docles as a It is a remarkable instance of the strange complexities Empeand seeming inconsistencies of human nature, that a man pretender whose capacious mind revolved ideas so far-reaching and to divinity. fruitful, should have posed among his contemporaries as a prophet or even as a god, parading the streets of his native city bedecked with garlands and ribbons and followed by obsequious crowds of men and women, who worshipped him and prayed to him that he would reveal to them the better way, that he would give them oracles and heal their infirmities.1 In the character of Empedocles, as in that of another forerunner of science, Paracelsus, the sterling qualities of the genuine student would seem to have been alloyed with a vein of ostentation and braggadocio; but the dash of the mountebank which we may detect in his composition probably helped rather than hindered him to win for a time the favour and catch the ear of the multitude, ever ready as they are to troop at the heels of any quack who advertises his wares by a loud blast on a brazen trumpet. With so many claims on the admiration of the wise and the adulation of the foolish, we may almost wonder that Empedocles did not become the founder, if not the god, of a new religion. Certainly other human deities have set up in business and prospered with an intellectual stock-in-trade much inferior to that of the Sicilian philosopher. Perhaps Empedocles lacked that perfect sincerity of belief in his own pretensions without which it seems difficult or impossible permanently to impose on the credulity of mankind. To delude others successfully it is desirable, if not absolutely necessary, to begin by being one's self deluded, and the Sicilian sage was probably too shrewd a man to feel perfectly at ease in the character of a god. The old savage doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which Empedocles furbished up and passed off on his dis forth, but how little Aristotle fully comprehended the principle, is shown by his remarks on the formation of the teeth." Darwin omits Aristotle's reference to Empedocles, apparently deeming it irrelevant or unimportant. Had he been fully acquainted with the philosophical speculations of Empedocles, we can scarcely doubt that Darwin would have included him among 1 Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philosoph. The ciples as a philosophical tenet, was afterwards countenanced, doctrine of if not expressly affirmed, by another Greek philosopher of a migration very different stamp, who united, as no one else has ever the trans of souls in Plato. done in the same degree, the highest capacity for abstract thought with the most exquisite literary genius. But if he borrowed the doctrine from savagery, Plato, like his two predecessors, detached it from its rude original setting and fitted it into an edifying moral scheme of retributive justice. For he held that the transmigration of human souls after death into the bodies of animals is a punishment or degradation entailed on the souls by the weaknesses to which they had been subject or the vices to which they had been addicted in life, and that the kind of animal into which a peccant soul transmigrates is appropriate to the degree and nature of its weakness or guilt. Thus, for example, the souls of gluttons, sots, and rakes pass into the bodies of asses; the souls of robbers and tyrants are born again in wolves and hawks ; the souls of sober quiet people, untinctured by philosophy, come to life as bees and ants; a bad poet may turn at death into a swan or a nightingale; and a bad jester into an ape. Nothing but a rigid practice of the highest virtue and a single-minded devotion to abstract truth will avail to restore such degraded souls to their human dignity and finally raise them to communion with the gods. Though the passages in which these views are set forth have a mythical colouring and are, like all Plato's writings, couched in dramatic form and put into the mouths of others, we need not seriously doubt that they represent the real opinion of the philosopher himself.2 It is interesting and instructive to meet with the old savage theory of the transmigration of souls thus masquerading under a flowing drapery of morality and sparkling with the gems of Attic eloquence in the philosophic system of a great Greek thinker. So curiously alike may be the solutions which the highest and the lowest intellects offer of 1 Plato, Phaedo, pp. 81 B-84 C; Republic, x. pp. 617 D-620 D; Timaeus, pp. 41 D-42 D; Phaedrus, p. 249 B. 2 This is the view of E. Zeller (Die Philosophie der Griechen, ii.3 Leipsic, 1875, pp. 706 sqq.), Sir W. E. Geddes (on Plato, Phaedo, p. 81E), and J. Adam (on Plato, Republic, x. p. 618 A). We have no right, with some interpreters ancient and modern, to dissolve the theory into an allegory because it does not square with our ideas. those profound problems which in all ages have engaged the curiosity and baffled the ingenuity of mankind.1 1 In our own time the theory of transmigration is favoured by Dr. McTaggart, who argues that human beings may have lived before birth and may live many, perhaps an infinite number of, lives after death. Like Plato he further suggests that the nature of the body into which a person transmigrates at death may be appropriate to and de termined by his or her character in the preceding life. See J. McT. Ellis McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (London, 1906), pp. 112-139. However, Dr. McTaggart seems only to contemplate the transmigration of human souls into human bodies; he does not discuss the possibility of their transmigration into animals. CHAPTER XVII The ambiguous and the Gilyaks towards bears TYPES OF ANIMAL SACRAMENT § 1. The Egyptian and the Aino Types of Sacrament WE are now perhaps in a position to understand the behaviour ambiguous behaviour of the Aino and Gilyaks towards the of the Aino bear. It has been shewn that the sharp line of demarcation which we draw between mankind and the lower animals does not exist for the savage. To him many of the other explained. animals appear as his equals or even his superiors, not merely in brute force but in intelligence; and if choice or necessity leads him to take their lives, he feels bound, out of regard to his own safety, to do it in a way which will be as inoffensive as possible not merely to the living animal, but to its departed spirit and to all the other animals of the same species, which would resent an affront put upon one of their kind much as a tribe of savages would revenge an injury or insult offered to a tribesman. We have seen that among the many devices by which the savage seeks to atone for the wrong done by him to his animal victims one is to shew marked deference to a few chosen individuals of the species, for such behaviour is apparently regarded as entitling him to exterminate with impunity all the rest of the species upon which he can lay hands. This principle perhaps explains the attitude, at first sight puzzling and contradictory, of the Aino towards the bear. The flesh and skin of the bear regularly afford them food and clothing; but since the bear is an intelligent and powerful animal, it is necessary to offer some satisfaction or atonement to the bear species for the loss which it sustains in the death of so many of its members. This satisfaction or atonement is CH. XVII EGYPTIAN AND AINO TYPES OF SACRAMENT 311 made by rearing young bears, treating them, so long as they live, with respect, and killing them with extraordinary marks of sorrow and devotion. So the other bears are appeased, and do not resent the slaughter of their kind by attacking the slayers or deserting the country, which would deprive the Aino of one of their means of subsistence. of the worship of Thus the primitive worship of animals assumes two Two forms forms, which are in some respects the converse of each other. On the one hand, animals are worshipped, and are animals. therefore neither killed nor eaten. On the other hand, animals are worshipped because they are habitually killed and eaten. In both forms of worship the animal is revered on account of some benefit, positive or negative, which the savage hopes to receive from it. In the former worship the benefit comes either in the positive form of protection, advice, and help which the animal affords the man, or in the negative one of abstinence from injuries which it is in the power of the animal to inflict. In the latter worship the benefit takes the material form of the animal's flesh and skin. The two forms of worship are in some measure antithetical in the one, the animal is not eaten because it is revered; in the other, it is revered because it is eaten. But both may be practised by the same people, as we see in the case of the North American Indians, who, while they apparently revere and spare their totem animals,1 also revere the animals and fish upon which they subsist. The aborigines of Australia have totemism in the most primitive form known to us; but, so far as I am aware, there is no clear evidence that they attempt, like the North American Indians, to conciliate the animals which they kill and eat. The means which the Australians adopt to secure a plentiful supply of game appear to be primarily based, not on conciliation, but on sympathetic magic,2 a principle to which the North American 1 This is known, for example, of the Yuchi Indians, for among them "members of each clan will not do violence to wild animals having the form and name of their totem. For instance, the Bear clan people never molest bears." See F. G. Speck, Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians (Philadelphia, 1909), p. 70. But in spite of the attention which has been paid to |
