dogmatic opinion as to the cause of a given result when sufficient
evidence to warrant a definite conclusion is wanting; to the savage,
the notion of any necessity for, or advantage to be derived from, such
self-restraint never once occurs. Neither the lightning that strikes
his hut, the blight that withers his crops, the disease that destroys
the life of those he loves; nor, on the other hand, the beneficent
sunshine or life-giving rain, is by him traceable to any known
physical cause. They are the results of influences utterly beyond his
understanding--supernatural,--matters upon which imagination is allowed
free scope to run riot, and from which spring up a legion of myths, or
attempts to represent in some manner these incomprehensible processes,
grotesque or poetic, according to the character of the people with which
they originate, which, if their growth be not disturbed by extraneous
influences, eventually develop into the national creed. The most
ordinary events of the savage's every-day life do not admit of a natural
solution; his whole existence is bound in, from birth to death, by a
network of miracles, and regulated, in its smallest details, by unseen
powers of whom he knows little or nothing.

13. Hence it is that, in primitive societies, the functions of
legislator, judge, priest, and medicine man are all combined in one
individual, the great medium of communication between man and the
unknown, whose person is pre-eminently sacred. The laws that are to
guide the community come in some mysterious manner through him from the
higher powers. If two members of the clan are involved in a quarrel, he
is appealed to to apply some test in order to ascertain which of the two
is in the wrong--an ordeal that can have no judicial operation, except
upon the assumption of the existence of omnipotent beings interested in
the discovery of evil-doers, who will prevent the test from operating
unjustly. Maladies and famines are unmistakeable signs of the