SPIRITUAL CAUSES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 803, 25 October 1929, Page 9

SPIRITUAL CAUSES

ACCEPTED BY PRIMITIVE MIND FRENCH THEORY EXPOUNDED The generally accepted theor> of French anthropologists on the working of the primitive mind was interestingly presented by Mr. J. W. Shaw lecturing in the I'niversity College Hall last evening Illustrations of primitive thought and action of the cave-man. the AngloSaxon. down to the Maori, were given by the lecturer, who instanced curious actions by these people. English anthropologists, he said, regarded tin savage as an undeveloped civilised man. and that his mind moved front the Vame objects, along the same avenues, to the same goals as did our> This was linked with the animism o: Tylor and Frazer, according to whom the native noticed the difference be tween living and dead persons. There was also the fact that the native could see dead people in dreams, and could even see himself. The native, therefore. believed he was in two parts his life and liis phantom. The theory of the undeveloped n*.«u was challenged by Levy Bruhl. who also denied the fundamental assumption of animism. The native mind differed entirely from ours in that ii had n«>t our ideas, saw nothing as ▼'«■ saw it. and followed different pat I'." to the goal. He asserted that th native mind was fully developed. Th native received a vast amount of traditional lore from the group mind, and linked up everything he saw wit' the ancestral lore. By the law of participation the primitive established u multitude of relations with the spirit - that surrounded and inter-penetrated this life: he sought for the explanation of disease in offended spirits <>» witchcraft: he undertook nothing without special ceremonies and incant a tions. To him the dead and th. living were one. members of the sani* clan. The dead still took an interest in this life and would soon be born back into it.