and in the absolute difference between what they call "dead" and living matter; in accepting and theorising on these reports, no allowance has been made for the turn given to them by the preconceived notions of these Christian missionaries and travellers; nor any allowance for the unwillingness and inability of savage peoples and uncultured classes to reveal what their notions of things really are, and their persistent effort, indeed, to conceal and mislead when questioned as to these notions.[1] Secondly, the scientific study of Folk-lore, in its comparison of the genuine expressions of Folk-belief in Folk-customs, Folk-sayings, and Folk-poesies shows that the terms which would be usually translated by our words "soul", "ghost", or "spirit" do not mean anything like what these words signify to us. One finds, for instance, that what is really meant by the terms thus translated is not a wandering "spirit", but a restless corpse,[2] and that Dr. Tylor's definition of the "soul" as "capable of continued existence after the death or destruction of the body", is a Christian Culture-conception, rather than a Pagan Folk-conception; or that what
- ↑ "The more one knows of the natives", says Bishop Knight Bruce, in his Journal of the Mashonaland Mission, 1888-92, "the more one finds how consistently they keep on concealing from strangers what they really think." Similar expressions of opinion might be quoted from Bishop Codrington, and indeed from most of the more recent and more critical travellers and missionaries.
- ↑ Thus, for instance, Mrs. Balfour, in her admirably transcribed and most interesting Legends of the Lincolnshire Cars (Folk-Lore, March, September, and December 1891), entitles one of them "Sam'l's Ghost". Yet she at the same time admits that "ghost" is "not a Lincolnshire word", and tells us that to these peasants dead persons are not "ghosts", but "bogles", which appears to mean "corpses capable of feeling, speaking, appearing to living eyes, and of working good and evil, till corruption has finally completed its work, and the bodies no longer exist" (Folk-Lore, December 1891, pp. 492-3). Such an adjective as "perverse" is, of course, inadmissible with reference to a lady; but if a man, with similarly full knowledge, had been guilty of such a misleading use of the term "ghost", one might allowably have protested against it as "perverse".
