The threshold of religion / by R.R. Marett.

  • Robert Ranulph Marett
Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The threshold of religion / by R.R. Marett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    pose that because the primitive mind is able to ex- plain away its doubts, there is therefore necessarily any solid and objective truth at the back of its ex- planations. Given sufficient bias in favour of a theory, the human mind, primitive or even civilized, by unconsciously picking its facts and by the various other familiar ways of fallacy, can bring itself to believe almost any kind of nonsense. At the same time there does happen to be an objectively true and real projectiveness in the kind of symbolic magic we have been especially considering—the discharge of wrath on the image or what not. We know that as a fact to be symbolically tortured and destroyed by his enemy “ gets on the nerves ” of the savage, so that he is apt really to feel torturing pains and die.1 The psychology of the matter is up to a certain point simple enough, the principles involved being indeed more or less identical with those we have already had occasion to consider. Just as the savage is a good actor, throwing himself like a child into his mime, so he is a good spectator, entering into the spirit of another’s acting, herein again resembling the child, who can be frightened into fits by the roar of what he knows to be but a “ pretended ” lion. Even if the make-believe is more or less make-believe to the victim, it is hardly the less efficacious; for, dominat- ing as it tends to do the field of attention, it racks the emotional system, and, taking advantage of the relative abeyance of intelligent thought and will, sets stirring all manner of deep-lying impulses and auto- See, eg., G. B.,2 i. 13.
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