, birth, 
 growth, life and initiative; and these matters engross the attention and 
 stimulate speculation. But they know equally well the matter of fact that 
 water will run down hill, that two stones are heavier than one of them, 
 that an edge-tool will cut softer substances, that two things may be tied 
 together with a string, that a pointed stick may be stuck in the ground, 
 and the like. There is no range of knowledge that is held more securely 
 by any people than such matters of fact; and these are generalizations 
 from experience ; they are theoretical knowledge, and they are a matter 
 of course. They underlie the dramatical generalizations of the broad 
 scheme of things, and are so employed in the speculations of the myth- 
 makers and the learned. ' ' — Veblen, T., ' ' The Evolution of the Scientific 
 Point of View, ' ' in The University of California Chronicle, Vol. X, No. 4, 
 pp. 403-404 (Oct., 1908). 
 2» Spencer, Op. cit., § 46.
 
 WONDER IN PEIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 105 
 
 about new things." Dr. Lang^^ will not admit that even the 
 lower races are at fault in this respect, and proceeds to demolish 
 Spencer's evidence. He further claims that mythology is the 
 result of the inquisitive turn of mind which universally belongs 
 to savage races. Professor Giddings comes at the question com- 
 paratively, from the point of view of the analogy supposed to 
 exist between the minds of children and savages, and, discover- 
 ing a relation between the child's curiosity and his naming 
 activity, would by analogy throw curiosity as far back as the 
 practice by primitive man of ' ' his newly acquired and wonderful 
 faculty of speech. ' '^^ The wide variety of opinion indicated by 
 these three references might perhaps have been avoided if the 
 term curiosity had been carefully defined in its application to 
 those degrees of intelligence that are lower than those amongst 
 which the term is common. Here, as in the early stages of the 
 development of every body of knowledge, much confusion arises 
 through the use, where exact information is to be conveyed, of 
 popular and loosely defined phrases. If by curiosity there is 
 meant the mere attempt at closer, sensuous familiarity with a 
 novel object, the tentative rubbing and mouthing and fingering 
 of the strange thing, it will be immediately admitted that such 
 curiosity is to be attributed not only to savages, but also, and 
 most indubitably, to the lower animals. The craning necks 
 of fowls, the advancing and retreating movements of domestic 
 or wild animals, are too familiar to allow of any disagreement 
 here. It is to this class of activities that we have already seen 
 Professor James referring in these words : ' ' Some such suscepti- 
 bility for being excited ... by the mere novelty, as such, of 
 any movable feature of the environment must form the instinctive 
 basis of all human curiosity. ' '^^ Nor is this desire sensuously to 
 experience the new object a matter that ends with the develop- 
 ment of a rational curiosity. The Sandwich Islanders examining 
 Cook's European equipments, exploring and stroking them, are 
 to be compared to a civilized being involuntarily fingering things 
 new to his experience. Whether or not there is in connection with 
 
 30 Lang, A., Myth, Eitual and Bcligion, London 1899, I, 86 fif. 
 
 31 Giddings, F. H., The Principles of Sociology, New York 1896, p. 227. 
 
 32 James, W., op. cit., II, 429.
 
 106 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 this instinctive curiosity a state of blank suspense that might be 
 called the physiological analogue of wonder, is, however, a matter 
 with which we are not concerned. As already remarked, the 
 genetic study of these matters is distinctly outside the present 
 province of early mind ; while wonder as it has been described in 
 the last chapter is, so far as we are concerned, a matter dis- 
 tinctly dependent upon that long circuit of reaction that brings 
 into play the cerebral and rational functions. 
 
 If, on the other hand, there is meant by curiosity a definite, 
 reflective, ratiocinative progress, by which the novel object or 
 experience is made to go through the gamut of analysis and 
 comparison in order to be assigned to its proper place in the 
 mental classification of phenomena, the task of answering 3'ea or 
 nay to the question of savage curiosity is more complicated, 
 though by no means doubtful. The degree of reflection present 
 in the individual is indeed the key to the whole mental difference 
 between the uncivilized and civilized races ; nor is there, perhaps, 
 any way in which this can better be realized than by contrasting 
 the environments into which the children of the respective races 
 are born. A child of modern civilization is not only born into a 
 world of a highly developed language, which is freighted with 
 the reflection of centuries, and to which he immediately falls 
 heir, but he also grows up in the midst of a world of thought- 
 monuments, — of houses, fences, walks, roads, of steam-cars, news- 
 papers, telegraph-poles, and books, of innumerable other embodied 
 human thoughts, which take the place in his life that in the life 
 of the savage's infant is occupied by the natural wilds of forest 
 and plain, mountain and river. Churches and other institutions 
 convey early to one mind a sense of the past ; family records and 
 histories of nations create him a miniature citizen long before the 
 age of maturity; religious instruction makes a priest of him with 
 eyes toward the future while still at his mother's knees; geo- 
 graphies make of him a cosmopolitan before he travels beyond his 
 own village : to the other mind all these monuments and encour- 
 agements to reflection are present only in a degree so low as to 
 appear abortive by comparison ; while the wilds and dangers, the 
 great, sheer, physical struggle with beast and tempest, the con- 
 tinual search, nomad-wise, for food and shelter, dominate his 
 
 I
 
 WONDER IN PEIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 107 
 
 wandering, precarious initiation into life.^'' But the beginnings 
 of religion and history and government, of church, college, and 
 state, are there, — in the tools and shelters of the stone-age, in the 
 initiation ceremonies of the Australians, in their complex tribal 
 and inter-tribal relationships, in their tales and mythologies. 
 The contrast is tremendous; but there is something to contrast. 
 Finally, corresponding to those rude beginnings, there is a rough 
 mental classification of phenomena ; and thus there is present the 
 machinery for a reflection as crude mentally as the horde, or 
 wigwam, or celt, is crude economically. Calculated only for daily 
 needs are the implements of savage life ; and corresponding only 
 to daily activities is the reflection evidenced by peoples of the 
 stone-age in culture. Spencer and Gillen say of the Central Aus- 
 tralians : ' ' their mental powers are simply developed along the 
 lines which are of service to them in their daily life. ' '^* For per- 
 forming their sacred ceremonies they can give no clear reason : 
 "the natives have no very definite idea in regard to this, merely 
 saying that it pleases the Wollunqua when they are performed 
 and displeases him when they are not, ' '^^ 
 
 A reflection as crude as this can hardly give rise to a rational, 
 deliberative curiosity ; and, indeed, upon turning to the testimonies 
 of early travels, it is found that the curiosity evinced by the 
 aborigines is uniformly lacking in the reflective quality. The 
 experience of rarities and novelties is provocative of astonish- 
 ment, or of the mere sensuous exploration of the novel object, as 
 mentioned above. Cook tells of the surprise with which a New 
 Zealand chief viewed the European's vessel, and of how impos- 
 sible it was to fix his attention upon any object for a single 
 moment ; of the astonishment of the Matavians at seeing men on 
 horseback ; of the more than usual astonishment of the Sandwich 
 Islanders upon coming aboard.^" But the astonishment seems to 
 have worn away without any access of reflection. Fifty years 
 later Wilkes found among the same peoples, who had in the 
 
 '•i^Cf. Letourneau, La Psychologie Ethniqiie, Paris 1901, p. 79. 
 
 34 Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 30; cf., 
 by same authors, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 46 ff. 
 
 35 Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, etc., p. 227. 
 
 36 Kippis, A., Narrative of the Voyages Performed by Capt. Cool-, New 
 York 1858, pp. 173, 320, 337,
 
 108 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 meantime come under the tutelage of the missionaries, a curiosity 
 equally idle and in hardly any greater degree passing beyond the 
 stupid stare of astonishment." Of the equally simple inquisitive- 
 ness of the Dyaks a good illustration may be found in H. Ling 
 Roth's account of the natives of Sarawak and Borneo.''® At other 
 times there appears a complete absence of curiosity of any kind ;^^ 
 so that the curious state of mind seems not only as idle and 
 empty of reflection, but also as capricious, as with children. 
 
 On the other hand, the presence of teleological myths is 
 usually taken as an indication of a reflective curiosity working 
 upon its environment ; and Dr. Lang bases his whole account of 
 mythology upon the assumption of an early curiousness about the 
 world. Tylor speaks of the savage's intellectual appetite and 
 craving for reasons 'why. '^° But readiness to ask questions does 
 not mean a reflective and discriminating curiosity, even Avhen the 
 questions are about the origin and nature of the individual's 
 environment. The savage's curiosity, like that of the child, is 
 satisfied with the first answer that comes to hand, as Dr. Lang 
 is at pains to point out;*^ and that answ^er is the answer of 
 imagination. Here, indeed, a fact most important to the under- 
 standing of the primitive mind and its products becomes evident. 
 When such a mind confronts a question of rarity, its reflection is 
 identical with its imagination. A creative activity of mind, rather 
 than a critical examination, is what constitutes primitive reflec- 
 tion, and makes of primitive science a realm of fairy-stories that 
 contain the naive and facile answering of the questions asked by a 
 simple curiosity. Finally, it may be suggested that the inherent 
 delight in the exercise of this free function of invention, that the 
 universal love of story-telling, is quite as much at the basis of 
 mythology as that tendency to ask questions about everything 
 which is so often mistaken for a self-conscious and deliberative 
 activity. 
 
 37 Wilkes, C, U. 8. Exploring Expedition, Philadelphia 1845, II, 8, 111, 
 127. 
 
 88 H. Ling Roth, The Natives of Sarnicolc and North Borneo, London 
 1896, I, 68. 
 
 39 Earl. G. W., Papuans, London 18.53, p. 46; Kippis, op. cit., pp. 35, 82, 
 95, 325; Cf. H. Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania, Halifax 1899, p. 42, 
 
 40 Tylor, op. cit., I, 368, 369. 
 ■•1 Lang, op. cit., I, 51.
 
 WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 109 
 
 Thus, on the one hand, whatever there is of curiosity, simple, 
 idle, capricious, and empty of nwy appreciable reflection (except, 
 of course, in matters connected with the chase, where the savage 's 
 complete experience is always in the process of wearing down to 
 ideas and reflection), is closely bound up with that stupid aston- 
 ishment which, as we have seen, it is always difficult to distinguish 
 from real wonder, and which is, at any rate, of little or no 
 importance in our study, save as a frequent associate of wonder. 
 On the other hand, the same curiosity, brought to bear upon the 
 striking effects of natural environment, passes off into an imagina- 
 tive activity which, so far as the deliberation and bafflement 
 of reflection that make for wonder are concerned, promises no 
 eventuation in that emotion. 
 
 Once more, then, the progress to wonder, this time from 
 curiosity, is retarded by the absence of a sophisticated classifica- 
 tion of phenomena under a conscious conception of natural law 
 and order. But if a reflection rich in the store of analysis and 
 synthesis of data is absent, has not imagination, it may be asked, 
 lent another opportunity for wonder, aside from that which comes 
 from curiosity working upon objective material ? Has not a new 
 wonder been born, even a marvel, the marvel of imagination 
 working upon the unrealities of the mind's eye to produce that 
 which has never been seen on land or sea? 
 
 This question introduces the matter of belief. Belief, because, 
 perhaps, of its perduring primitiveness, shows better than almost 
 any other mental trait the identity of processes in the minds 
 of savage and citizen. Dr. Lang has assisted in exploding a 
 fallacy long connected with the popular opinion of primitive 
 character. To Europeans, he remarks, the mind of the savage 
 and credulity have appeared almost synonymous, while in fact 
 it is easy to show that incredulity is a marked characteristic of 
 savages. Tales of Creation and the Fall brought them by the 
 missionaries are received often with utter disbelief, as preposter- 
 ous, and worthy only of ridicule.**- Everything depends upon 
 the authority under which the matter for credence is presented. 
 Let the tradition of his own people present him with the absurdest 
 
 42 Lang, op. cit., I, 92-93.
 
 110 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 foolery,*^ or let those accredited with authority in the subject 
 demand his confidence in wildest vagaries, and the implicit assent 
 of the savage is immediately forthcoming. He is then the 
 apotheosis of credulity.''* On the other hand, the \evy narrowness 
 and irrationality of his faith under familiar authority render 
 him equally and unreasonably impervious to contrary ideas when 
 presented without such authority. That the early missionaries 
 often achieved their ends is no proof to the contrary ; but that this 
 furnishes, rather, a case in point, may be seen if time is taken to 
 reflect that the authority of these white strangers with new and 
 terrible magical powers of slaying and traveling was indeed so 
 high as to be god-like. The only wonder is that they ever failed. 
 Incredulity must have been unfortunately only too strong for 
 many an early devoted soul. The whole affair is in every way 
 identical with the mingling of bigotry and utter credulity which 
 is found among the unlearned to-day, and which would be a 
 paradox were it not so clearly an inevitable combination. 
 
 In belief proper, distinguished from unreflective credulity 
 by its interplay with doubt and conviction, the same general 
 principles of authority tend to hold so long as the individual 
 mind is absorbed in the communal. Moreover, progress in think- 
 ing for himself is provocative of hardly any other assured tend- 
 ency in the savage, because, as we have just pointed out, reflec- 
 tion and imagination in the savage are one and the same. Nor is 
 this imagination of a kind to widen the field of perceived differ- 
 ences, or open up the sense of various possibilities. It is not 
 the active imagination of a sophisticated mind indulging in con- 
 structive discovery and analytical invention, but, as Vierkandt 
 suggests, the principle of association dominating without chal- 
 lenge or hindrance the affairs of a narrow, uncritical conscious- 
 ness. Presentation in thought becomes equivalent to external 
 reality; and sequence in images, whether by contiguity or simi- 
 larity, is absolutely accepted as cause and effect. Thus, like 
 influences like; and antecedence in time is the same as efficient 
 cause.*"' There is no freedom of rare similarities and impossible 
 
 43 < < What the tribe believes, he believes, no matter what his senses tell 
 him. ' ' Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 13. 
 
 ** See, e.g., Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, etc., p. 484, note 1. 
 ■«5 For example, see Frazer, op. cit., I, pp. 9ff; 49 ff; and below, p. 114.
 
 WONDEB IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. Ill 
 
 contiguities, such as constitute the imagination of a modern poet, 
 but an even and sluggish flow of habitual associations won 
 directly from objective experience. What Tylor has to say about 
 the similarity of a savage's fancy to that of a raving lunatic*^ 
 applies rather to the error of the imagination and absoluteness of 
 the delusion than to any characteristic of high and sensitive 
 plasticity ; to the implicitness of belief, in a word, rather than to 
 the spontaneity of invention. To be sure, the higher races, some 
 branches of the Polynesians in particular,*^ evince an astounding 
 freedom of poetic image; but the lower peoples are quite as 
 innocent of such powers as they are unconscious of their own 
 lesser faculties.*^ Imagination is not imagination to them; it is 
 fact. "There is no organized experience to produce hesitation. 
 There is no doubt taking the shape — 'This cannot be,' or — 'that 
 is impossible.' Consequently, a fancy once having got posses- 
 sion, retains possession, and becomes an accepted fact. If we 
 always carry with us the remembrance of this attitude of mind, 
 we shall see how apparently reasonable to savages are explana- 
 tions of things which they make."'*® Or, to use Tylor 's words: 
 "Beholding the reflexion of his own mind like a child looking at 
 itself in a glass, he humbly receives the teaching of his second 
 self."^" 
 
 4c Tylor, op. cit., I, 315. 
 
 47 Cf. Frazer, op. cit., I, 140. 
 
 48 The learned show more than usual uniformity of testimony in this 
 matter. Jevons {Introd. to the Hist, of Selig., Lon. 1902, p. 36) refers 
 to the singularly sterile imagination of the savage. Tylor {op. cit., II, 
 108) shows that spirits are personified causes, and not creatures of un- 
 bridled fancy. Tarde (TJie Laws of Imitation, New York 1903, p. 95) 
 speaks of "a feeble, wayward imagination scattered here and there in 
 the midst of a vast passive imitativeness, " and quotes Sumner Maine's 
 reference to Taylor to the same effect. Grosse (Beginnings of Art, New 
 York 1897, p. 158) says: "Some historians of culture have ascribed to prim- 
 itive man an excess of fancy. If he really possesses anything of the kind, 
 it is doubly remarkable that he never exhibits even a trace of it in the 
 productions of his representative art." Spencer {op. cit., I, §§39, 47, and 
 I, App. B., § 11) claims that primitive imagination is rominiseont, not con- 
 structive. Hirn {Origins of Art, Lon. 1900, pp. 168, 297) would do away 
 with the ' ' idea of a rich and creative imagination in primitive man, ' ' and 
 notices instead his deficient powers of observ^ation. 
 
 49 Spencer, op. cit., I, App. A. 
 
 50 Tylor, op. cit., II, 49. The savage's implicit trust in his own imaginings 
 is well illustrated by that habit of mind in a child which is called "make- 
 believe." It is easy to remember how real those fancies were in our 
 own childhood; how the mind "saw" the things happen, while external 
 reality was totally forgotten. The savage has comparatively little of that
 
 112 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 For belief, then, whether iu liis own iniajjcinings or in new 
 presentations, everything depends upon the mental complexity of 
 the individual, — the number of categories of experience that the 
 subject for credence must satisfy. The less the number of such 
 categories, the greater the rigidity of belief. That there is a 
 mental complexity in the individuals we are dealing with, has 
 already emphatically been stated. In view of that development, 
 there cannot be on the part of the savage a mere blind acceptance 
 of whatever is presented to his consciousness, of anything and 
 everything claiming his attention. Far from that ; and yet, when 
 w'e speak comparatively, his intellectual capacity is after all a 
 very small matter; and as such it gives evidence of itself in a 
 rigidity of belief that is far from a negligible quantity in the 
 present research. On the contrary, this rigidity is of extreme 
 importance, as may be seen upon realizing its force and extent in 
 actual primitive life. So implicit among the aborigines of Vic- 
 toria is the belief in the powers of magical incantation that ' ' men 
 and women, who learned that it had been directed against them, 
 have been known to pine away and die of fright. '"^^ In New 
 Zealand the belief in the fatal power of tapu is so great as to 
 kill by mere suggestion the unlucky savage who incurs its malig- 
 nity f- and similar eases are easily found in all parts of the world, 
 — among the peasants in civilized countries as wxll as among the 
 savages of the archipelagoes. Spencer and Gillen cite the case 
 of a Kaitish man who believed that some of the evil magic of a 
 pointing-stick had gone into his head. ''The natives," they 
 write, "are people of the most wonderful imagination, and we 
 thought at first it was going to affect him seriously ; however we 
 assured him that our medicine chest contained magic powerful 
 
 extornal reality to forget: his " mako-bolieve" endures, and there is no 
 80j)hiHticate(l parent to point out his mistakes. Spencer and GiUen {North- 
 ern Tribes, etc., p. 252) give a good example of this in the case of the 
 roots of trees which have forced their way down through the rock into 
 the water beneath, and which the natives believe to be the whiskers of 
 the Wollunqua snake who resides in the pool. 
 
 SI Frazer, op. cit., I, 13. — Quotes from E. M. Curr, The Australian liacc, 
 III, 547. 
 
 ^2 Ibid., I, 321. — Quoted from Old New Zealand, by a Pakeha Maori, 
 Lon. 1884, p. 96. See further in Frazer for other cases — also p. 60 for 
 the same thing among European peasants. Cf. also E. Crawley, The Mystic 
 Ease, Lon. 1902. p. 67; A. W. Hovvitt, Native Tribes of South-East Aus- 
 tralia, Lon. 1904, pp. 373, 446.
 
 WONDER IN PEIMITIFE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 113 
 
 enough to counteract the effect of all the atnilingas in the tribe, 
 and gradually he recovered his equanimity. "^^ But the term 
 imagination is here utterly misleading, and furnishes a good 
 example of the looseness with which psychological terms are 
 applied by even ethnological specialists. Eigidity of belief, 
 rather than any liveliness of imagination proper, was the mental 
 trait liable to produce an unfortunate outcome; and so under- 
 stood the case is nothing but another example of the force and 
 extent of the stereotyped aspect of narrowly circumscribed 
 consciousnesss. 
 
 This belief even unto death, as it might be called, due as it 
 is to the absence of "many ways of conceiving things," and 
 implying a corresponding density toward other ways of apprecia- 
 tion — possessing, in a word, both the positive and the negative 
 characteristics of bigotry — is the adequate compliment of the 
 perfect credulity under authority, and the equally perfect in- 
 credulity without authority, which were noticed above. And 
 when to this belief and credulity, which approximate each other 
 so closely that they seem hardly differentiated, there are added 
 the other conditions of simplicity and paucity of imagination, 
 and belief in that meagre imagination, such as it is, it is at once 
 apparent that between mental sluggishness and stereotyped 
 bigotry of conception there is small chance for wonder. These 
 are indeed tendencies that point directly away from, rather 
 than toward, that mental plasticity and sense of rarity that were 
 found in the previous chapter to be the sme qua non of any 
 wonder beyond mere stupid astonishment. There is no creation 
 of a new wonder by feats of imagination, as seemed possible for 
 a moment; there is the throttling of wonder by the readiness of 
 credulity and the rigidity of belief; incredulity is so absolute as 
 to eventuate in the sense of the ridiculous, not of wonder ; there 
 is little or nothing of the ebb and flow of doubt and speculation, 
 which form the shifting outlines of the belief that, consonant with 
 wonder, stops short of annihilating it with too absolute a 
 credence.^* The lower in the human scale the search is carried, 
 the stronger become these inimical conditions and the further 
 
 C3 Spencer and Gillon, Nortliern Tribes, etc., pp. 462-463. Cf. Stoll, 
 Suggestion und Hypnotismus, etc., Leipzig 1904, p. 121. 
 c-i Cf. above, p. 80.
 
 114 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS. 
 
 away we move from marvelling. Unless some other tendency- 
 appear to contravene these, there is as small chance for wonder 
 from the side of belief and imagination as from the side of 
 curiosity. 
 
 A word about Magic. A few paragraphs above, mention was 
 made of the dominant powers of association in a narrow con- 
 sciousness, — of how appearance in thought becomes equivalent to 
 external reality.^^ It is the body of logical error, occasioned by 
 this natural confusion of the subjective and the objective, and 
 rendered concretely obvious in certain peculiar practices, that 
 is meant by the term magic in this place. The regarding of 
 antecedence and consequence in time as the same thing as cause 
 and effect ; the assumption, unconsciously the result of mental 
 association by similarity, that like effects like, — that, in a word, 
 "causal connection in thought is equivalent to causative connec- 
 tion in fact" : — art magic, as Dr. Lang observes, is simply putting 
 these erroneous principles into action.^** Or, to quote Dr. Frazer, 
 "A mistaken association of similar ideas produces imitative or 
 mimetic magic; a mistaken association of contiguous ideas pro- 
 duces sjTnpathetic magic in the narrower sense of the word. "^^ 
 Thus, to give an example of the mimetic kind, the Bushmen light 
 fires when they desire rain, with the idea that the black smoke 
 clouds will attract black rain clouds. The Talus sacrifice black 
 cattle for the same purpose.^* Of sympathetic magic the readiest 
 example is the superstition that ill may be worked to an individual 
 by torturing either any refuse of his body, such as hair, skin or 
 finger-nails, or anything that has been contiguous to his body, 
 such as his coat or other part of his dress.'^^ It is this sort of 
 magic, magic in its simplest terms, that is considered here in its 
 possible relation to wonder. 
 
 In the first place, and briefly, it is to be noted that magic can 
 occupy no place of rarity in early consciousness, both because of 
 
 Bs See above, p. 110. 
 50 Lang, op. cit., I, 96. 
 
 57 Frazer, op. cit., I, 62. 
 
 58 Lang, op. cit., I, 99. 
 
 58 For further examples, see Frazer as indicated above, note 45 ; or Jcvons, 
 op. cit.. Chap. IV.
 
 WONDER IN PEIMITIFE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 115 
 
 the universality of its fundamental causes, which are found 
 wherever there is mental association by similarity and contiguity, 
 — and also because of its constant appearance in objective form 
 and practice among all the individuals of primitive tribes or com- 
 munities.^° To us, indeed, the magical powers commonly arrogated 
 to himself by each member of a tribe appear superhuman and 
 ridiculous; but to the savage himself they are as much matters 
 of fact as his physical powers, — as his other physical powers, to 
 express what would be his own statement if he were capable of 
 the abstraction. Instead of being the exercise of a rare and special 
 prerogative of influencing the supernatural, or at least the super- 
 human, the practice of magic is in his consciousness the mere 
 exertion of the perfectly well-known and common methods of his 
 science. ' ' His sympathetic magic is but one branch of his science, 
 and is not different in kind from the rest"; magic is not 
 "magical" to the savage.*'^ There needs neither more words nor 
 further proof immediately to lift the matter of simple magic from 
 the demesne of wonder. 
 
 Can the same be shown of what Dr. Tylor calls ''Animism"? 
 Can the spirits spoken of by Vierkandt as beings "whose actions 
 cannot be predicted by calculation and whose motives are 
 whimsical," be shown to be equally unproductive of marvelling? 
 
 It is impossible to approach this subject without defining 
 what is meant by animism; for there has been a confusion of 
 application that lays the content of the word open to question. 
 Animism, as Dr. Lang remarks, is " (1) a sort of instinctive or 
 unreasoned belief in universal animation, which Mr. Spencer calls 
 'Animism' and does not believe in; (2) the reasoned belief in 
 separable and surviving souls of men (and in things), which Mr. 
 Spencer believes in [and calls the Ghost-theory] and i\Ir. Tylor 
 calls 'Animism.' ""- The former sort, based as it is upon a sup- 
 posed lack of differentiation of the animate and inanimate, is 
 
 CO See Frazer, op. cit., I, 129, et passim; also I, 66, 72; cf. Brinton, op. 
 cit., p. 56; Crawley, op. cit., pp. 31, 86; Lang, Making of Eclig., p. 49; 
 Journ. Am. Folk-Lorc, XVIII, 327; Lang, Myth. Bit. and Belig., I, 85; 
 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 456. 
 
 ci Jevous, op. cit., pp. 27, 35. Cf. Brinton, op. cit., p. 13. 
 
 02 A. Lang, The Making of Eelig., 2d ed., London 1900, p. 53.
 
 116 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS. 
 
 pretty thoroughly discredited by the observations, put forward 
 by Van Ende and others, that even the lower animals make such 
 a distinction."^ The second sort, as defined b}^ Dr. Tylor, is of a 
 double nature, involving both spirits and gods. "It is habitually 
 found," he says, "that the theory of Animism divides into two 
 great dogmas, forming parts of one consistent doctrine; first, 
 concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued 
 existence after the death or destruction of the body; second, 
 concerning other spirits, upward to the rank of powerful 
 deities."®* Whether these two dogmas should be taken together 
 in the sense that the same spiritual conception extends throughout 
 the series of souls, demons, and deities, while the conception of 
 soul is the original one of the series f^ or whether they should be 
 separated, as Dr. Lang maintains, because of an independent 
 development of the idea of deity, are questions we fortunately^ do 
 not have to decide in the search for wonder. Nor is it necessary 
 to regard the origin of the idea of spirits, whether it arises 
 from metaphysical sources or from mistaken interpretation of 
 dream, vision, hallucination, shadow, and the like. For us the 
 ideas of both gods and souls are there — existent ; and, though the 
 origin of a belief may sometimes give to the student some dubious 
 hint of its later subjective value, usually the present value in 
 popular consciousness of a belief or rite is quite divorced from 
 any appreciation of the exact nature of its origin. The evolution 
 of religious belief is always marked by the loss to memory of the 
 earlier and cruder stages. Since there is thus no call to join the 
 ranks of either party of disputants, it cannot be interpreted as 
 giving allegiance or countenance to the one or the other if here, 
 for the sole sake of clearness in argument, the soul-spirit-demon 
 side of Animism is regarded by itself, and the deity side post- 
 poned to another place. For the present then, only the former 
 case is covered when the word Animism is used. 
 
 The extent, according to primitive belief, of the world of 
 spirits and demons is practically boundless, as Dr. Frazer and 
 others have most adequately shown. A few cases taken from 
 
 <''•■> U. Van Ende, Histoire Naturelle de la Croyance, Paris 1887. 
 84 Tylor, op. cit., I, 426. 
 ^^•Ihid., IT, 109.
 
 WONDER IN PEIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 117 
 
 the Golden Bough will serve to recall emphatically the astonish- 
 ing conditions. "Thus in regard to the aborigines of Australia 
 we are told that 'the number of supernatural beings, feared if 
 not loved, that they acknowledge is exceedingly great; for not 
 only are the heavens peopled with such, but the whole face of the 
 country swarms with them; every thicket, most watering-places, 
 and all rocky places abound with evil spirits. In like manner, 
 every natural phenomenon is believed to be the work of demons, 
 none of which seem of a benign nature, one and all striving to do 
 all imaginable mischief to the poor blackf ellow. ' 'The negro,' 
 says another writer, 'is wont to regard the whole world around 
 him as peopled with invisible beings, to whom he imputes every 
 misfortune that happens to him, and from whose harmful 
 influence he seeks to protect himself by all kinds of magic means. ' 
 . . . Speaking of the spirits which the Indians of Guiana 
 attribute to all objects in nature, Mr. E. F. im Thurn observes 
 that 'the whole world of the Indian swarms with these beings. 
 If by a mighty mental effort we could for a moment revert to a 
 similar mental position, we should find ourselves everywhere sur- 
 rounded by a host of possible hurtful beings, so many in number 
 that to describe them as innumerable would fall ridiculously 
 short of the truth. It is not therefore wonderful that the Indian 
 fears to move beyond the light of his camp-fire after dark. . . . ; 
 nor is it wonderful that occasionally the air around the settle- 
 ment seems to the Indian to grow so full of beings, that a peaiman 
 (sorcerer), who is supposed to have the power of temporarily 
 driving them away, is employed to effect a general clearance of 
 these beings, if only for a time.' . . . The Tahitians, when 
 they were visited by Captain Cook, believed that 'sudden deaths 
 and all other accidents are effected by the immediate action of 
 some divinity (sic). If a man only stumble against a stone and 
 hurt his toe, they impute it to an Eatooa; so that they may be 
 literally said, agreeably to their system, to tread enchanted 
 ground.' . . . [Among the Maori the spirits] 'were sup- 
 posed to be so numerous as to surround the living in crowds [like 
 mosquitoes] ever watching to inflict evil.' ... In Bolang 
 Mongondo, a district of Celebes, 'all calamities, great and small, 
 of whatever kind and by whatever name they are called, that
 
 118 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 befall men and animals, villages, gardens, and so forth, are 
 attributed to evil or angry spirits. The superstition is in- 
 describably great. The smallest wound, the least indisposition, 
 the most trifling adversity in the field, at the fishing, on a journey 
 or what not, is believed by the natives to be traceable to the anger 
 of their ancestors.' . . . The Mantras, an aboriginal race of 
 the Malay Peninsula, 'find or put a spirit everywhere, in the air 
 they breathe, in the land they cultivate, in the forests they 
 inhabit, in the trees they cut dowTi, in the caves of the rocks. 
 According to them, the demon is the cause of everything that 
 turns out ill. . . .' "«« 
 
 The examples can be multiplied indefinitely. In this populous 
 realm of superstition, what is the status of wonder and the won- 
 derful ? In the first place, it will be seen immediately that there 
 are certain conditions that, according to our descriptive stand- 
 ard, are opposed to wonder. There is no rarity. Spirits are 
 common, and extremely intimate in their intercourse with men. 
 They hardly can be said to constitute * another world, ' so entirely 
 is their activity in this. They are as common as the diseases and 
 misfortunes they cause; and like those experiences they are 
 calamities, — not wonders. As personifications of disease they 
 enjoy the very real, and equally common, characteristics of the 
 diseases themselves. It has already been observed"^ that rarities 
 in experience lose their wonder because of their instantaneous 
 explanation by reference to this great and common premise of 
 spiritual influence : the further observation may now be made 
 that their very commonness tends to keep the spirits themselves 
 from taking on the air of the wonderful. Furthermore, the 
 materialistic conception of spirits tends to make wonder even 
 more remote. Associated with them is nothing of the modern 
 idealistic and tenuous character of a supernatural, transcendent, 
 unembodied power ; instead, either they are so vaguely conceived 
 as to be hardly liiore than ' influences, '"* or else no distinction is 
 made between them and persons. The methods adopted to expel 
 spirits conclusively show the naive materialism of the savage. 
 
 66 Prazer, op. vit., Ill, 41 ff. 
 
 67 See above, p. 102. 
 
 68 Cf. Crawley, op. cit., p. 19.
 
 WONDER IN PEIMITIFE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 119 
 
 Screaming and beating the air with sticks, pelting with stones, 
 stalking an infected village and clearing it of demons by assault, 
 pulling the evil spirits down from the roof by ropes, shutting 
 gates against them, scaring away fever-demons by terrific noise 
 and war-like preparations, charging them with squadrons of 
 elephants,*'^ — these, and many other physical means of expulsion, 
 can point to nothing else than a belief that spirits have bodies 
 and functions, powers and susceptibilities, like those of the men 
 whom they persecute. If any further proof is needed, the world- 
 wide primitive conception of soul as a material entity can be 
 cited.^'' Again, in the universal fear evinced toward these 
 malignant spirits lies another condition incompatible with won- 
 der. Practically all the cases cited by Dr. Frazer insist upon 
 the dread with which the savage regards the cruel propensities 
 of the demon hosts. Personified causes of misfortunes as they are, 
 they are hated as the misfortunes are feared. In sickness and 
 pain, fear and hatred usurp the attention ; and when the respon- 
 sibility for suffering can be placed upon concrete shoulders, no 
 time is lost in wondering at the matter. Pain demands allevia- 
 tion; the offenders' shoulders must be chastised. Nothing of 
 awe, which goes with wonder as we have seen, but everj^hing 
 of fear, which, as we have also seen, preoccupies the mind, is 
 the perpetual and harassing attendant of these primitive spir- 
 itualists. One would think that under such nervous conditions 
 corpulence Avould be a rarity so great and inexplicable as to 
 be marvellous! Finally, the perfect belief in all these spirits, 
 the absolute, matter-of-fact assumption of their material reality, 
 the air of what might proleptically be called scientific certitude, 
 is enough in itself to render the supposition of wonder extremely 
 precarious. Such a belief is the natural accompaniment, or the 
 meet culmination, of a superstition that is singularly sterile in 
 wonder-tendencies in spite of its possession of many apparent 
 incentives to the feeling of mystery : but spirits are the most usual 
 of primitive visitors. 
 
 There may be noticed, however, in the second place, that 
 even among these spirit-swarms there are certain hints of 
 
 60 Frazer, op. cit., Ill, 60 ff. 
 
 70 Vid. ib., I, 248; II, 57; III, 351.
 
 120 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 strangeness, which are bound sooner or later to grow into con- 
 ditions favoring wonder. The prevailing, though by no means 
 unexceptional, invisibility of the demon is as rich a source of 
 wonder-development as can be wished. In dreams, indeed, all 
 maj' have seen demons ; in visions the wizards are supposed to 
 behold them; and at times of great excitement, when a whole 
 village is in frenzied pursuit of the plaguing sprites, many act- 
 ually believe they see them dodging and running about. But, 
 for the most part, houses are beaten, and streets charged, with- 
 out any visible meeting with the dreaded invaders. When belief, 
 for one cause or another, shall grow less absolute, this invis- 
 ibility will become a distinguishing mark, and the cause of many 
 premonitory ghost-shivers. Again, the power of the unholy 
 spirits, though so man-like, is always open to exaggeration, 
 which, in turn, will tend ultimately to a more and more refined 
 intangibility. Wliether or not in the cases indicated, say that 
 of the Australians, for instance, there is already anything of 
 the supernatural, it is extremely difficult to say, because of 
 the extremely modern and sophisticated connotation of the word 
 supernatural. Certainly nothing of the supernatural in the 
 sense of that which contravenes systematized categories of ex- 
 perience : but it is absurd to deny that the Australian is conscious 
 of the supernatural in the sense of a power greater than his owti 
 — the sense which Principal Jevons supports ;'^^ for the admission 
 means nothing more than repeating that the spiritual powers were 
 not 'spiritual,' but material. As Crawley puts it, "Primitive 
 man believes in the supernatural, but supernatural beings and 
 existences are to him really material — the supernatural is a 
 part of and obeys the laws of nature. "^^ 
 
 We may now pause to summarize the results already obtained. 
 All the premises and tendencies of primitive thought and belief 
 so far noticed, with the possible exception of the one ingredient 
 of invisibility in the last case, lead away from wonder rather 
 than toward it; and they evince a general disposition on the 
 part of early mental and religious conditions to have less and 
 
 "1 Jevons, op. cit., pp. 19, 23, 41. 
 72 Crawley, op. cit., p. 62.
 
 WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 121 
 
 less to do with wonder the more primitive they are. We have 
 now practically covered the field indicated by the picture 
 drawn by Vierkandt. In one way or another — by the discussion 
 of the mental and emotional cues to wonder, surprise, reflection, 
 curiosity, imagination, credulity, belief, fear; or of the insti- 
 tution, as it may be called, of magic ; or of the data of animism, 
 so far as we have undertaken them — the premises, and the sub- 
 jective and objective characteristics, of that typical picture have 
 been mentioned and commented upon. 
 
 Is the task, then, ended? Has the field of tendencies been 
 explored sufficiently, and is the general negative conclusion in 
 the matter of wonder and marvel to stand as it now is? The 
 task cannot be so simple. Human nature is not so amenable 
 to one-way categories. It always has a habit of disturbing the 
 best laid and best considered of such rigid cabinet-filings. The 
 student too often sees only one way of the web, and forgets the 
 warp in the woof. It is proper, therefore, to turn again to the 
 general field of primitive conditions with the expectation of 
 finding in some matters not mentioned by Vierkandt the pres- 
 ence, or at least the seed, of contrary tendencies that will count 
 toward the development of a sense of wonder even in very early 
 conditions. Now the logic of the case, as it stands revealed by 
 the steps already taken, indicates that what is necessary for 
 this development of wonder is a certain specialization and 
 uniqueness here and there in the midst of common and universal 
 conditions, a separating and secluding tendency, by which the 
 individuality that belongs to rarity may grow up in the midst 
 of the communal character and characteristics of primitive life. 
 It is the particular, the glaringly personal, the discrete fruit 
 of variety apotheosized in exaggerated specialties and close cor- 
 porations, that is needed as much for the production of real 
 wonder as for the economic and social advance of the horde or 
 clan. And it is in the hitherto neglected side of animism, in 
 its aspect or dogma of separate, overlording deities — great, par- 
 ticular, and individual spirits, far removed from the ordinary 
 demon — that the first of such specializing tendencies may be 
 noted. 
 
 Upon the nature of the gods, however, the anthropologists
 
 122 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 do not agree. AVhile the older anthropology has been in the 
 habit of regarding them as segregations from the great animistic 
 company of ghosts and spirits,^^ Dr. Lang has of late strongly, 
 though to very few convincingly, supported the theory that 
 'savage supreme beings', such as the Australian Daramulun, 
 originate in no specialization within animistic circles, are not 
 spiritual beings at all, but are the idealizations of the savage 
 himself, as conceived by himself. Such a being "was not origin- 
 ally differentiated as 'spirit' or 'not spirit'. He is a Being, con- 
 ceived of without the question of 'spirit' or 'no spirit' being 
 raised; perhaps he was originally conceived of before that 
 question could be raised by men. When we call the Supreme 
 Being of savages a 'spirit' we introduce our own animistic 
 ideas into a conception where it may not have originally existed. 
 If the god is 'the savage himself raised to the n*^ power' so 
 much the less of a spirit is he. "^* A very questionable proof 
 and illustration of this theory is the case of Daramulun. Mr. 
 Howitt writes thus: "This supernatural being, by whatever 
 name he is known, is represented as having at one time dwelt 
 on the earth, but afterwards to have ascended to a land beyond 
 the sky, where he still remains, observing mankind. As Dara- 
 mulun, he is said to be able to 'go anywhere and do anything.' 
 He can be invisible; but when he makes himself visible, it 
 is in the form of an old man of the Australian race. He is evi- 
 dently everlasting, for he existed from the beginning of all 
 things, and he still lives. But in being so, he is merely in the 
 state in which, these aborigines believe, everyone would be if 
 not prematurel}' killed by evil magic. Combining the statements 
 of the legends and the teachings of the ceremonies, I see, as 
 the embodied idea, a venerable kindly Headman of a tribe, 
 full of knowledge and tribal \\nsdom, and all-powerful in magic, 
 of which he is the source, with virtues, failings, and passions, 
 such as the aborigines regard them. Such, I think, they picture 
 the All-Father to be, and it is most difficult for one of us to 
 divest himself of the tendency to endow such a supernatural 
 
 "3 See, e.g., Jevons, op. cit., p. 17.5; Im Thurn, in Journ. Anthrop. Instit., 
 XI, 374; and Tylor, as quoted above, note G4. 
 
 T* Lang, Making of Belig., p. 187.
 
 WONDER IN PEIMITIFE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 123 
 
 being with a nature quasi-diyine, if not altogether so — divine 
 nature and character. "^^ Later on, indeed, with the popular- 
 ization of ghost and spirit worship, such a Being as this All- 
 Father would by analogy come to be regarded as a spirit and 
 be placed side by side with other "non-original gods that were 
 once ghosts."'*^ 
 
 The best thing to be done, in view of the present state of 
 the question, is to speak of the following kinds of gods : original 
 gods who are Supreme Fathers and non-animistic ; gods who 
 were originally ghosts or other spirits, and are not Supreme 
 Fathers, and who appear in great number as local deities, or 
 as tutelary deities of sections of the community, or as tutelary 
 deities of individuals;^^ lastly, original gods who became anim- 
 istic by analogy. Now, in any class the element of individuality 
 or specialization, and so of the rarity that makes for wonder, 
 is distinctly present. Two particular cases, however, should be 
 noted. In the first place, in whatever way the god arises, he 
 is universally distinguished from the animistic crowd by his 
 benign intentions toward men and even helpful offices in their 
 behalf. Such goodness, though, does not produce intimacy in 
 the popular breast to anywhere near the degree that intimacy 
 is precipitated by the malignity of the demons. The good god 
 means, to the savage, the harmless god, whom he need not worry 
 about in the course of his struggles against the torments of the 
 fiends.'^ The air of remoteness which is thus attendant upon 
 the segregation of the god, and which is rather fostered than 
 otherwise by the esoteric teachings of the initiation ceremonies 
 described by Howitt, and Spencer and Gillen, will possess a 
 double tendency, — toward both awe and neglect. The sense of 
 wonder lags under such conditions. Inasmuch as they are not 
 continually present to the popular consciousness, there is, in- 
 deed, a rarity about the great gods; but so great is the remote- 
 ness that makes the rarity that the wonder becomes more and 
 
 75 A. W. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia, London 1904, 
 pp. 500-501, 
 
 7e Lang, Making of Belig., pp. 189, 190. 
 
 77 Cf. Jevons, op. cit., p. 163. 
 
 78 In some cases the neglect may be due to other causes. See Jevons, 
 op. cit., p. 181.
 
 124 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 more a thing of special or esoteric resuscitation. The vividness 
 of wonder is proportioned to the immediate and striking contra- 
 vention of familiar experiences, to the interruption of the 
 affairs of men and women in their intimate surroundings and 
 oflfiees. By the unlearned peasant, as well as by the ignorant 
 savage, the wonder of Jack the Giant-Killer, for instance, is 
 felt far more and far oftener than the wonder of a creation 
 story. But peasant and savage both experience, at times of 
 religious initiation or celebration, the wonder of the ancient and 
 remote. Thus the greater gods are always a source of wonder 
 to the human breast; but a source that is often quiescent, and 
 the power of which is latent until revivified by special con- 
 ditions of social custom, or by particular circumstances of 
 individual moment. 
 
 In the second place, it is to be noted that the original Su- 
 preme Father of Dr. Lang's argument derives no wonder from 
 spiritual sources until far on in his downward career. This does 
 not mean that he possesses no wonder of his own. The awe and 
 reverence with which he is regarded, the secret nature of his 
 rites, and the mystery of his revelation,'" all indicate conditions 
 eminentl}' favorable to, if not the actual presence of, wonder. 
 Indeed, the w^onder attaching to him is in all probability far 
 greater than could ever be derived from his alliance with the 
 commonplace crowd of spirits and ghosts. Dr. Lang himself 
 claims that with the rise of ghost-worship the All-Father becomes 
 more and more an indifferent and little regarded power.^" 
 Again, the powers of Daramulun, Baiame, and the like, are such 
 as indicate a wonderful nature. It will be necessary in a 
 few moments to show that the magicians are supposed to derive 
 their extraordinary gifts from the gods, who are represented 
 as the sole source of all such gifts. The tale of the other powers 
 of the gods, equally out of the ordinary', equally unique and 
 limited to themselves, may be found in the passage in Howitt 
 to which reference has already been made.®^ There may be won- 
 der without spirits; and many a wonderful tribal hero Or head- 
 
 7» Howitt, op. cit., p. 489 ff. 
 
 80 Lang, Making of Eelig., pp. XX, 190. 
 
 81 See above, p. 123.
 
 WONDER IN PEIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 125 
 
 man, idealized by tradition and exaggerated by piety, becomes 
 a spirit only with the rise of the rival spirits in popular regard. 
 
 The segregation of the god is paralleled, and undoubtedly 
 also increased, by the segregation of his special mortal servant, 
 the priest. The relation of priest and magician in primitive life 
 is a matter of dispute. While, on the one hand, it is undeniable 
 that in many races individuals are found who combine the func- 
 tions of priest and sorcerer, and that in many highly developed 
 priesthoods of civilized nations the priest retains certain powers 
 undeniably of magical origin, it is equally certain, on the other 
 hand, that the notable struggle in advanced communities between 
 priest and sorcerer, between magic and religion, is duplicated 
 among the lower races in the opposition of the orthodox med- 
 icine-man to the shrewd, crafty, imtruthful, and unscrupulous 
 charlatan, who holds no office of public trust, but preys upon 
 the simple and ignorant. Francis La Flescher has eloquently 
 insisted on this opposition; and has shown clearly how the 
 venality of the charlatan, and his readiness to perform for a 
 consideration, have always obscured in the eyes of strangers 
 the real religion and high idealism of the sacred and secretive 
 office of the priest.**- Exactly what this state of affairs may 
 mean — whether the priest has evolved from the magician, or 
 the two, separate and distinguishable in the beginning, have 
 in the course of later development mutually borrowed the powers 
 of each other, while still maintaining an antagonism of offices — 
 is a matter that must be left to the specialists. For present 
 purposes the best must be made of a bad matter by regarding 
 the two offices separately. 
 
 Aside from the specialization of the office, which in itself 
 is a strong factor of rarity, there are other conditions — in part, 
 perhaps, aspects of this segregation — that indubitably produce a 
 tendency toward the wonderful. For one thing, the close relation 
 between the offices of king and priest,®^ so often amounting to 
 identity, doth hedge them mutually with a supreme dignity and 
 
 s^ Journal of American Folh-Lore, XVIII, 274; cf. Jevons, p. 289; 
 Lang, Making of Belig., p. 183; Frazer, I, 64. 
 
 ssPrazer, op. cit.. Index under "Kings as Gods"; Jevons, p. 275 ff.
 
 126 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 awful sanctity. Again, the function of mediating between man 
 and god, of supplying the necessary channel of supplication and 
 communication, is always a present reminder of tlie extraor- 
 dinary powers of the deity's agent. But greater than either 
 of these is the possession by the priest of actually divine power, 
 received by him as the representative and chief servitor of the 
 god. "Among his associates he is looked upon as set apart 
 from other men by the divinitj^ which chooses him for its agent, 
 or dwells within him. In the Polynesian Islands this is forcibly 
 expressed in the terms applied to the native priests, pia atua, 
 'god boxes', receptacles of divinity; and amama, 'open mouths', 
 for through them the god speaks, not their own selves."®* — The 
 chief evidence of this power, and often the origin of the claim 
 to the priestly office, is in itself one of the most fertile sources 
 of wonder to be met with in primitive life. This remarkable 
 evidence, distinguished by a rarity and fearful intensity appro- 
 priate to its character as a propaedeutic to one of the rarest 
 of offices, is that body of phenomena nowadays studied under 
 the various heads of suggestion, hypnotism, mesmerism, neuro- 
 pathy, psychical phantasms, pneumatische Erfahrungen, and the 
 like. The uncritical mind and narrow consciousness of the sav- 
 age lay him open to such experiences in a degree hardly as yet 
 realized ; and, among the members of the horde, the neurotic who 
 is the greatest adept in trance, nervous convulsions, hysteria, 
 and the whole range of that sort of thing, is regarded as a sacred 
 and inspired character. "These inspired seers represent the 
 priesthood of every primitive religion. They cultivate [mystic 
 power] and preserve it, and in them the missionaries of higher 
 faiths have ever found their most resolute foes and successful 
 opponents. The reason is, as I have said, that the sliaman has 
 himself been face to face with God, has heard Ilis voice, and 
 felt His presence. His faith therefore is real, and cannot be 
 shaken by any argument. He may indeed, and he generally 
 does, assist his public performances with some trickery, some 
 thaumaturgy; but that this is merely superadded for effect is 
 proved by the general custom that when one such adept is ill 
 
 84 Brinton, op. cit., p. 58; cf. Frazer, I, 249.
 
 WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 127 
 
 or in straits he will solicit the aid of another."**^ Moreover, it 
 may be noted, the very addition of such thaumaturgy indicates 
 the general atmosphere of wonder in which the whole per- 
 formance is witnessed. Here, at least, is a power distinctly 
 immediate in its interruption of the usual courses of daily 
 affairs, whether it be experienced by the layman or by the 
 priest. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of a stronger stimulus 
 to wonder than these strange and awful experiences, wrung 
 from within our own selves, or particularly evident (in their 
 intense disturbances of ordinary vocations) in the vivid con- 
 tortions of the adepts; nor would it be altogether fanciful to 
 attempt philosophically to trace all wonder back to these mystic 
 and mysterious, even as yet only partly understood, eruptions 
 of a subliminal life. Short even of a speculative attempt, an 
 actually empirical demonstration of such an origin might be made 
 with the aid of that pile of evidence which has been gathered for 
 establishing the foundation of religion in such experiences. Of 
 all the tendencies for wonder, this is undoubtedly the greatest, 
 if it be not the common source of all. 
 
 The magician, also, delves in these mysterious effects of an 
 unknown, misunderstood mental pathology. Dr. StoU, in his 
 eminently suggestive, if not exhaustive work. Suggestion und 
 Hypnotismus in der VolkerpsycJiologie (2d ed., Leipzig 1904), 
 has traced the evidence through many races and ages. Among 
 the Australians, for instance, he finds the Boyl-yas are endowed 
 with powers in which the possible and impossible are mixed 
 without critical regard. As a particular indication of the sug- 
 gestion-nature of the activity of the magicians, he cites the 
 manner in which they obtain their powers.^" M. Mauss, in an 
 exhaustive article, L'Origine des pouvoirs magiques dans les 
 societes Australiennes,^'' clearly shows this suggestive nature of 
 initiation. The prevailing method of acquiring the art is, ac- 
 cording to this writer, revelation by the dead, by spirits or 
 
 85 Brinton, op. cit., p. 58. 
 
 soStoll, op. cit., pp. 113 ff.; cf. Crawley, op. cit., pp. 23, 24. 
 
 8T £cole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sect. Religieuses, Paris 1904, pp. 
 14 ff.
 
 128 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 mythic personages, by more complex forms. ®^ Mr. Hewitt, in 
 the seventh chapter of the work already cited, gives a long ac- 
 count of the making of medicine-men; suggestion and thauma- 
 turgy play the leading roles. Moreover, the powers of the magi- 
 cian are equalled by the weirdness of his initiation. ' ' The power 
 of the doctor is only circumscribed by the range of his fancy. 
 He communes witli spirits, takes aerial flights at pleasure, kills 
 or cures, is invulnerable and invisible at will, and controls the 
 elements. "^^ Howitt mentions his powers as: supernatural 
 powers, healing and causing disease, magical practices, rain- 
 making, clairvoyant power, spirit mediumship, special forms of 
 magic, and the possession of songs of enchantment.^** Thus, the 
 magician, as well as the priest, is the recipient and agent of 
 powers that distinctly lift him above his fellows as a man of 
 wonder and worker of marvels. 
 
 The fact of social separateness is here also. In spite of the 
 common possession by the members of his tribe of neuropathic 
 experiences, the shaman is universally distinguished by actual 
 differences of conduct and appearance, as well as by the exer- 
 cise of superior powers. Not only has the wizard, for instance, 
 the power of communicating with spirits during waking hours, 
 while the ordinary mortal can meet such only in sleep,"^ but, 
 as M. ]\Iauss indicates, "he feels himself different and does not 
 lead the same life, as much from the necessity of imposing upon 
 others as because he imposes upon himself, — particularly because 
 he fears to lose the extraordinarily fugitive qualities acquired. 
 He becomes, he remains, he is obliged to continue 'another.' He 
 has in part a 'new soul.' He is a being whom society makes 
 expand, and he himself must develop his personality until some- 
 times it is almost confounded with that of the 'superior be- 
 ings.' "®^ The strenuous forms of initiation, so carefully 
 guarded, in themselves show the attitude adopted toward the 
 office and its powers. But a still further and extremely cogent 
 
 88 See Journ. Am. Folk-Lore, XVIII, 327. 
 8» Frazer, op. cit., I, 73. 
 
 00 Op. cit., Ch. VII. 
 
 01 Lang, Maling of Belig., p. 49. 
 
 02 J. A. F., XVIII, 327.
 
 WONDER IN PEIMITirE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 129 
 
 factor supports the argument for a wonder-tendency in this 
 place; and that is the character of the belief in the powers of 
 the magician. There is here just that room for slight doubt that 
 is the best growing-ground for wonder. The belief of the savage 
 in magic may indeed, on the one hand, be said to be implicit; 
 but there are nevertheless certain circumstances that undermine 
 that implicitness, though the contrary forces may seldom or 
 never reach the expression of skepticism. I quote from Spencer 
 and Gillen. ' ' Whilst living in close intercourse with the natives, 
 spending the days and nights amongst them in their camps while 
 they were preparing for and then enacting their most sacred 
 ceremonies, and talking to them day after day, collectively and 
 individually, we were constantly impressed with the idea, as 
 probably many others have been before, that one blackfellow 
 will often tell you that he can and does do something magical, 
 whilst all the time he is perfectly well aware that he cannot, and 
 yet firmly believes that some other man can really do it. In order 
 that his fellows may not be considered in this respect as superior 
 to himself he is obliged to resort to what is really a fraud, but 
 in course of time he may even come to lose sight of the fact 
 that it is fraud which he is practising upon himself and his fel- 
 lows. ""^ Is there a more common or fruitful source of wonder 
 than this disbelief in one's own powers but fearful belief in 
 those of others ?°* Is there any more fecund ground of supersti- 
 tion to-day? Is not this state, preeminently human in its sub- 
 servience to custom and pathetic deceit, the half-conscious but 
 strenuously unacknowledged state in which every spiritualist 
 and mystic finds himself to-day, even as Paracelsus and Empedo- 
 eles found themselves centuries ago? Verily, this is the secret 
 mark of the wonder-lover and the wonder-worker ! Nor is 
 there need of further words to clarify the wonder-tendency of 
 the primitive magician. 
 
 When magic becomes 'magical,' it becomes marvellous. When 
 one is inclined to believe, against his better knowledge, that the 
 magician or witch possesses a power over affairs that is dis- 
 tinctly' a contravention of usual fact, i.e., natural law, the wizard 
 
 0^ Native Tribes, etc., p. 130. 
 
 9*Cf. Crawley, op. cit., p. 86; Howitt, op. cit., pp. 411, 533.
 
 130 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOVS. 
 
 is elevated to the higher realm of marvel. A word as to how 
 this step is taken. The case is briefly presented as follows: "A 
 curious instance of the continued influence of magic over reli- 
 gions and races who have discarded it is to be found in the 
 belief that inferior peoples and faiths conquered by such higher 
 races possess greater magical powers. * * * Hence resort is 
 made to members of the inferior race by their superiors when 
 they wish diseases cured or injuries to be subtly avenged. In 
 this way the Dravidians of India, the rude races of the Malay 
 Peninsula, the Finns and Laps, the negroes of the West Indies, 
 are regarded respectively by Hindus, ]\Iohammedan Malays, 
 Scandinavians, and Christian whites as having powerful magic. 
 So, too, the ancient Greeks regarded the Thessalians, and medi- 
 aeval Christians the pagans of the north, or stole in secret to 
 the ghettos wiiere the despised Jew was supposed to practise 
 his strong magic. ' '^^ As Jevons sums it up : " Hence the more 
 civilised race find themselves face to face with this extraordinary 
 fact, namely, that things which they know to be supernatural 
 are commonly and deliberately brought about by members of 
 the other race."®® There could hardly be a better proof of the 
 correctness of our description of the psychology of the marvel- 
 lous than this case which so perfectly fits what was laid down 
 on that subject in the previous chapter.^' 
 
 Finally, there is still another factor, which, while indicating 
 a general perception by the rude mind of whatever is abnormal 
 or strange, provides for the particular isolation of priest and 
 magician. I mean taboo, the institution of the "strongly 
 marked." Whatever its origin, whether in fear, or holiness, or 
 the merely strange and abnormal, or what not,"^ taboo incor- 
 porates the specializing tendency of the mind in a custom 
 provocative of awe and reverence, and indicative of high 
 authority. As such, taboo is to be regarded as a custom in 
 harmony with the other specializing tendencies that count 
 
 0'' MaccuUoch, J. A., Religion (Temple Primers), London 1904, p. 6fi. 
 80 Jevons, p. 37; cf. Gomme, Ethnoloqy in Folklore, New York 1892, 
 Chap. III. 
 
 07 See above, especially pp. 75 flF. 
 
 08 (;/■. Jevons, Chaps. VI, VII, VIII; Crawley, op. cit., vid. Index.
 
 WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 131 
 
 for wonder, and as particularly supplementing and sanctitying, 
 or at least certifying, them by a common and social reverence 
 which is recognized and scrupulously observed by every member 
 of the community. Indeed, if there were more space at our dis- 
 posal, it might be shown that just as the Dakotans applied the 
 term wakan to "ever>i;hing extraordinary or immense, out of 
 the course of nature, and especially to everything sacred or 
 divine,"'"' so the custom of taboo, universal and common as it is, 
 marks by its associations of awe and reverence the germ of the 
 recognition of that which, because it appears to transcend nat- 
 ural law, carries one into the realms of marvelling. As the spir- 
 itual explanation of the unusual became rarer, and reflection 
 commoner, taboo must have become more and more the pronun- 
 ciamento of the unknown and inexplicable. In its application 
 to priest and magician, at any rate, may be seen its conscious 
 employment in some such meaning, still further isolating the 
 sanctity and wonder it certifies. 
 
 All the specializing tendencies so far noticed have been be- 
 liefs incorporated in practices or individuals. There is one 
 other, and last, and, for the student of literature, chief, tendency 
 that makes for wonder and marvel and contravenes the negative 
 results of our contemplation of Vierkandt's composite of prim- 
 itive mind. This, also, is a specializing tendency; but of quite 
 another kind. For it is subjective; it is not on institution. It 
 partakes also of a certain sort of generalization ; for it has the 
 effect of raising the individual into a typical greatness and 
 universal importance. Indeed, it is the mental factor concerned 
 in the elevation of gods and priests and magicians, and of the 
 neuropathic experiences of taboo, to an impressive importance 
 above the ordinary and commonplace. These are all children 
 of exaggeration. Exaggeration has lifted them all up into nota- 
 bility; exaggeration has cro"\vned priests, and endowed magi- 
 cians; has magnified the gods, and intensified fits of ecstasy, 
 and elaborated the realm of taboo. It has been the more or 
 less unconscious creator of wonderful beliefs and forms and 
 offices. But it has not stopped there : it has found expression 
 
 00 Briuton, op. cit., p. 61.
 
 132 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 elsewhere. Indeed it is with a further expression of the habit 
 of exaggerating that we come at hist upon the dynamic force 
 of wonder, by which, as into an entangling web, the objects 
 and cases of wonder, already noted as customs and beliefs, are 
 woven. Exaggeration employs this further expression in its 
 common, every-day practice of talking and telling and recount- 
 ing the multitude of passing experiences and past experiences. 
 And into the tale are woven the wonder-stot-k of custom and 
 belief, of god and priest, of magician and the "magical," of 
 trance and wakan. Tales of the gods themselves are rehearsed; 
 the magician is now the subject, now the machinery of the 
 recital. The seeing of the dead motives the wonder-tale ; and 
 exaggeration makes untruth true. Exaggeration is the most 
 primitive form of imagination; its employment is the first evi- 
 dence of plasticity, of freedom in that stiff imaginative faculty 
 already noticed. As such, exaggeration is the first door opening 
 into that ideal realm of the marvellous spoken of in the previous 
 chapter; and thus, too, it becomes the gateway of wonder into 
 literature.^"" All the tendencies, all the cases noted so far, are 
 but the colors and tones present to the hand of exaggeration as 
 it spins its web of romance, — as it disports freely in tale and 
 legend, until a critical age regards it with a cold and disapprov- 
 ing eye, and an empirical science rings the first knell of the 
 imaginative interpretation of life. 
 
 We shall see this power working upon the memory of cele- 
 brated gods, priests, and magicians. Howitt says of one of his 
 native informants: "The man's information as to the customs 
 of his tribe, and especially as to the initiation ceremonies, I 
 found to be very accurate, but it was when he began to speak 
 of the magical powers of the old men of the past generation 
 that I found his coloring to be too brilliant, and more especially 
 as regarded his tribal father, the last great warrior-magician 
 of the tribe. In his exaggeration of the exploits of this man one 
 might see an in.structive example of how very soon an heroic 
 halo of romance begins to gather around the memory of the 
 illustrious dead. ' '^"^ We shall see the same power working upon 
 
 1"' Cf. above. Chap. TI, pp. 74, S.^-SS, 91. 
 
 i"! Op. cit., p. 3.57; cf. also p. 444. (The italics in the text are mine.)
 
 WONDER IN PRIMITIVE MIND, CUSTOM, AND BELIEF. 133 
 
 mere tales of adventure, the classic example being perhaps the 
 wonder-tales of the Polynesian Omai upon his return from 
 Europe to the South Seas.^^^ What marvels were his to tell ! Of 
 how the English had ships as big as his native island, and guns 
 so big that many men might sit inside of them! Everything 
 was big, very big! So a child's imagination begins by convert- 
 ing magnificently his experiences into indescribable 'bigness'. 
 Again, we shall see exaggeration extended by analogy from 
 familiar to unfamiliar fields, until all the world of internal and 
 external experiences is conquered by the advancing power. Then, 
 indeed, the universe will be subject to wonder : and the dynasty 
 of the marvellous will last for centuries. Yet further: with 
 the wonders of exaggeration fully established, we shall see the 
 beginning of the failure of its power, and of the decay of its 
 throne, through the gradual assertion of those very mental pro- 
 cesses that in the previous chapter were described as inimical to 
 wonder. Within the ideal realm of story-telling, rarities will 
 cease to be rare through repetition; marvels will be destroyed 
 by an advancing sophistry; unbelief will raise the ridiculous 
 where once all was awe; reason will succeed imagination; and 
 a new day and power will be born from the old. But in both 
 days the mind of man in its ebb and flow of wonder will remain 
 the same; and each ebb tide will give way to a new flood of 
 marvel. 
 
 The preliminary field of wonder has now been more or less 
 adequately covered. The dynamic power that is to make the 
 literature of wonder has been named; the tendencies of belief 
 and custom assisting that power have been indicated; the con- 
 trary tendencies have been unfolded at greater length; in both 
 sets, the actual materials present to the exercise of the dj-namic 
 power have been suggested : thus we possess an indication of the 
 directions in which we may expect to find the practice of wonder. 
 A previous chapter has supplied us with a description of the 
 complex mental operations of wonder and marvel and their allied 
 states : thus we possess a means of appraising the wonder- value 
 
 1U2 Kippis, Cook's Voyages, p. 301.
 
 134 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 of whatever we examine. Impulse, tendencies, materials, stand- 
 ards of judgment, — all these are now at hand. We are in position 
 to go forward into the actual fields of literary beginnings and 
 search for wonder and marvel. It is proposed to make this 
 application in one of the lower fields, — the Australian ; to note 
 there the special conditions under which the general processes 
 are at work, and to examine these processes at work in myth and 
 legend.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 
 
 Discussion of sources — General cultural conditions of Cen- 
 tral Australians; identity among tribes; low stage of culture 
 — In such a stage the forces against wonder strongly present 
 — More important to regard the forces making for wonder — 
 General crowd of spirits not wonderful to natives — Particular 
 spirits and wonder — No gods — Other particular spirits — Magi- 
 cian and wonder; segregation and initiation; extraordinary 
 powers; deceit; exaggeration — Totemie traditions and legends 
 — Heroic and aitiological legends — Wonder in the heroic — 
 Combination of animal and human characteristics — The inmin- 
 tera, Churinga, and Wollunqua — Character of the legends as a 
 whole — The beginning of wonder in literature — Summary: the 
 relation between the beginnings of wonder and of literature. 
 
 At the beginning of the previous chapter it was promised 
 that the danger of unreliable information concerning savage 
 races would be met by a careful selection of cases from the 
 works of trained ethnologists. It is a notable and encouraging 
 piece of good fortune that within the last seven years there 
 have been made upon the culture of very primitive races most 
 careful and discriminating researches. The natives of south- 
 east, central, and north-central Australia have been described 
 by trained observers in three long and invaluable works which 
 mark an epoch in the history of the histories of primitive man. 
 Of these three English books that of A. W. Howitt^ should be 
 mentioned first, because, although in its present form it bears 
 the imprint of a date later than one of the other two, it is 
 nevertheless the final edition of an older series of articles long 
 since famous under the names of their authors, Howitt and 
 Fison. ■ The other two books have been received with an en- 
 thusiasm hardly second to the gratitude all ethnologists owe 
 to Howitt and Fison. Two other names are now linked as col- 
 laborators in this field; Spencer and Gillen have become as 
 
 1 A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, London 190-4.
 
 136 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 familiar to ethnological footnotes as the other famous pair. In 
 1899 appeared their tirst publieation, The Native Tribes of Cen- 
 tral Australia; and five years later the companion volume, The 
 Northern Tribes of Central Australia, made its bulky way into 
 immediate favor. It is from these works, so opportunely at 
 hand, and especially from the one last named, that the data 
 for the present discussion of wonder and marvel in Australian 
 belief and story are selected. So exliaustive are the works that 
 it will seldom be necessary to step beyond them to the less trust- 
 worthy sources of earlier and untrained observation. 
 
 Before undertaking the direct examination of the collected 
 myths and legends of some of the Australian tribes, it will be 
 proper to enter into a short discussion of the general economic 
 and religious conditions of the individual tribes that are to 
 fall under the present view. Thus may be avoided that unfor- 
 tunate lack of definition of particular cultural strata so wisely 
 deprecated by Professor Dewey,^ and so thoroughly destructive 
 to a history of the sequences of any one tendency or class of 
 phenomena. In the shifting phantasmagoria of tendencies that 
 make now toward, now away from, wonder and marvel, there 
 is need enough for whatever aid can be had from careful strat- 
 ification of economic conditions; while the only satisfactory 
 method of correlating what may appear as the different stages 
 of the development of wonder, from the naive creations of the 
 mind of the savage to the sophisticated productions of the Greek 
 romancers, lies not in the application of descriptive adjectives 
 to each step, but in the determination of the association of each 
 step with definite cultural epochs. 
 
 In their second book Spencer and Gillen describe the social 
 organization, the customs, and beliefs of the aborigines resident 
 in north-central Australia between the Macdonnell ranges, in 
 the center of the continent, and the Gulf of Carpenteria. Their 
 former book had described the Arunta and Urabunna, lying to 
 the south of the Macdonnell ranges. The chief northern tribes 
 observed were the Unmatjera, Kaitish, Warramunga, and Tjin- 
 gilli. In their progress northward the authors were able to trace 
 as they went "a gradual change amongst the tribes in regard to 
 
 2 For reference, see above, p. 97, note 15.
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 137 
 
 organization and beliefs, and at the same time to demonstrate 
 a fundamental agreement in regard to certain important mat- 
 ters."^ One notable agreement was the universal belief that 
 "every living member of the tribe is a reincarnation of a spirit 
 ancestor." "As we pass northwards we find the Arunta be- 
 liefs and customs merging into those of the Kaitish, the latter 
 into those of the Warramunga, Tjingilli, and Umbaia, and these 
 again, in their turn, into those of the coastal tribes, the Gnaji, 
 Binbinga, Anula, and Mara. Not only is this so, but in the south 
 we find the beliefs of the Urabunna tribe agreeing fundament- 
 ally with those of the Arunta. We are thus able to demonstrate 
 the fact that there is no radical difference, so far as important 
 beliefs and customs are concerned, between tribes which count 
 descent in the male line, and others which count it in the female 
 line. . . . Taking every class of evidence into account, it 
 appears to us to be very difficult to avoid the conclusion that 
 the central tribes, which, for long ages, have been shielded by 
 their geographical isolation from external influences, have re- 
 tained the most primitive form of customs and beliefs. It is 
 an easy matter to imagine the beliefs of the more northern 
 tribes resulting as a modification of original ones, more or less 
 similar to those now held by the central tribes, but the reverse 
 process is not conceivable."* In the introductory chapter that 
 follows, the authors remark emphatically upon "the identity 
 or close agreement of the tribes in regard to important customs 
 and beliefs." This appears true in spite of the geographical 
 and linguistic isolation of the tribes, which may have been, as 
 the authors surmise, the result of climatic changes.^ 
 
 From these and other remarks of like nature throughout the 
 book, it is to be noted that all these tribes are for our purposes 
 in practically the same cultural condition, but that the Arunta 
 series probably offers the nearest approach to that older culture 
 from which they must all have descended. Dr. Frazer has main- 
 tained that the Arunta represent the savage at his lowest depth. 
 Secluded in that most secluded of continents, where the past 
 
 3 N. T.2 {=Northern Tribes of Central Australia), xi. 
 
 4N. T.2, xi. 
 
 5 See N. T.2, 14, for summary of resemblances and diflferences.
 
 138 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS. 
 
 seems to have been preserved as in a great miiseiim, where 
 types of flora and fauna long since extinct in all other parts 
 of the world are only now becoming extinct, — isolated in that 
 strangely backward continent, the Ariinta present a vast con- 
 trast, not only to civilized man, but even to many savage races. 
 To illustrate that contrast Frazer emphasizes two of the points 
 brought out by Spencer and Gillen. It appears that although 
 these Australians suffer much from the cold, it has never oc- 
 curred to them to use as garments the pelts of the wild beasts 
 they have killed. "They huddle, naked and shivering, about 
 little fires, into which, when they drop off to sleep, they are 
 apt to roll and scorch themselves." For a second illustration, 
 they do not understand the true physiology of sex, but imagine 
 that birth is due to the entrance of ancestral spirits into the 
 bodies of the women.** Of course Dr. Lang, in his usual breezy 
 fashion, insists upon "collaborating by suggesting objections,'"' 
 but in the matter of the points noted his success is more rhetor- 
 ical than real. For the rest, it is enough to remark that these 
 tribes are all in the hunting stage, and the lowest at that; that 
 their implements are of stone, and of the nature "usually de- 
 scribed as characteristic of Pala3olithic and Neolithic man";* 
 that they possess no pottery, but only wooden pitchis; that in 
 the matter of government "there is no one to whom the term 
 'chief,' or even head of the tribe, can be properly applied; but 
 on the other hand there are certain of the elder men, the heads 
 of local groups, who, at any great ceremonial gathering . . . 
 take the lead and superintend matters. They form, as it were, 
 an inner council or cabinet and completely control everything."" 
 The local headmen of totemic groups normally receive their 
 office by heredity; but the office is concerned chiefly with seeing 
 to the performance of totemic ceremonies. "In all of the tribes 
 there is a division into local groups, which occupy certain well- 
 defined areas within the tribal territory. There is no such 
 thing as one man being regarded as the owner of any tract of 
 
 The Origin of Totemism, J. G. Frazer, in Fortnightly Review, Vol. 71^ 
 p. 648. 
 
 7 Id., pp. 1012 ff, Mr. Frazer's Theory of Totemism. 
 
 8 N. T.2, Chap. XXIII, csp. p. 635. 
 ON. T.2, 20, 21.
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTBALIAN BELIEF AND STOBY. 139 
 
 country. In every case the unit of division is the local totemic 
 group. "^° Descent is reckoned in some tribes by maternal, in 
 others by paternal, rule. The marriage customs vary from in- 
 dividual marriage to what amounts to group marriages at cer- 
 tain times.^^ 
 
 In turning to speak of the general religious conditions, it 
 is to be noted that those tendencies of mental operation already 
 noticed as working rather against, than for, wonder, will prob- 
 ably be found to exist with peculiar force among a people so 
 low in the economic scale as the details just given have indi- 
 cated. Among them, indeed, there is to be met no conception 
 of an unexceptional regularity; spirits of ancestors are as com- 
 mon as men and women, or dogs and trees; they can conceive 
 of no natural impossibility; their curiosity passes into a crude 
 imagination, severely dominated by a narrow field of conscious- 
 ness and the materials of the past, instead of into a discriminat- 
 ing reflection; credulity and belief are among them as bigoted 
 under authority as conceivable, or as their incredulity and dis- 
 belief are under the absence of authority; magic is their "sci- 
 ence," practised to a certain extent by everyone. In a word, 
 as being among the lowest of races, these Australian tribes 
 represent in greatest degree the activity of all those tendencies 
 which, making against wonder, have been ascribed to primitive 
 man. One has but to read the pages of Howitt and Spencer- 
 Gillen in order to give ready assent to these matters. The more 
 important task is to inquire how far operative are those contrary 
 tendencies that are friendly to the beginnings and development 
 of wonder. In the directions from which the previous chapter 
 has taught us to look for manifestations of wonder, is there any- 
 thing to be observed ; or are conditions here so extremely primitive 
 as to give no hope for the detection of wonder-elements in myth 
 and legend? 
 
 Here, again, there is no necessity for a very extended view; 
 for in the previous chapter much of the support of the wonder- 
 making tendencies was dra^\^l from the very works we are now 
 considering. It is enough to mention those tendencies again 
 
 10 N. T.2, 27. See, further, Chap. III. 
 
 11 N. T.2, 141.
 
 140 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 and emphasize them briefly by further references to the beliefs 
 and mental attitudes of these Australian aborigines. 
 
 The universal belief in spirit ancestors was mentioned a 
 moment ago. Certain peculiarities connected with this belief 
 must now be noticed. It appears that the common belief is in 
 a great body of spirit individuals who were derived from totemic 
 ancestors and are constantly undergoing reincarnation. These 
 totemic ancestors are in themselves strange creatures and of 
 extraordinary powers; they will be discussed when the legends 
 are taken up. At present, it must be stated that the ancestors 
 appear far more marvellous than the spirits they left at various, 
 centers; the latter, indeed, are nothing more than the concep- 
 tion of the 'life' of the individual passing on from one incarna- 
 tion to another, and as such the spirit is as actual a part of 
 the body as an arm or leg, and far more necessary. Aitiological 
 these spirits may even be called, since they explain the phenom- 
 ena of procreation, as was seen above in the quotation from 
 Frazer, and explicate the mystery of the origin of man. "In 
 the Warramunga tribe the women are very careful not to strike 
 the trunks of certain trees with an axe, because the blow might 
 cause spirit children to emanate from them and enter their 
 bodies. They imagine that the spirit is very minute, — about, 
 the size of a small grain of sand, — and that it enters the woman 
 through the navel and grows within her into the child. "^- The- 
 Arunta leave a small depression on one side of the burial mound 
 in order that the spirit may pass in and out to visit the body.^' 
 Upon the death of a man his spirit, which the Urabunna then 
 call kumpira, goes back to the place where it was originally 
 left by the totemic ancestor. There it may remain for some- 
 time; but sooner or later it is reincarnated." Occasionally the 
 spirit can be heard making a low kind of whistling sound."' 
 The Binbinga believe that both men and women can see the 
 spirit children at the mungai spots.^" Moreover, it is to be sur- 
 mised that among all the tribes the only reason that would be: 
 
 12 N. T.2, 331. 
 
 13 N. T.2, 506. 
 
 14 N. T.2, 148. 
 " Ibid., 530. 
 ^^Ibid., 171.
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 141 
 
 put forward for the invisibility of the spirits would be their 
 minuteness. A small grain of sand passing quickly from a tree 
 or a rock into a woman's navel could be seen only with the 
 greatest difficulty/^ Other details might be added, which would 
 still further indicate the truth of the conclusion to be dra^vn 
 from those we have mentioned. The universality of the spirits, 
 their commonness, their scientific or aitiological aspect, the perfect 
 and matter-of-fact belief in them, the materialistic conception : all 
 these suggest nothing of wonder; while the possible visibility of 
 the grain-like 'soul' deprives us of even that hopeful source of 
 mystery — invisibility. 
 
 There are, how^ever, certain specialized spirits that promise 
 far more for wonder. These special spirits are not subject 
 to reincarnation, nor are their form and size undifferen- 
 tiated and minute as a grain of sand. Rather, they have the 
 appearance of men, and possess often the power of making 
 medicine-men. They practically amount to Alcheringa men, 
 and possess all the extraordinary powers usually attributed to 
 such. Among the Warramunga a spirit called puntidir, who 
 lives out in the Mulga scrub, is said to make medicine-men. 
 Two puntidirs, for instance, after killing (by magic) a sleeping 
 native, "cut him open and took all his insides out, providing 
 him, however, with a new set, and finally, they put a little 
 snake inside his body, which endowed him with the powers 
 of a medicine-man."^^ Among the Arunta the same kind of 
 spirit individuals are called iruntarinia}^ "In the Binbinga 
 tribe the doctors are supposed to be made by the spirits, who are 
 called Mundadji and Munkaninji, father and son." A story 
 is told of how the old Mundaji caught a native by the neck, 
 killed him, "cut him open, right down the middle line, took 
 out all his insides and exchanged them for those of himself. . . . 
 . . . At the same time he put a number of sacred stones in his 
 body. After it was all over, Munkaninji came up and restored 
 him to life, told him that he was now a medicine-man, and 
 
 17 For further examples, see N. T.2, 145, 150, 162, 163, 169, 170, 258, 
 330, 421, 430, 431, 450, 451, 505, 513, 519, 527. 
 
 18 N. T.2, 484. For Alcheringa, see below, p. 152. 
 
 10 For a full description, see N. T.i {■= Native Tribes of Central Aus- 
 tralia), Chap. XV.
 
 142 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 showed him how to extract bones and other forms of evil magic 
 out of men. Then he took him away up into the sky and brought 
 him down to cartli close to his own camp, where he heard the 
 natives mourning for him, thinking he was dead. For a long 
 time he remained in a more or less dazed condition, but grad- 
 ually he recovered and the natives knew that he had been made 
 into a medicine-man. When he operates, the spirit of IMunkan- 
 inji is supposed to be near at hand watching him, unseen of 
 course by ordinary people. "-'' Now everything here points to 
 a development of wonder. The specialization in itself would 
 suggest it ; the extraordinary powers, the spirit being considered 
 as a great source of magical power and capable of bringing the 
 dead to life, carrying the individual up into the sky, etc., would 
 further indicate it ; the esoteric nature of the experience, and the 
 alliance of the spirit with the mysterious medicine-man, would 
 render the presence of wonder more than probable ; the obviously 
 trance-like condition under which the subject sees the spirit, 
 and the strong air of deceptive exaggeration in the tale of the 
 whole encounter as set forth by the self-interested doctor, would 
 beyond doubt win a gaping wonder from the crowd ; and, finally, 
 quite in line with our previous observations, these spirits, as 
 associated in the popular consciousness with mystery, are, un- 
 like the others noted above, held to be invisible save to the spe- 
 cially and wonderfully initiated. 
 
 From spirits it is a short step to gods. Have these tribes 
 any conception of an All-Father, as Dr. Lang would like to 
 believe; or of any sort of a deity? What Howitt has to say 
 upon the matter has already been quoted. He can find no 
 grounds for assigning to the tribes of southeast Australia any 
 conception of divinity, but remarks upon the difficulty with 
 which a modern mind avoids attributing a sense of deity to 
 IMungan, Nurrundere, Baiame, Daramulun, and the like, who 
 are all spiritual idealizations of those great and ancient head- 
 men who, with extraordinary powers, created man and formed 
 the features of the landscape.-^ These beings, supposed to 
 
 20 N. T.2, 487. See also pp. 488, 501, 502. 
 
 21 Howitt, op. cit., pp. 488 ff.
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 143 
 
 be still existing as spirits, seem to be practically identical 
 with the totemic ancestors of the tribes visited by Spencer and 
 Gillen. Of these, those authors remark : "In connection with 
 their totemic ancestors it may be said that there is apparently 
 no indication of the development of beliefs which might lead 
 ultimately to the association with one or other of them of spe- 
 cial attributes resulting in their finally being regarded in the 
 light of deities."-- Short of deity, however, there are to be 
 met certain particular spirits that may well be mentioned here. 
 In the Arunta tribe there are mischievous spirits called Oruntja, 
 whom the natives fear, — especially during the night-time. They 
 are in the habit of snatching lonely wanderers and carrying 
 them off underground. Twanyirika is another Arunta-made 
 spirit; he is used for terrifying the women and children. At- 
 natu, of the Kaitish tribe, has more definite characteristics : a 
 very great man; with a very black face; with no anus; self- 
 made a very great while ago, even before the Old Time; the 
 maker, indeed, of that Old Time or Alcheringa, and of every- 
 thing that the blackfellow has. There are various tales about 
 him. The Binbinga, in addition to the Mundadji mentioned 
 in the last paragraph, believe in a friendly spirit, Ulurkura, 
 who lives in the woods and rescues men from the clutches of 
 the Mundadji. Only medicine-men can see him. The Mara 
 have a similar spirit whom they call Mumpani. Now, all these 
 spirits, including those that, like Twanyirika, are mere bogies 
 to frighten the women and children, are specializations to be 
 compared with the spirits that make the doctors; and as such 
 they undoubtedly count toward wonder. But Avhether or not 
 they are actually provocative of wonder, remains a question. 
 There is not about them, with the exception of Atnatu, that 
 fullness of wonderful tale and adventure, that exaggeration and 
 individuality, which characterize the spirits. What is certain, 
 however, is that none of them possesses the moral, cultural, or 
 propitiatory characters of a supreme being.-^ 
 
 There can be, then, no differentiation of a priestly office. 
 The nearest to that is the company of elders who direct the ini- 
 
 "•- N. T.-, 496. 
 
 23 See N. T.2, Chap. XVI.
 
 144 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 tiation and totemic ceremonies; but they possess none of the 
 priestly powers or characteristics. 
 
 The magician, however, reigns supreme. His power is care- 
 fully segregated from the common magic; his office is hedged 
 mightily with mystery. The article of M. ]\Iauss, the most ex- 
 haustive upon the subject, has already been mentioned;-* and 
 the abstracts from Spencer-Gillen given a few paragraphs back 
 represent one method of initiation into that office. All medicine- 
 men are "supposed to have had stones or other objects placed 
 in their bodies by certain spirit individuals, and by virtue of 
 them they can counteract, to a greater or less extent, the evil 
 magic to which any bodily pain is always attributed."-^ Their 
 power is, with one or two exceptions, wholly curative and bene- 
 ficial. The recital of one or two more instances of initiation 
 will clearly show the mystery and wonder of the making of 
 medicine-men. Sometimes they are made by other medicine- 
 men, instead of by Iruntarinia as above. "A celebrated med- 
 icine-man named Ilpailurkna, a member of the Unmatjera tribe, 
 told us that, when he was made into a medicine-man, a very 
 old doctor came one day and threw some of his atnongara stones 
 at him with a spear-thrower. Some hit him on the chest, others 
 went right through his liead, from ear to ear, killing him. The old 
 man then cut out all his insides, intestines, liver, heart, lungs — 
 everything in fact, and left him lying all night long on the ground. 
 In the morning the old man came and looked at him and placed 
 some more atnongara stones inside his body and in his arms 
 and legs, and covered over his face with leaves. Then he sang 
 over him until his body was all swollen up. When this was so 
 he provided him with a complete set of new inside parts, placed 
 a lot more atnongara stones in him, and patted him upon the 
 head, which caused him to jump up alive. The old medicine- 
 man then made him drink water and eat meat containing atnon- 
 gara stones. When he awoke he had no idea as to where he 
 was, and said, 'Tju, tju, tju' — 'I think I am lost.' But when 
 he looked around he saw the old medicine-man standing beside 
 
 24 See above, p. 127, note 87. 
 
 25 N. T.2, 479.
 
 WONDEB IN CENTRAL A USTEALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 145 
 
 liim, and the old man said, 'No, you are not lost; I killed you 
 a long time ago.' Ilpailurkna had completely forgotten who he 
 was and all about his past life. After a time the old man led 
 him back to his camp and showed it to him, and told him that 
 the woman there was his lubra, for he had forgotten all about 
 her. His coming back in this way and his strange behavior at 
 once showed the other natives that he had been made into a 
 medicine-man, ' '^*' 
 
 It will be noticed that this story does not differ materially 
 from the one quoted above where Mundadji and ]\Iunkaninji 
 made a medicine-man in the Binbinga tribe, except in the fact 
 that where the operators in that case were spirits, the operator 
 here is represented as "a very old doctor." Among the War- 
 ramunga tribe the making of medicine-men by old practitioners 
 from the neighboring Worgaia tribe is one of the most secret 
 of their customs. But the similarity of the tales, in spite of 
 the difference of the agents, is remarkable, and indicates a long 
 tradition and jejune custom^'^ within which the imagination 
 moves only in exaggeration of certain well-known and long- 
 used properties. The killing, slitting, deprivation of entrails, 
 placing of magical stones within the body together with new 
 entrails, the strange awakening and weird return to camp, are 
 properties recurring again and again in stories throughout the 
 region explored. What was the original reason for the stone 
 detail can only be conjectured. It may have had some reference 
 to the sensations of the wizard when under neuropathic con- 
 ditions; or the stones may have been regarded as powerful 
 through association with sacred spots, such as the oknanikilla, 
 where the totemic ancestors went into the ground, leaving their 
 spirit parts behind them; but more probably it was the mere 
 handiness to the imagination of stones to represent the material- 
 istic conception of magic power. Among the Arunta we have 
 seen that a snake was used in place of stones.-** This explana- 
 
 20 N. T.2, 480. 
 
 27 Especially in view of the wide ilistribution of the tales throughout 
 tribes that for years have had little or no communication. This would 
 imply an antiquity of the tales equal to that of the original distribution 
 of the tribes. 
 
 28 Cf. also the Jcupitja, and the Irman, N. T.2, 484-5.
 
 146 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS. 
 
 tion is on a par with the materialistic conception of all disease 
 and illness as an affection to be got rid of by the supposed 
 removal of some object, a small stick or stone, from the body 
 of the patient. The magical power of the medicine-man was 
 probably regarded as only a particular kind of bodily affection 
 or disease, as it were; and his stones were only the particular 
 stones that caused those peculiar affections. Again, the origin 
 of the detail of disemboweling rests in conjecture, and must 
 have had a beginning equally simple and commonplace with 
 that of the atnongara. The strange awakening and return 
 seem clearly the product of sensation-experiences, probably 
 neuropathic. But, w^hatever the origin of such details in a re- 
 mote antiquity, before the various tribes had branched off from 
 a parent stock, their present state reveals all the mystery of 
 arbitrary and inexplicable power that alwaj^s characterizes 
 the mummeries of magic, whether in the wilds of Africa, the 
 fairs of the middle ages, or the seances of modern spiritualism. 
 The following case from the Arunta well illustrates the 
 deceptive accessories of the magic-man. From such deception 
 springs a fearful belief in another's magical power, although 
 the individual believer is aware of his own impotence, — a state 
 of belief distinctly favorable to the wonderful, as has previously 
 been remarked.-" When any man of the Arunta tribe feels that he 
 may become a wizard, he goes alone to a cave where the Irunta- 
 rinia are supposed to dwell. "Here, with considerable trepida- 
 tion, he lies down to sleep, not venturing to go inside, or else 
 he would, instead of becoming endowed with magic power, be 
 spirited away forever. At break of day, one of the Iruntarinm 
 comes to the mouth of the cave, and, finding the man asleep, 
 throws at him an invisible lance which pierces the neck from 
 behind, passes through the tongue, making therein a large hole, 
 and then comes out through the mouth. The tongue remains 
 throughout life perforated in the center with a hole large enough 
 to admit the little finger; and when all is over, this hole is the 
 only visible and outward sign of the treatment of the Iruntar- 
 inia. How the hole is really made it is impossible to saj^ but 
 as shown in the illustration it is always present in the genuine 
 
 20 See above, p. 129.
 
 WONDEB IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STOBY. 147 
 
 medicine-man. In some way of course the novice must make it 
 himself; but naturally no one will ever admit the fact, indeed 
 it is not impossible that, in the course of time, the man really 
 comes to believe that it was not done by himself. A second 
 lance thrown by the Iruntarinia pierces the head from ear to 
 ear, and the victim falls dead and is at once carried into the 
 depths of the cave. . . . Within the cave the Iruntarinia 
 removes all the internal organs and provides the man with a 
 completely new set, after which operation has been successfully 
 performed he presently comes to life again, but in a condition 
 of insanity. {Ainongara stones are also placed in his body by 
 the spirit.) — This (the insanity) does not last long, and when 
 he has recovered to a certain extent the Iruntarinia, who is 
 invisible except to a few highly gifted medicine-men and also 
 to the dogs, leads him back to his own people. The spirit then 
 returns to the cave, but for several days the man remains more 
 or less strange in his appearance and behaviour until one morn- 
 ing it is noticed that he has painted with powdered charcoal 
 and fat a broad band across the bridge of his nose. All signs 
 of insanity have disappeared, and it is at once recognized that 
 a new medicine-man has graduated. According to etiquette he 
 must not practise his profession for about a year, and if during 
 this time of probation the hole in the tongue closes up, as it 
 sometimes does, then he will consider that his virtues as a med- 
 icine-man have departed, and he will not practise at all. ]\Iean- 
 while, he dwells upon his experiences, doubtless persuading 
 himself that he has actually passed through those which are 
 recognised as accompanying the making of a medicine-man by 
 the Iruntarinia, and at the same time he cultivates the acquain- 
 tance of other medicine-men, and learns from them the secrets 
 of the craft, which consist principally in the ability to hide 
 about his person and produce at will small quartz pebbles or 
 bits of stick; and, of hardly less importance than this sleight- 
 of-hand, the power of looking preternaturally solemn, as if he 
 were the possessor of knowledge quite hidden from ordinary 
 men. "30 
 
 SON. T.i, 523-525.
 
 148 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 Deception and exaggeration go hand in hand: and the de- 
 ceptive character of the magician is no more evident in this 
 story than is the habit of exaggerating details in order to win 
 popidar regard. A word further may be hazarded upon this 
 subject. AVhik^ the power of magic by itself is not yet a matter 
 of wonder to the aborigines, who all possess some degree of it,'^ 
 the magician is distinguished by his superior endowment in mag- 
 ical lore and ability, as well as by the mysterious methods 
 undertaken to secure the endowment. The power is not different 
 in kind, but exaggerated in degree; and the consciousness of 
 his exaggerated position continually dictates to the magician a 
 course of deceit and mendacity calculated to heighten still 
 further his position in popular superstition. From this fertile 
 field arises the wonder of these Australian medicine-men. It 
 is hardly right to look for examples of this wonder in the 
 pseudo-medical acti\aties of the doctors, inasmuch as their prac- 
 tices of pretending to remove twigs from the bodies of their 
 patients are the commonly acknowledged materia medica of the 
 tribe; but it is entirely proper to insist that only the doctors 
 possess this curative power, and that, while having presumably 
 gained it through mysterious and awful methods, they are ex- 
 tremely careful to surround the exercise of the power with all 
 the exaggeration of ceremony and hocus-pocus that will impress 
 the ignorant with a sense of strange and extraordinary condi- 
 tions. One of the most valuable of the mysterious accessories 
 is the kupitja, a small object worn through the nose by the 
 medicine-men of the Warramunga tribe. Spencer and Gillen 
 say that "the most profound mystery attaches to this innocent- 
 looking little article. "^^ "No young medicine-man to whom 
 one of them has been given would ever dream of conducting an 
 investigation into its structure. He implicitly believes the old 
 man, who tells him that it was made in the Alcheringa and is 
 full of magic power. "^^ In serious cases a great deal is made 
 of these instruments, which are supposed to counteract the evil 
 magic resident in the patient by being projected into his body. 
 
 31 See, e.g., N. T.2, Chap. XIV, p. 456; N. T.i, 530, 534 flF. 
 
 32 N. T.2, 485. 
 
 33 N. T.2, 484, note.
 
 WONDEB IN CENTEAL A VSTEALIAN BELIEF AND STOEY. 149 
 
 The old Worgaia-man who makes them is fully aware of the 
 exaggerated importance and sanctity to be gained by his pos- 
 session of the Icupitjas, and steadfastly refused to confess his 
 authorship. He persisted in claiming that they were made in 
 the Alcheringa * ' by some very powerful old snakes. ' '^* Extraor- 
 dinary as the magicians' powers may appear, however, the belief 
 of the natives in their reality and efficacy is perfect. Examples of 
 this recur again and again : and were it not for the tremendous 
 insistence upon the extraordinary character of the magicians' 
 powers, which overbalances the wonder-destroying power of abso- 
 lute belief ; were it not for the careful exaggeration of the rarity 
 of their office and endowments, the wonder of these magical prac- 
 tices might well sink beneath the chilling effect of a matter-of- 
 fact belief. The whole set of circumstances is well illustrated 
 by the following picture from the Arunta tribe. "In serious 
 cases the action is more dramatic, and the medicine-man needs 
 a clear space in which to perform. The patient, perhaps too 
 ill to sit up, is supported by some individual, while the medicine- 
 man who has been called in and may have come a long distance, 
 gravely examines him and consults with other practitioners who 
 may be present. . . . The diagnosis may occupy some time, 
 during which everyone maintains a very solemn appearance, all 
 conversation being carried on in whispers. As a result the 
 medicine-man will perhaps pronounce that the sick man is suf- 
 fering from a charmed bone inserted by a magic individual, 
 such as a Kurdaitcha; or perhaps, worse still, the verdict is 
 that one of the Iruntarinia has placed in his body an Ullinka 
 or short barbed stick attached to an invisible string, the pulling 
 of which, by the malicious spirit, causes great pain. If the latter 
 be the case it requires the greatest skill of a renowned medicine- 
 man to effect a cure. While a patient is supported in a half- 
 sitting attitude, the medicine-man will first of all stand close 
 by, gazing down upon him in the most intent way. Then sud- 
 denly he will go some yards off, and looking fiercely at him will 
 bend slightly forwards and repeatedly jerk his arms outwards 
 at full length, with the hand outstretched, the object being to 
 thereby project some of the Atnongara stones into the patient's 
 
 34 N. T.2, 486.
 
 150 STUDIES IN TEE MAEFELLOUS. 
 
 body, the object of this being to counteract the evil influence 
 at work within the latter. Going rapidly and with a character- 
 istic high-knee action from one end of the cleared space to the 
 other he repeats the movement with dramatic action. Finally, 
 he comes close again, and, after much mysterious searching, 
 finds and cuts the string which is invisible to every one except 
 himself. There is not a doubt among the onlookers as to his 
 having really done this. Then once more the projecting of the 
 Atnongara stones takes place, and crouching down over the sick 
 man lie places his mouth upon the affected part and sucks, until 
 at last either in fragments or, very rarely, and only if he be a 
 very distinguished medicine man, the Ullinka is extracted whole 
 and shown to the wondering onlookers, the Atnongara stones 
 returning, unseen, once more into his own body. "^^ 
 
 The deceit and exaggeration, the mysterious accessories of 
 the art and the wondering credulity of the onlookers, are all 
 represented here. Among the other exaggerated powers of the 
 magicians the following may be noted briefly. The Mungaberra 
 attribute special powers to the magicians, such as ability to 
 transform themselves into eagle-hawks, and, thus disguised, 
 travel long distances during the night.'^" In many of the tribes 
 the magician is able to affect a whole group of men and women 
 with disease, or to discover the individual who is responsible 
 for the death of any native.^^ The Mara medicine-man possesses 
 the power "of climbing at night-time by means of a rope, invis- 
 ible to ordinary mortals, into the sky, where he can hold con- 
 verse with the star people."^® Howitt''^ mentions other powers, 
 such as rain-making, clairvoyance, spirit-mediumship, enchant- 
 ment by song, etc., etc. 
 
 It is now evident that, among the forces counting for wonder, 
 the belief in spirits, or the animistic force, tends to produce 
 wonder only in the case of the special spirits segregated from 
 
 ■•■■• X. T.i, .0.31-2. Cf. Ilowitt, 386-387. 
 
 36 N. T.i, 533. Cf. Ilowitt, 374, 388. 
 
 37 N. T.I, 532, 533. 
 
 38 N. T.2, 488. Cf. Howitt, 359. 
 soHowitt, Chap. VII.
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 151 
 
 the great reincarnating mass; that in the absence of definitely 
 conceived gods we may turn only to these particular spirits for 
 a sign of that wonder usually attributed to the god. That the 
 magician, furthermore, offers the example of the most powerful 
 of the forces making for wonder, is clearly seen by his segre- 
 gated character, mysterious initiation, extraordinary powers, 
 practice of deceit and exaggeration, and by the popular rever- 
 ence extended to him. 
 
 With the completion of this preliminary view it is conven- 
 ient to pass directly to an examination of the totemistic legends 
 collected by Spencer and Gillen in their second volume.*" A 
 great part of these traditions consists of the sort of details just 
 discussed under the aspects of spirit and magician. These very 
 tales, indeed, are the sources which furnish the data for those 
 aspects. No further discussion along those lines will be neces- 
 sary.*^ But closely related to the totemic ancestor, and so lead- 
 ing us to a view of the relations between wonder and that most 
 important and puzzling of primitive customs, the totem, is a 
 further mass of details which must now be investigated. 
 
 The great similarity of all the legends renders possible the 
 selection of a typical story, which may be prefixed to the enu- 
 meration of the details. Here is the tradition of the origin of 
 the Unmatjera as gathered from their own lips, but told in 
 the words of the collector. ' ' In the Alcheringa an old crow man 
 sat down at Ungurla by the side of what is now called the "Wood- 
 forde River. He arose at first from a Churinga, and when he 
 came out he looked at himself and said, 'I think that I must be a 
 hawk; but no — I am too black.' Then he thought that he was 
 an eagle-hawk, but decided that he had too much wing; then 
 he looked at his arms, out of which black feathers had sprouted, 
 and said, 'I am a crow.' When the sun shone he sat out on the 
 
 40 N. T.2, Chap. XIII. 
 
 41 The following referencos to spirit and magic in the legends may be 
 appended: Spirits, N. T.2, 396, 417, 421, 435. 445, 450; special individ- 
 uals who can see them, 450-451; reincarnation, 404, 419, 450; Atnatu, 420; 
 spirit-children, 423, 426. 428, 431, 438, 441, 444, 450; sacredness of the 
 Nanja, 448. Magic, 396, 428; as ordinary power, 456, 466, 477; rain- 
 maker, 393; magic-song, 421, 443; power of the left hand, 425, 426, 428; 
 pointing-sticks, 433; regarded with awe, 462.
 
 152 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 top of a hill wanning himself, and when it set he went back to 
 his Churinga camp and slept there. One day he saw, far away 
 in the distance, a lot of inmintera — that is, incomplete men 
 and women — belonging to the Unmatjera tribe. He decided to 
 go over and make them into men and women. He did this by 
 means of his beak, and then returned to his camp and there 
 made a Churinga lelira, a sacred stone knife, with which he 
 intended to come back and circumcise them. Meanwhile, how- 
 ever, two old Parenthie lizard men had come up from far awaj'' 
 to the south, and, with their teeth, they both circumcised and 
 subincised the men, and performed the operation of atna-ariltha- 
 kuyna upon the women. When the old crow had got his lelira 
 ready and was just about to start, he looked out and saw that 
 the two Parenthies had been before him, and so as there was 
 nothing further for him to do, he stayed at Ungwurla, and there 
 he died. A big black stone marks the spot, and in the ertnata- 
 lunga there his lelira is kept, as well as a number of stones 
 which are Churinga, and represent the eggs which he used to 
 void in the place of the usual excrement. ' '*^ 
 
 Our observations may well take the form of a commentary 
 upon the extraordinary details of this legend. Let it be first 
 noticed that the phrase "In the Alcheringa," or its equivalents, 
 *'In the Wingara," "In the Mungai time," is the usual begin- 
 ning phrase, the "once-upon-a-time" of these stories. The Al- 
 cheringa, or Wingara, or Mungai, is the far past, or dream- 
 time,*^ in which the totemic ancestors lived. There is, then, the 
 recognition of a temporal remoteness in which beginnings began ; 
 and about such a word and its content there would seem at first 
 glance to cling something of the aroma of wonder and day of 
 faery that haunt our own conceptions of primal times. Certain 
 it is that the Central Australian regards the Alcheringa as a 
 time of greater character than the present, as a time distin- 
 guished by the play of extraordinary power and happenings. 
 ". . . it may be remarked," write our authors, "that the 
 further we pass back from the present towards the Alcheringa 
 times, the greater are the powers supposed to have been wielded 
 
 42 N. T.2, 399. 
 
 ^^ Alchcri means dream.
 
 WON DEE IN CENTEAL A USTBALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 153 
 
 by the members of the totem."** Such a conception, however, 
 is nothing more than the simple result of that very first of 
 exaggeration's activities by which the contents of the past per- 
 petually undergo an enlargement of figure and idealization of 
 power. The very next words of the passage referred to indicate 
 that this simplicity of character does indeed attach to the con- 
 ception. "Every native has a great respect for his kankwia 
 or grandfather, and imagines him to have been a far greater 
 man than he himself is, while his kankivia's kankivia is propor- 
 tionately greater still; in fact we may say that the virtues and 
 powers of various kinds attributed to any ancestor increase in 
 geometric proportion as we pass backwards towards the Alche- 
 ringa. "*^ But such simple exaggeration is quite other than our 
 own conception of the Beginning; our wider consciousness and 
 sad sophistication in the limitation of human life and power 
 mutually assist to enchant the primal day with the fascination 
 of a great freedom, of a Golden Age, or of a Garden of Eden 
 where Jahve walks with man in the cool of the evening. The 
 narrow consciousness of the Arunta and Unmatjera, in the want 
 of such complex endowment, must take the phrase "In the Al- 
 cheringa" with far less of enticing strangeness. Nor does the 
 appellation dream-time indicate the contrary; for dreams to 
 them are material realities.*^ Finally, both the commonness of 
 the phrase, taken side by side with a mental sluggishness and 
 indifference, and also the full and matter-of-fact belief in such 
 a time, so that "It happened in the Alcheringa" is sufficient 
 answer to any objection as to possibility,*^ must serve as numb- 
 ing tendencies to the simple sense of wonder that is stirred in 
 the minds of the aborigines by this naive exaggeration of the 
 virtue of the past. 
 
 But whatever may be the vagueness of the wonder-conscious- 
 ness as touching the Alcheringa in the abstract, it is beyond con- 
 troversy that the ancestors who arose in that dimness of time are 
 depicted and regarded as men of extraordinary powers. "The 
 
 44 N. T.2, 277. 
 
 4B N. T.2, 277. 
 
 46 N. T.2, 451. 
 
 4TN. T.i, 137.
 
 154 STUDIES IN THE MAIIVELLOVS. 
 
 Central Australian native," Spencer and Gillen remark, "is 
 firmly convinced, as will be seen from the accounts relating to 
 their Alcheringa ancestors, that the latter were endowed with 
 powers such as no living man now possesses. They could travel 
 underground or mount into the sky, and could make creeks or 
 water-courses, mountain ranges, sand-hills and plains."*^ These 
 powers are not illustrated in the legend given above, but it is 
 easy to choose cases from the great number furnished in the 
 other traditions of the collection. The Ertwaininga women of 
 the Unmatjera, when frightened, went down into the ground 
 and traveled on out of sight;'"' the ancestors of the emu totem 
 of the Kaitish "dived down into the ground and came up at 
 Burnia, a long way off, where there is a soakage. "'^'^ Moreover, 
 the ancestor usually arises in the first place from the earth or 
 rocks, or from some water-hole, and goes down into the same 
 at the end.^^ Among the Arunta they arise, as in the legend 
 cited above, from Churinga.^^ Going up into the sky is a power 
 especially attached to flying totemic ancestors, such as the flying- 
 fox and the white cockatoo ;^^ although occasionally the wind 
 catches up the ancestor and sends him to heaven.''* The making 
 of natural features of the landscape was one of the duties, it 
 might be said, of the Alcheringa individuals. "Close to what 
 is now called Powell Creek is a small water-course, made in the 
 Alcheringa by an old Thamungala (a frilled lizard) man who 
 spent his time there performing ceremonies. A number of men 
 of the Thaballa (laughing boy) Totem came from Lamara, and 
 hunted the old lizard away. As he travelled on he made Powell 
 Creek, and the course of the stream as it flows away northwards 
 marks the line of retreat."" Two wildcat men made creeks by 
 cutting the ground with their knives;^" the snake-man made 
 
 <8N. T.2, 490. 
 
 49 N. T.2, 403. 
 
 60 Ibid., 415. 
 
 Bi Ibid., 395, 396, 400, 414, 429, 431, 433, 440, 441, etc. 
 
 62 Ibid., 399. 
 
 63 /bid., 428, 424. 
 
 6* Ibid., 444. 
 
 65 N. T.2, 423. 
 
 60 Ibid., 424, 425.
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 155 
 
 many creeks as he traveled.^^ With these cases may be grouped 
 the multitude of examples of the rise of a hill, or mountain 
 range, or pile of rocks, or trees, to mark the place of some Al- 
 cheringa event, such as the place where the ancestor appeared 
 or disappeared, held ceremonies, or performed other striking 
 acts. A pelican burned up a duck man's camp, and a heap of 
 stones arose to mark the spot;^^ a great gum-tree arose to mark 
 the spot where another ancestor died;^" a hill marks the place 
 where an emu man was killed.''** 
 
 Now it is at once apparent that there are two sorts of details 
 in these examples. There is the detail that is distinctly indi- 
 vidual in its characterization; it may be called the 'heroic' 
 detail: such is the power of traveling underground, or up into 
 the sky. There is also the detail of causation, or the aitiological 
 detail, as it is usually called: such are the making of creeks and 
 the raising of mountains, rocks, etc. — Both sorts are extraor- 
 dinary: are they wonderful to the Central Australian? This 
 must now be decided. 
 
 Of the first, then, first ! Traveling underground is certainly 
 a feat not indulged in by the native ; unless, as he might believe, 
 by the great magician, — and that would make for wonder im- 
 mediately. Indubitably such power is a rarity even in the con- 
 sciousness of an Australian. Has he any explanation? Of 
 course ! It was in the Alcheringa ! — a vague, but to him per- 
 fectly satisfactory answer. The rarity remains after the ex- 
 planation is given, — which is the condition of the second of the 
 six cases of rarity. Wonder, therefore, if present at all, is 
 doomed to decay and extinction.^^ But the absence of any idea 
 of unexceptional regularity takes away the real mental vividness 
 of the rarity itself ; and there is left only the somewhat indiffer- 
 ent realization of a rarity by a narrow consciousness that finds 
 some difficulty in fixing its attention steadily upon the remote 
 conditions of the Alcheringa. Thus, the sense of wonder is ren- 
 dered still more precarious. Add to this the perfect belief to 
 
 57 Ibid., 432. Cf. 436, 438, 440. 
 68 /bid., 434. 
 f'^Ihid., 398. 
 
 60 Ibid.. 394. Cf. 395, 396. 397, 398, 400, 405, 408, 414, 419, 420, 426. 
 
 61 See above, p. 63.
 
 156 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 which Spencer and Gillen testify above;*'- and the common con- 
 ception of the powers of one 's ancestors as increasing from one 's 
 grandfather to great-grandfather, and so on, as time grows more 
 remote,"^ — add these, and, in spite of the rarity in experience of 
 this underground traveling, the wonder of it in the primitive 
 Weltanschauung glimmers but feebly, if at all. Finally, it is 
 not, perhaps, out of place to suggest that the belief is easily 
 motived by the dog-holes with which the native is familiar, and 
 of which he sometimes takes advantage for shelter. The most 
 that can be said, then, is that there is here, perhaps, a feeble 
 inclination to wonder. 
 
 JMounting into the skies is another 'heroic' power which 
 may be regarded in practically the same light as traveling un- 
 derground. For the same reasons its wonder-value to the Aus- 
 tralian is, doubtless, rather insignificant, — a beginning cer- 
 tainly; but only a faint beginning. It has been pointed out, 
 however, that this is a power often claimed by the magicians.®* 
 This circumstance, unless counterbalanced by the winged char- 
 acter of the totem-animal mentioned in the illustration above, 
 might serve to bring a remote character more vividly to present 
 attention. Finally, whether or not these two powers are con- 
 sidered cases of magic, I cannot say. There is not sufficient 
 evidence to allow a conclusion. 
 
 Of the aitiologieal details it may be necessary to speak a 
 trifle more carefully. The origin of these details lies in the 
 desire to explain the 'how' of natural phenomena; these phe- 
 nomena, and not the ancestors, are to be regarded as the stimuli 
 of the legends. Around the ancestors as a convenient nexus 
 and adequate explanation grew up the mass of aitiologieal mate- 
 rial, extending the ancestors' wanderings, increasing their vir- 
 tues, and multiplying their avocations. The extraordinary 
 necessity and an extraordinary power existed side by side in 
 the consciousness of the simple savage: a power greater than 
 his was needed to make mountain and river; his ancestors pos- 
 sessed such power by virtue of his own natural exaggeration of 
 
 62 See above, p. 154. 
 
 63 See above, p. 153. 
 
 64 See above, p. 150, and note 38.
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTEALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 157 
 
 the remote; the association of the two was inevitable, and the 
 mental association was conceived as objective cause and effect. 
 The process is the same that w^e have seen underlying the prac- 
 tice of magic, the same mistaking of subjective contiguity for 
 objective relation. 
 
 But it must be emphasized that no actual wonder attends this 
 process.^^ When it is said that the savage wonders as to the 
 ^how' of mountain and stream, the only wonder really meant 
 is that sort of wonder that is merely another name for a rather 
 idle curiosity; the double use of the word 'Svonder" itself has 
 in this case been responsible for that common idea of the savage 
 whereby he appears surrounded by a halo of religious or meta- 
 physical wonder at the marvels of creation. We come by the 
 mistake, quite respectably, quite eminently, from ancient phil- 
 osophy. "For from wonder men, both now and at the first, 
 began to philosophize, having felt astonishment originally at the 
 things which were more obvious, indeed, among those that were 
 doubtful," says Aristotle.^® But there is no metaphysical phil- 
 osophizing among the Arunta and Kaitish ; there is no long and 
 arduously concentrated and discriminating attention, intelli- 
 gently, critically focused upon the 'how' of nature. Instead, 
 there is the utterly uncritical, momentary experience of mental 
 association childishly erected into a story. It is indeed the 
 ■* science' of the savage, the weakly imaginative, narrowly con- 
 ceived answer to a question barely put. But whether we use 
 the word wonder in its looser sense of idle curiosity', or in its 
 stricter meaning of a puzzlement of intelligence, in either sense 
 there can be ascribed to these aitiological details no significance 
 in wonder. It is only when the light of a completer knowledge 
 begins to break, as we have seen it breaking among the early 
 Greek philosophers, that these extraordinary powers, originally 
 bound up with the matter-of-fact ' science ' of primitive mind, are 
 regarded as wonderful, because at last recognized as impossible. 
 Belief lasting longer than 'science,' the earlier 'science' becomes 
 a marvel! Thus, too, is it to-day, bringing the matter home, in 
 
 05 For the exaggeration of aitiological detail to the point of wonder, see 
 below, p. 169. 
 
 &« Metaphysics, I, 2 (Bohn's Lib.)
 
 158 STUDIES IX TEE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 the case of Hebrew scripture and its marvels of creation. 
 
 But of that another time! It must now be remarked that 
 the lack of wonder in aitiologieal detail is again seen by the 
 application of our six typical eases of rarity to the original 
 point of view, that is to the primitive view that experienced 
 objective phenomena as a stimulus to observation. In the mul- 
 titude of cases where some natural object — hill, tree, pile of 
 rocks, etc. — is said to have arisen to mark a sacred spot, it is 
 particularly apparent that some more or less slight degree of 
 rarity has suggested the need of explanation, — has, in other 
 words, motived the 'story'. For instance, it is said in one 
 locality that when the old Murunda died and went into the 
 ground a big stone arose to represent his organs, which were 
 abnormally developed;®'^ at another place it is told that two 
 Alcheringa men pulled out their penes and placed them on the 
 ground, whereupon, in each case, a stone arose to mark the 
 spot."* Obviously, in both examples, the peculiar shape of the 
 stone has given rise to the legend. Rarity of size, also, often 
 motives a tale.®* Clearly we have again the conditions of the 
 second of the six cases, — that where an actual rarity still re- 
 mains after the explanation is given. The inference of the pre- 
 vious paragraph is now only strengthened by the conclusion to be 
 drawn from these conditions, viz., the decay of wonder. Even if 
 there could have been, and we believe there could not have been, 
 any real wonder to begin with, it must speedily have fallen into 
 desuetude. The 'heroic' detail shows at least an inclination to 
 wonder ; the aitiologieal detail shows almost an opposition to any 
 original wonder. 
 
 It is now possible, after completing the discussion of the 
 extraordinary powers of the totemic ancestors, to turn again to 
 the first, typical illustration and carry our research a step 
 further. It will be remembered how the old crow man found 
 difficulty in determining what he was; how he finally hit upon 
 the crow because of the black feathers which sprouted out of 
 
 07 N. T.'-:, .396. 
 
 68 Ihid., 440. Cf. 400, 408, 430. 
 
 6» Ihid., 398, 433.
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 159 
 
 his arms; how he possessed a beak, and yet could think and 
 talk like a man. It is this extraordinary union of natures and 
 forms, of man and beast, that must now be examined. 
 
 The state of affairs pictured here is very common in the 
 legends.'^" The majority of ancestors may be said to have under- 
 gone the trying ordeal of discovering what sort of animals they 
 were. The solution of the anomalous character which such a 
 belief presents to our eyes lies in properly emphasizing the fact 
 that these ancestors were totemic ancestors, and that as such 
 they were again and again the ancestors of animal totems. Let 
 us occupy for a moment the point of view of the savage who 
 finds himself the member of an animal, say the black crow, 
 totem. Why is this totem, the savage asks, the black crow totem ? 
 The obvious answer is that the totemic ancestor was a black 
 crow. But he must have been a man also ! Then he was a man 
 and a crow too ! In other words, I believe that these details 
 now under consideration were in origin strictly aitiological. 
 Primitive man, finding himself a member of an animal totem, 
 having long since forgotten the reason for the social division, 
 casts about in his mind for an explanation of the circumstance 
 and invents the simplest possible 'reason', — a reason that 
 depends upon nothing else than the juxtaposition in his mind 
 of man and his totem animal, and issues most irrationally and 
 naively in the statement "He was a black crow!" Nay, more! 
 His own state of mind, and almost his very question, are at- 
 tributed to the ancestor. This naivete of the savage becomes the 
 psychological character of his forbear. Like his descendant, 
 the ancestor speculates as to what sort of an animal he is, and 
 finds out only after several guesses. These characteristics, and 
 the truth of our interpretation, are well illustrated by the con- 
 versation of two ancestors, one of whom was Thungalla,^^ the 
 other Umbitjana." "The Thungalla looked at his shadow 
 (illinja) and called himself Illinja. At first down grew all 
 along his arms and hair on his head, and his eyes became big 
 and stood out like those of the Tittherai bird. The two men 
 
 TO See, e.g., N. T.2, 398, 400, 402, 405, 409, 414, 420, 452, 
 
 Ti Name of a male class. 
 
 72 Name of another male class.
 
 160 STUDIES IN THE MAETELLOUS. 
 
 discussed matters, and Umbitjana said to the Thungalla, 'You 
 aud I sit down little birds', but Thungalla said, 'No, we sit 
 down blaek-fellows, and we belong to the same country.' Then 
 he said, 'You have got no father, you are my child, you are 
 Umbitjana,' and it was decided that Thungalla was an opossum, 
 because fur had grown on him like that of an opossum, and his. 
 eyes were prominent, and that Umbitjana was a grass-seed man, 
 and that his name was Murunda."'^ Here, it will be noted, 
 after having decided upon their classes, Thungalla and Umbit- 
 jana, they proceed to decide upon their totems. The Thungalla. 
 has good reason for determining his animal, but the grass-seed 
 is attributed to the other without reason, by a sort of primitive 
 social contract! In another tale, where a man is represented 
 as arising from the grass-seed, the same attempt at aitiological 
 detail is shown.''* 
 
 The simplicity of the primitive mind could hardly be better 
 illustrated than by this naive invention; and the very obvious- 
 ness of that simplicity, whereby, in the lack of such categories 
 of the animal world as we possess, the savage is able without 
 any sense of the irrational or impossible to attribute animal 
 characteristics to his ancestors, shows at once that wonder is 
 no more to be attached to the origin of this detail than to the 
 other aitiological details already discussed. There was no crit- 
 icism based upon a strict classification of the mammalia ; to a 
 naked, hairy savage, living as naturally as the beasts, a little 
 opossum fur along his arms was no great thing! Originally, at 
 the making of the legend, such a detail was not felt as wonderful. 
 Later, of course, with the growth of a wider knowledge and 
 keener criticism, such details would become marvels; but the 
 Central Australian, most primitive of living races, has not yet 
 reached the culture stage that embraces such knowledge. He 
 may, indeed, be in advance of the ancestors who framed his; 
 legends ; and so the road toward wonder may be in the making. 
 Completed it is not. 
 
 It would be an egregious blunder if one of the chief elements 
 of later wonder, present here in embryo, were passed over in 
 
 T3 N. T.2, 409. 
 
 'i*Cf. also the legends of the Water-Totcin, Ibid., 418; Laughing-boy- 
 totem, 422; Wind-totera, 444; Eesin-totem, 444.
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTEALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 161 
 
 silence. The talking animal is of course one of the most common 
 of details in wonder-stories. The totemic ancestor is from one 
 point of a view a man : as such he of course talks as a man. 
 From another point of view he is an animal, and goes by the 
 name of that animal. Here, then, is an animal talking, with 
 the best and clearest of rights to talk ! In some cases the animal 
 character is still stronger, even overshadowing the human char- 
 acter.'^^ Obviously that is natural enough, — only a trifle of 
 difference in emphasis along the same line of aitiological in- 
 quiry; it militates, however, for a remarkable state of affairs 
 when centuries later the human character has dropped away, 
 and there is left only an animal who talks with no good reason 
 for talking ! There is no intention of implying here that the 
 entire wonder of talking animals takes its rise in totemic con- 
 ditions. Probably several other origins will be found also. But 
 what is claimed is, that in this origin of the talking animal there 
 is no feeling of that wonder which, through the forgetfulness 
 and growing sophistication of later ages, comes to be attached 
 to the circumstance. There is the best of reasons for the talk : 
 it is a man talking! 
 
 Once again attention must be directed to the type-legend 
 for further comment. The crow-man saw one day a "lot of 
 inmintera — that is, incomplete men and women — belonging to 
 the Unmatjera tribe. ' ' He engages in an attempt to make them 
 perfect. Now these inmintera, or intera-intera, or inapcrtwa, 
 represent nothing more nor less than one of the primitive attempts 
 at explaining the origin of man. Sometimes it was the totemic 
 ancestor who, 'rising' from the ground or Churinga, gave birth 
 to the men of his totem in various ways, sucli, for instance, as 
 by throwing crystals out of his body, throwing out his muscles, 
 or merely by looking at himself;''*' but among the Umnatjera there 
 exists this peculiar belief in imperfect creatures, whose limbs 
 were not divided, neither arms, fingers, legs nor toes, whose 
 noses had to be added and the nostrils bored with fingers, whose 
 mouths had to be slit open, likewise the eyelids.''^ 
 
 75 C^, e.g., the Eagle-hawk, N. T.2, 398. 
 70 N. T.2, 430, 431, 400. 
 
 77 N. T.i. 389; N. T.2, 156, 157; cf., also, N. T.2, 152, 154, 161, 149, 
 150, 345, 399, 403.
 
 162 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 It is difficult to speak of these creatures in view of wonder. 
 Certainly they are aitiological, and the cutting loose of the 
 limbs, boring of the nostrils, and slitting of the eyes by the old 
 crow'^ suggest an attempt to account for the human form and 
 features. Now, inasmuch as all the aitiological details noted 
 thus far have yielded no original wonder, there is strong pre- 
 sumption against assuming any original wonder here. I cannot, 
 however, support that presumption with any evidence, theoret- 
 ical or empirical. The most I am prepared to assert at present 
 is, that in view of the greater differentiation of idea and image 
 involved here over and above the other cases of human origin 
 from the totemic ancestor, it would seem that the inmintera 
 would sooner be felt as wonderful than would the animal-char- 
 acter of the ancestors. 
 
 There remains but one other detail in the crow legend that 
 requires comment, and that is the Churinga. To speak of these 
 briefly is to fall far short of appreciating their place and 
 significance in the totem and lives of its members. Spencer and 
 Gillen in their first volume have devoted a long chapter to the 
 Churinga;^'' from the material there presented the present notes 
 for our purpose are roughly put together. The term Churinga 
 is applied chiefly to "rounded, oval or elongate, flattened stones 
 and slabs of wood of various sizes"; the smaller ones are com- 
 monly called bull-roarers. Considerable mystery is attached to 
 them, partly, no doubt, in order to impress the women and boys, 
 who are never under any condition allowed to see them. "From 
 time immemorial myths and superstitions have grown up around 
 them, until now it is difficult to say how far each individual 
 believes in what ... he must know to be more or less of 
 a fraud, but in which he implicitly thinks the other natives 
 believe." "Especially in connection with the Churinga, there 
 are amongst the Australian natives beliefs which can have had no 
 origin in fact, but which have gradually grown up until now 
 they are implicitly held." In the Alcheringa, each ancestor, 
 
 "« N. T.2, 1.57. Sometimes two creatures who lived in the western sky 
 performed the operation. See N. T.2, 150. 
 
 79 N. T.i, Chap. V.
 
 WONDEB IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 163 
 
 according to the Arunta and certain other tribes, was closely 
 bound up with his Churinga. With the Churinga the spirit- 
 double of the individual is closely associated, and the belief is 
 evidently a modification of the idea, found universally in folk- 
 lore, that the soul as a concrete object may be placed in some 
 secure spot for safe-keeping. In many of the legends cited the 
 ancestor arises from a Churinga, just as our crow-man does. 
 
 Even in this short and unsatisfactory account there are al- 
 ready apparent several circumstances that make for wonder. 
 The segregation of the Churinga to the possession of the ini- 
 tiated man, the mystery sedulously fomented, the air of deceit, 
 the vacillation of belief, and the accretion about them of 
 legends due to exaggeration rather than to fact, — all these are 
 by now well-known indications of the presence of wonder. Nor 
 is one's impression lessened by reading the long accounts of 
 Spencer and Gillen. It should be noted, however, that the fear 
 of the Churinga, among the women at least, may well overbal- 
 ance any show of wonder ;^° while among the men its spiritual 
 associations are scarcely of a sort (in view of what has already 
 been said of the relations of the spirit-crowd and wonder) to 
 heighten their sense of mysterious segregation with a wonder 
 born of religious awe. As a whole, however, there seems a 
 preponderance of evidence for, rather than against, a sense of 
 wonder concerning these secret and extremely vital objects. 
 
 Before turning to the characterization of these legends as 
 a whole, there is a particular and somewhat peculiar case, men- 
 tioned earlier in the same volume,^^ which deserves a moment's 
 special notice. Among the Warramunga there is a totem an- 
 cestor who, unlike what has happened with every other totem 
 ancestor except the laughing-boy (who is the echo?), has act- 
 ually persisted from the Wingara to the present day.*- This 
 peculiar ancestor is believed to be a monstrous snake, and is 
 called Wollunqua. "The Wollunqua," say our authors, "is 
 regarded as a huge beast, so large that, if it were to stand up 
 
 80 See above, pp. 88-90. 
 
 81 N. T.2, Chap. VII. 
 
 82 N. T.2, 226.
 
 164 STUDIES IN THE MABVELLOUS. 
 
 on its tail, its head would reach i'ar away into the heavens. It 
 lives now in a large water-hole called Thapauerlu, hidden away 
 in a lonely valley amongst the Murehison Range, and there is 
 alwa^■s the fear that it may take into its head to come out of 
 its hiding-place and do some damage. It has already been 
 known, apparently for no particular reason, to destroy a num- 
 ber of natives, though on one occasion, when attacked, the men 
 were able to drive it off. Some idea of what the natives feel 
 in regard to the mythic animal — though it must be remembered 
 that it is anything but mythic in the eyes of the native — may 
 be gathered from the fact that, instead of using the name Wol- 
 lunqua, when speaking of it amongst themselves, they call it 
 urkulu imppaurinnia, because, so they told us, if they were to 
 call it too often by its real name they would lose their control 
 over it and it would come out and eat them all up."^^ 
 
 It has been thought wise to mention particularly this Wol- 
 lunqua, not because of its exaggeration of size, or its evident 
 sanctity, or its wholly animal nature®* — any one of these would 
 render it remarkable, and the first at least, its size, would en- 
 title it to a place in wonder — but because all these characteristics 
 appear in their extraordinary vividness to be the result of bring- 
 ing the remote home to the present. We have before this 
 insisted that remoteness of the Avonderful is not calculated 
 to keep the heart thrilling with wonder.®^ Here, in the con- 
 trast between the more sober regard with which the ordinary 
 totemic ancestor is contemplated and the striking concern dis- 
 played toward the Wollunqua, may be detected a fair example 
 of that observation. This affluence of wonder, again, would in 
 all probability be the fortune of every totemic ancestor could 
 they all be conceived as still living. The constant insistence 
 upon the Wollunqua 's stupendous length, as, for instance, that 
 after traveling underground many, many miles his tail was 
 still in its original resting place; the uniqueness of his position, 
 inasmuch as this great progenitor is supposed to be the only 
 surviving animal of his kind; the fearful approach to the mys- 
 
 83 N. T.2, 227. 
 
 84 N. T.2, 493. 
 
 8'>See above, pp. 123-124.
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL A USTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 165 
 
 terious pool where he dwells, — all these are details that lift 
 the WoUunqua into a place of notability in wonder as com- 
 pared with the founders of other totems. A present god, as it 
 were,- is indeed a greater marvel than an absent one ! 
 
 But what of the general character of these legends as a 
 whole? In answering this question it is possible to speak of 
 the totem legends collected in Spencer and Gillen's first volume 
 as well as of those in the second ; for the details that make 
 up the tales of the first collection are practically identical with 
 those of the second, which we have just discussed. Upon look- 
 ing over these collections for the first time, the prevailing im- 
 pression is one of sameness. Tale after tale repeats the same 
 formula, — the same material and the same handling; so that 
 reading one legend is equivalent to reading twenty. And yet, 
 upon a somewhat closer examination, it is found that in pro- 
 portion to the variation in distribution of the two sorts of 
 details, aitiological and 'heroic', the general character of the 
 legends varies from a meagre matter-of-fact list of answers to 
 certain questions connected with the totem, on the one hand, to 
 a considerably richer exploitation of the details involved in 
 such answers, on the other hand. A division of character may 
 thus be made into the heroic and aitiological; and though there 
 may occur legends where the exploitation is too slight to admit 
 of definite classification under one or the other head, the division 
 will nevertheless be of real value in the greater number of cases. 
 One caution, however, needs mention. It may be that the dif- 
 ference in length and richness of interest between certain of 
 the legends is due rather to the fulness or meagreness of the 
 report of the tale than to the original recital. Whether this be 
 so or not, or where it is so, I am unable to tell. This ignorance 
 is all the more distressing in view of a still stronger induction 
 that may be made if the tales are in their original form. 
 Until, therefore, further light is shed upon the question, it is 
 necessary to restrain our conclusions somewhat tentatively within 
 as modest bounds as possible. The attempt must be made to 
 state them in such fashion that they will not be invalidated even 
 if the lack of elaboration in many of the legends proves to be
 
 166 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 due to the compression of the reporters, while they may be 
 strengthened if the apparent contrast proves a real one. 
 
 Of the shorter, or more strictly aitiological character, the 
 crow legend examined above is an example. The details are 
 exclusively aitiological. There is nothing of what we have 
 termed the 'heroic' detail, — that is, traveling underground, or 
 mounting into the sky, etc. Questions closely connected with 
 the tribe and totem are answered with no pause to exaggerate 
 the power or importance of the ancestor. How the Unmatjera 
 began, why a certain totemic ancestor was a crow, how the 
 custom of circumcision and the like arose, what certain peculiar 
 stones mean : these are the questions answered. Probably, also, 
 the beforehand action of the two old Parthenie lizard men ex- 
 plains some circumstance of the Unmatjera economy. To these 
 questions it is necessary to add only a few others in order to 
 possess a fairly complete list of the aitiological subjects upon 
 which the legends exercise themselves. How various other cus- 
 toms arose, how the different totemic ceremonies originated, 
 what other features of the landscape mean, how the markings 
 of certain animals were made: these, together with the aitiolog- 
 ical details discussed above at length, give a good idea of the 
 common motives of the various aitiological legends. Now, it 
 has been pointed out that the aitiological detail is seldom, if 
 ever, originally felt as wonderful. Only much later generations, 
 whose keener and far more discriminating and reflective obser- 
 vation has become conscious of the categories of natural law 
 and strict classifications of kind, are able to look back upon 
 their primitive science and, through ignorance of its original 
 character, pronounce it wonder and delusion. It is right, then, 
 to assume that tales which are composed almost exclusively of 
 such 'scientific' details are not as a whole wonderful to the 
 savage. The only question is whether we actually have before 
 us legends of simple and unelaborated character : that such 
 tales necessarily precede the more heroic sort, or that their sim- 
 plicity is due to a lower rather than to a higher development, 
 are points that in the absence of evidence it is unfortunately 
 impossible to determine. But to whatever circumstance, or set 
 of circumstances, such tales are due, certain it is that tales so
 
 WONDER IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN BELIEF AND STORY. 167 
 
 predominantly aitiological are essentially devoid of the wonder 
 element in the consciousness of those who make and rehearse 
 them with an implicit belief in their character and truth. 
 
 The longer sort of legend, where the ancestor is felt more 
 in a way that approximates, at least, to the heroic sentiment 
 of later times, and where, as one may say, the ancestor is on 
 the road to become a hero, must be illustrated by another quota- 
 tion from the collection. Most of the tales of this heroic sort 
 are rather lengthy — three or four times as long as the crow tale — 
 and the full realization of their far more elaborate character can 
 be gained only from the longest. One that falls somewhat short 
 of this extreme elaboration must, however, do service here. It 
 is the legend of 
 
 PITTONGU, THE FLYING FOX. 
 
 * ' In the "Wingara, Pittongu, the flying fox, a Thapanunga man, arose 
 in the country away to the north of the Warramimga and travelled south 
 until he came near to Altunga in the eastern Macdonnell Eanges. He met 
 a number of black-fellows who had lubrasss with them, and among the 
 latter two young ones whom he wanted to secure as wives for himself, 
 though one of them was Naralu and the other Nungalla, and therefore 
 neither of them his proper wife. After thinking how he could best secure 
 them — because of course the black-fellows would not give them to him of 
 their own accord — he killed a bandicoot and put some of the blood on his 
 foot and pretended to be lame and so unable to go any further. The men 
 went out hunting, leaving the women in the main camp, and the stranger 
 sat down, wondering what it was best for him to do so as to secure the 
 two women. Going a little way out into the scrub, so as to be out of sight, 
 he changed himself into a dog and then came back again to the women's 
 camp. All of them were there except the two younger ones, who happened 
 to be out hunting in the bush, and when they saw him the old women said, 
 ' Hullo, here is a big dog coming up ', and they called to it, but the dog 
 would not come near them and only snarled, so they left it alone. At 
 dusk the two younger ones returned, and the dog at once went up to 
 them wagging his tail and playing about them. The two said, 'This is 
 a very good dog for us to hunt with', and it stayed with them. They 
 tried next day to go in several directions, but each time the dog stopped 
 and refused to go on, until at length they directed their steps towards the 
 north, from which direction the man had come, and then the dog walked 
 along with them. The dog went in the lead, rounding up the wallabies, 
 the lubras following up behind. It drove the animals into holes, the mouth 
 [sic'l of which it then filled up with stones. At length the dog went on 
 ahead, right out of sight of the women, and changed itself back into a 
 
 80 Consorts.
 
 168 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 man. He returned to search for his spears and boomerangs, which ho had 
 secreted in the scrub. The lubras meanwhile came up and caught a large 
 number of the wallabies, but were much surprised not to see any trace of 
 the dog. Seeing the black-fellow approaching, they were frightened, but he 
 said to them, 'Why are you frightened? I made the wallabies go into 
 the holes. ' Then he said, ' We will walk along my country now ', but the 
 women declined to go with him. However, taking his spear-thrower, 
 he tangled their hairs together and threw them on a long way ahead of 
 himself to a place called Athalta, where he halted for a time and where, 
 for the purpose of making himself better looking, he knocked out a tooth. 
 Then he camped close by Thapauerlu, the home of the Wollunqua, and 
 there he pulled out another tooth. He was the first man to knock teeth 
 out, and he did so because he wanted the lubras to think him good-looking. 
 He carried with him mauia (e\'il magic), spears, tomahawks, stone knives, 
 and various other implements. All the way as he travelled across the 
 country he left spirit children behind him and threw the two lubras on 
 ahead. From what is now known as the Elsey Creek he threw them on 
 as far as Pine Creek, and there he finally left them and went up into the 
 sky. A mob of black-fellows saw him coming and threw their boomerangs 
 with their right hands, hoping to kill him, but could not touch him. Then 
 they threw with their left hand and he fell down. As he fell they shouted 
 out, 'Don't drop this way; drop with your head looking towards the Warra- 
 munga. ' Accordingly he did so, and his legs stretched out right beyond Pine 
 Creek. When he passed over the Warramunga country he dropped stone 
 axes, which is why the natives of these parts are specially good at making 
 the axes; in the same way he dropped stone-knives in the Tjingilli country, 
 which is why the Tjingilli men now make the best knives, and then away 
 to the north, he dropped barbed spears in the country where these are 
 now made. ' 's^ 
 
 Now this recital combines in a most interesting fashion the 
 short aitiological information-tale and the elaborated heroic 
 legend. The second half is mostly aitiological, and quite simply so ; 
 the first half is almost entirely heroic, and very richly so. The con- 
 trast between the two halves, or between the first half and the crow 
 tale, speaks for itself. In this first half, the suspense of denoue- 
 ment gained by meticulous detail, the suggestion of character, 
 and the thrilling climax — or, in a word, the sense for story dis- 
 played — immediately lift us into the realm of narrative interest. 
 Here is no mere answering of questions. Here is an adventure, 
 well told, appealing to human instincts, resting its power on 
 its appeal to human emotions. Here is that exaggeration of the 
 hero's cunning, of his patience, of his power, that characterizes 
 the art of the story-teller. Here, to be brief, is the beginning 
 
 87 N. T.2, 427-428; for other 'heroic' tales, see pp. 396, 405, 409, 424, 
 431, 435, 445, 451.
 
 WONDER IN CENTEAL A USTEALIAN BELIEF AND STOEY. 169 
 
 of the tale par excellence, the real home of marvel, that distinc- 
 tive region where thrives most strongly that marvel which is 
 born of the teller's desire to thrill and the listener's desire to 
 be thrilled. And as it was predicted above that the marvellous 
 would find its emphatic beginning with the 'telling' that passes 
 later into literature and literary fiction,^^ so we here find that 
 particular sort of detail which among the mass examined has ap- 
 peared most inclined toward the wonderful — the 'heroic' detail 
 as we have called it — making its appearance contemporaneously 
 with the evidence of the beginning of the elaboration of an 
 art of 'telling.' The aitiological detail is evidently expanded. 
 The ancestor has an adventure in procuring his wives. He has 
 all the heroic powers examined elsewhere, and others in addition. 
 They can hardly be added by mere chance to the aitiological 
 elements. There is no need for them as causes for anything. They 
 make for interest, for story. They are exaggerations that hold 
 the wonder. His power of transforming himself into a dog is 
 a rarity in the collection; it is also a rarity in the life of the 
 Central Australian to-day. Only the great and wonderful magi- 
 cian can accomplish such a feat. Again, Pittongu's power of 
 throwing the two lubras ahead of him is a strictly individual 
 touch ; and the very dwelling upon it, the repetition and careful 
 dwelling upon it even to the point of localizing the extraordinary 
 feat, all bespeak a lively sense of rarity, of a perdurable wonder, 
 almost of a marvel. Almost of a marvel: for the information 
 as to the exact distance he threw them, from Elsey to Pine Creek, 
 seems, in part at least, to be motived by a very vivid sense of 
 present-day impossibility. Then, too, the mighty extension of the 
 hero's fall, the almost Miltonic picture of his giant limbs resting 
 upon the country, as Satan's rested upon the sea of fire, is a 
 further note of strong exaggeration. If there were time, other 
 heroic details from some of the other legends might be described 
 side by side with these. The m3'sterious, fearful, and secret 
 Kurdaitcha men, who play a part half villain, half bogey; the 
 mischievous Oruntja-spirits; the growling hearts, which oddly 
 remind the reader of one of Poe 's marvellous tales ; another tre- 
 mendous snake, whose head, like the Wollunqua's, can reach up 
 into the sky : these can only be mentioned here as strengthening 
 
 88 See above, p. 74.
 
 170 STUDIES IN THE MAEVELLOUS. 
 
 the present contention that with the development of a sense for 
 story there is the addition of exaggerated and wonderful details. 
 
 Upon this point of the present inquiry, then, the finger of 
 emphasis must be placed with determination. To be sure, even 
 the most elaborate of these tales is, judged by modern standards, 
 elaborated very meagerly; and one is impressed far more by a 
 stock sameness of detail, and almost cast-iron tradition of form- 
 ula, than by any evidence of a free, plastic imagination. And 
 yet there is elaboration, beyond the aitiological 'science' of prim- 
 itive life, into a sort of wonder; there is a lifting up of emotion 
 and imagination into 'story-interest.' Thus comes into light a 
 faint beginning of the marvellous of literature proper. 
 
 We have traveled a long way in order to gain a careful ap- 
 proach to this faint beginning, and fully as much attention has 
 been paid to what is not wonderful to primitive consciousness 
 as to what is. Nay, more space has been given to the negative 
 side ; because we conceive that the first and most important step 
 in the present research is to show how elements which in a later 
 age and developed literature come to be regarded as wonders, 
 originated without any aroma of thaumaturgy. But here at least 
 there is marked a positive stage in the course of conscious wonder, 
 — an initial stage, but nevertheless unmistakable, starting out 
 (we see it in the very act of development) from the non-wonder- 
 ful aitiology of a narrow consciousness, advancing with an 
 exaggeration of familiar elements, gathering impetus with the 
 addition of further heroic elements, and culminating in a 
 realism of action and detail by which exaggeration magnifies 
 the past and its great characters, and brings home for a moment 
 to the mind of the listener the wonders of a remote Alcheringa. 
 Thus, in connection with the most important social phenomenon 
 of the Central Australian, the totem, we gain our first positive, 
 empirical result in the study of the marvellous.*" 
 
 soother tales not directly connected with the totems — 'myths' as Spen- 
 cer and Gillen call them — tales of the sun, moon, stars, rainbow, whirlwind, 
 and the like, aro nevertheless made up so closely after the pattern of the 
 regular totem legends that it is quite unnecessary to consider them sepa- 
 rately. The only point to be emphasized is that amongst this primitive 
 people there is as yet no difference of treatment of wonder or jtre-marvel- 
 lous elements as they pass from social and ancestral legends to the contem- 
 plation and explanation of the greater and more remote features of nature. 
 These so-called myths are very few in number, and may be found in Chapter 
 XVTII of the first, and Chapter XXII of the second volume of Spencer and 
 Gillen.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 In the preceding chapters an essay has been made toward 
 uncovering the sources and the rise of the marvellous in litera- 
 ture. Throughout those chapters we have been looking always 
 forward to the stage where literature would begin to take up 
 into itself and transform the elements of experience, custom, 
 and belief; the point of view has been from non-literary begin- 
 nings toward literary inceptions, rather than the reverse. But, 
 now that the first stage in the inquiry has been completed by 
 the survey of the sources in primitive custom and belief, and 
 the rise therefrom of wonders into that first faint dawn of nar- 
 rative literature, the semi-heroic tale, it is proper to pause and 
 from our present vantage look backward over the fields that 
 have been traversed. Thus the actual results for literature may 
 be rescued from the mass of psychological and ethnological 
 detail and set clearly and emphatically before the literary stu- 
 dent. 
 
 In taking such a retrospect it immediately becomes evident 
 that the progress toward these faint literary beginnings of 
 the marvellous has been through a series of narrowing circles ; 
 and, furthermore, that each of these circles has revealed the 
 marvellous in a characteristic aspect. From the historical view 
 of Greek criticism of fiction and marvel it soon became evident 
 that literary criticism itself was originally a development from 
 the moral and philosophical criticism of the wonders and mar- 
 vels that the Greeks had inherited, through their myths, from 
 the unphilosophical and uncritical days of their remote begin- 
 nings. There, indeed, we saw what Dr. Tylor so eloquently 
 refers to as that "momentous phase of the education of man- 
 kind, when the regularity of nature has so imprinted itself upon 
 men 's minds that they begin to wonder how it is that the ancient 
 legends which they were brought up to hear with such reverend
 
 172 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 delight, should describe a world so strangely different from 
 their own. Why, they ask, are the gods and giants and monsters 
 no longer seen to lead their prodigious lives on earth — is it per- 
 chance that the course of things is changed since the old days ? ' '^ 
 In that stage men wondered at the wonderful, marvelled at the 
 marvellous. And in their earnestness they came to take into 
 questioning consideration not only the more striking and offen- 
 sive of the old wonders, but the whole field of fiction as well. 
 Graduall}^ very gradually, they passed from the first severe 
 denunciations of impious fiction, through the steps of rationaliza- 
 tion, allegory, euhemerism, and the like, to a proper literary 
 criticism that was divorced from the moral and philosophical 
 view, and could contemplate the marvellous in literature under 
 that imaginative light which is the true and distinguishing 
 character of the realm of literary art. Thus, finally, a new view 
 — what might also be called the modern view — the view of poetic 
 truth and artistic illusion — came into being; and the marvellous 
 entered into a new stage, — that of aesthetic development. 
 
 The second circle of our inquiry was somewhat narrower ; for 
 it embraced, not the general field of the criticism of wonder, 
 but the more particular question, how do men wonder, or, what 
 is wondering psychologically speaking? Here an examination 
 was made of the processes that had been tacitly subsumed in 
 the first field by the criticism of their results. And once again 
 a character of the marvellous was brought to light. In the 
 course of a description of the complex nature of wonder, it 
 grew clear that as wonder ascends in power and intensity it 
 passes through an ascending series of rarities and improbabil- 
 ities, until, reaching a culmination in impossibility, it is fitly 
 called marvelling. Moreover, in view of the fact that in im- 
 aginative literature, the home of exaggeration, there has always 
 existed a standard of ideal possibility, whereby the impossible 
 ceases from being absolutely and prosaically impossible, it was 
 immediately apparent that in literature this marvelling finds 
 its peculiarly appropriate sustenance and field of activity. Relig- 
 ion, with its aspects of faith and superstition, offers a similar 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, I, 275.
 
 CONCLUSION. 173 
 
 field and support. Hence the naturalness, not to say the inevi- 
 tability, of the close association between literature and religion 
 in the matter of the marvellous. Here there was a recognition 
 that the marvellous would find its place in literature, and thrive 
 there under the fostering guidance of religious faith and super- 
 stition, long before it would be ready to enter upon its aesthetic 
 development under the tutelage of a properly emancipated liter- 
 ary criticism. 
 
 Armed with the subjective criteria gained from this field, 
 primitive mind, custom, and belief, and the relations between 
 literature, religion, and the marvellous, were contemplated in 
 their simplest possible manifestations. Two great facts made 
 their appearance. In the first place, it was recognized that, in 
 a vast number of cases, what is wonderful or marvellous to the 
 minds of later generations was simple fact to the primitive con- 
 sciousness. To understand, therefore, the marvellous elements 
 in literature, it became necessary to determine so far as possible 
 what marvels were wonderful, and what not wonderful, to the 
 primitive mind. This meant an examination not only of the 
 character of early mind, but also of the sources of marvel- 
 elements in early custom and belief. Such an examination 
 brought out the second significant fact, — viz., that there can be 
 distinguished more or less clearly two tendencies — one making 
 against wonder, the other for it — which run through many prim- 
 itive customs and the original mental attitudes toward them. 
 The more primitive the people, the greater the former tendency ; 
 the less primitive, the greater the latter. Moreover, the latter 
 tendency was seen to be characterized by the principles of segre- 
 gation and individualization, whereby details and powers are 
 differentiated from the communal mass. Gods and priests, magi- 
 cians and magic as 'magical,' and the custom of taboo, were 
 seen to illustrate this tendency. But underlying all these, and 
 the entire tendency, was the mental trick of exaggeration, often 
 joined with deceit. Through exaggeration the tendency to wonder 
 was abetted; through it, details which were not originally and 
 distinctly felt as wonderful became wonderful. But exaggera- 
 tion is primarily a matter of 'telling,' of rehearsing. It is 
 mind and mouth that lend exaggeration to a matter; the tale
 
 174 STUDIES IN THE MARVELLOUS. 
 
 spring's spontaneously from the lips of the exaggerator. Thus, 
 in this field also, literature, or at least its faint beginning, was 
 seen to be peculiarly bound up with wonder. And the greater 
 the exaggeration, the more of a wonder. As in the history of 
 criticism the marvellous was seen to be closely related to the 
 beginnings of that discipline, so here, with the beginnings of 
 'narative' literature, wonder is woven into the fabric of the 
 tale by the very exaggerating force that contributes so largely to 
 its origin. 
 
 The last and narrowest of our circles took' us from the gen- 
 eral field of primitive mind to the particular field of the beliefs, 
 customs, and legends of one of the most primitive of existing 
 races, the Central Australians. Guided by the sense of direction 
 gained in exploring the larger field, and supported by the de- 
 scriptive criteria of the previous chapter but one, it was not 
 difficult to detect among this people illustrations of our general 
 observation that many a wonder element, recognized as such 
 to-day, was plain matter-of-fact to the savage. Many such ele- 
 ments were named, and their origin briefly suggested, so that 
 at some other time their progress to wonder through later de- 
 velopment may be fitly observed. It is not claimed that any- 
 thing like entire success has been achieved in the difficult task 
 of differentiating among these primitive tribes the details that 
 are wonderful from those that are not wonderful. The most 
 that could be done in this first sketch of the situation, limited 
 as we are by an insufficiency of direct evidence, as well as by 
 the novelty of the attempt, was to make clear the general truth 
 of our conclusions by such a fulness of detail that a mistake in 
 the judgment of a single detail here and there would not invali- 
 date the entire argument. It was in following up the first posi- 
 tive step in the exploitation of wonder that we were brought to 
 the particular character of the marvellous that this chapter had 
 to offer. The particular case of actual legends concerning the 
 ancestors of these Australians proved the accuracy of the general 
 observ^ation upon the relation of literature and marvel which 
 was developed in the preceding chapter. Here, indeed, was de- 
 tected a simultaneous and associated growth of wonder and the 
 hero-tale from the religio-scientific details of the aitiological col-
 
 CONCLUSION. 175 
 
 lections, — a growth that in either ease was motived by the force 
 of a natural exaggeration. This exaggeration was evident both 
 in its wonder-making influence upon elements of custom and 
 belief, which originally were matters of fact, and also in its 
 creation of certain so-called 'heroic' details out of the fund of 
 general experience. Thus the hero-tale, bred from what might 
 be called an aitiological ancestor (even if he were a real an- "^ 
 cestor the term might be retained), and forming the beginning 
 of a narrative literature, comes to take its place as aiding the 
 tendency toward wonder by accommodating it with a natural 
 field for its activity. Such an alliance is bound to produce the 
 higher reaches of wonder in a comparatively short time. 
 Finally, it should be emphasized again that the first step into 
 'literature' was taken through the agency of a social institution, 
 the totem. Further research into the subsequent stages of the 
 development of the marvellous in literature must take this fact 
 as a cue to the perdurably social aspect of the question. 
 
 Our four circles of progress have thus each shown a peculiar 
 affinity between the marvellous and literature. The discussion 
 of the psychological aspect of the question adequately showed 
 the reason for this affinity. Briefly, in a w'ord, it may be said 
 that both are all compacted of imagination; and that the latter, 
 literature, offers the most natural playground to the former. 
 It would be easy here to wax philosophical and attempt to raise 
 a theory upon the inter-relations of religion, literature, and mar- 
 vel, — a theory that would have as much bearing upon later and 
 even present-day cycles of thought and expression as upon the 
 epoch of beginnings. I believe that in such a system the mar- 
 vellous would furnish the connecting link or common element; 
 and that the better understanding of its glamor would tend as 
 much to emancipate the faith of religion as to inspire a new 
 and more spiritual romanticism. The marvellous has given the 
 romantic tone to both religion and literature ; the analysis of that 
 tone, which after all is the purpose of these studies, would, 
 if brought home to the minds and hearts of a race, mean a new 
 day of creation, springing with brighter and whiter light from 
 the old barbaric days of gloom and mystery. 
 
 But no such theory is to be traced here. Instead, the remark
 
 176 STUDIES IN THE MABFELLOUS. 
 
 may be hazarded that the peculiarly intimate relation between 
 literature and wonder pointed out in this tentative essay has 
 never been sufficiently contemplated. Ever.y romantic epoch 
 brings round sufficient evidence of the reality of the relation, 
 and ample guarantee for the dignity of a careful examination 
 into its nature and origin. The present advances in psychology are 
 helping to minimize the subjective difficulties of the subject, and 
 the nearer to national literatures the study advances, the greater 
 the amount of direct evidence; modern ethnological research is 
 daily increasing the data of the remoter reaches of the problem ; 
 the freedom of criticism in the present, together with its wealth 
 of apparatus, offers an opportunity of dispassionate, if not 
 exhaustive, study such as seldom before has been extended to 
 the scholar. On the other hand, the advantages to the theory 
 and history of literature would surely not be inconsiderable. 
 The examination should be extended through other culture- 
 grades of savage and barbaric races ; the development into won- 
 der of the aitiological details should be noted, classified, and 
 explained; the creation of new wonders through individual 
 exaggeration of elements of thought and experience, should be 
 considered in conjunction with the rise of new economic condi- 
 tions as they affect the increasing significance of the individual 
 in society; the characteristic variations in the wonder elements 
 should be examined, and their treatment should be traced as they 
 pass from ancestor-tale and legend to myth, from myth and 
 legend to the self-conscious literary art of the epic, from early 
 epic to other types — tragedy, comedy, satire, novel — in their later 
 development: all the course of characteristic variations under 
 these changes of circumstances should be noted and correlated 
 with the passing of one literary epoch after another. "What a 
 field is opened in the European Middle Ages ! What a contrast 
 in the recurring successions of creative and critical periods ! 
 Nor would the least fascinating aspect of the subject lie in an 
 exploration of oriental marvel-literature and its comparison with 
 occidental wonder.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 INTKODUCTION. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Iktboduction 3 
 
 The marvellous in Eomance — Its profusion, and recurrent 
 character — Its neglect by literary criticism — Aristotle — Desul- 
 tory and fragmentary nature of wonder-criticism after 
 Aristotle — Data furnished by the ethnologists — The opportunity 
 for a criticism of the marvellous — Purpose and plan of the 
 present work — History of the usage of the term ' ' marvellous ' ' 
 — as an intensive — as denoting the supernatural — in other 
 languages — Suggestiveness of these usages. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Greek Cbiticism of Fiction axd Makvel 14 
 
 Outline of method — The philosophical doubt: (a) the 
 earlier expostulation with myth; (b) Pindar and the 'Charis 
 Doctrine'; (c) Xenophanes; (d) Empedocles; (e) Plato — 
 Philosophical attempts to explain the mar^-el in myth: (o) the 
 allegorists; (fc) Euhemerism — The beginnings of literary criti- 
 cism proper: (a) Aristotle; (ft) Dionysius of Halicarnassus ; 
 (c) 'Demetrius'; (d) Plutarch; (e) 'Longinus' — Minor phil- 
 osophers, rhetoricians, etc. — Conclusion: eight general points. 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 The Psychoi-ogy of Woxder _ 52 
 
 Inadequacy of previous descriptions of wonder — States 
 allied to wonder: (1) surprise, astonishment, and curiosity; 
 (a) surprise differentiated logically, as in sudden and unusual 
 experiences; (6) surprise differentiated physiologically, as in 
 short and long "circuits"; (c) passing of surprise [through 
 astonishment, at times] to curiosity and wonder; (d) relations 
 of curiosity, explanation, and wonder; (e) six tj'pical cases; 
 
 (f) differentiation of the improbable and the impossible, and 
 their relations to wonder and marvel and to the six typical cases; 
 
 (g) the marvellous: (2) belief and wonder; (a) definition; 
 (6) degree of belief consonant with wonder; (c) the ridicu- 
 lous; (d) belief and the standard of ideal possibility: (3) 
 imagination and the marvellous: (4) fear and marvel: (5) 
 pleasure and marvel. — Summary.
 
 CHAPTER TIL 
 
 PAGE 
 
 WoNDEK IN Primitive Mind, Custom, and Belief 93 
 
 What is wonderful to the primitive? — Difficulties in 
 answering — Subjective difficulty — Unreliability of data — 
 General description of primitive mind, custom, and belief 
 — Preliminary difficulties and objections — Vierkandt's pic- 
 ture of primitive mind and belief — Points, in primitive 
 conditions, making against wonder: (a) no conception of 
 unexceptional regularity; (b) matter-of-fact character of 
 belief in spirits who cause rarities; (c) no impossibility 
 possible to primitive consciousness; (d) primitive curi- 
 osity not favorable to wonder; (e) primitive belief and 
 imagination not favorable to wonder; (f) magic as 'scien- 
 tific'; (g) animism — Points, in primitive conditions, making 
 for wonder: (a) segregated nature of gods; (b) of priest; 
 (c) of magician; (d) of magic as 'magical'; (e) of taboo; 
 (/■) exaggeration — Summary. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Wonder in Central Australian Belief and Story 135 
 
 Discussion of sources — General cultural conditions of Cen- 
 tral Australians ; identity among tribes ; low stage of culture 
 — In such a stage the forces against wonder strongly present 
 — More important to regard the forces making for wonder — 
 General crowd of spirits not wonderful to natives — Particular 
 spirits and wonder — No gods — Other particular spirits — Magi- 
 cian and wonder; segregation and initiation; extraordinary 
 powers; deceit; exaggeration — Totemic traditions and legends 
 — Heroic and aitiological legends — Wonder in the heroic — 
 Combination of animal and human characteristics — The inmin- 
 tera, Churinga, and Wollunqua — Character of the legends as a 
 whole — The beginning of wonder in literature — Summary : the 
 relation between the beginnings of wonder and of literature. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 Conclusion 171
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 Page 40: Note 91 should read, See above, pp. 33-34. 
 Page 41: Note 96 should read, See above, p. 34. 
 Page 44: Note 110 should read, See above, p. 43. 
 Page 45: Note 116 should read, See above, p. 43. 
 Page 45: Note 118 should read, See above, p. 42. 
 Page 57: Note 20 should read. See above, p. 52, note 3. 
 Page 57: Note 21 should read. See above, p. 55, note 14. 
 Page 59, line 4: Read that is, instead of that, is. 
 Page 97: Line 16 should follow after line 22. 
 Page 103, note 28, line 3: Read experiential.
 
 
 
 
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