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Show ADMINISTBATIVE REPORT LXXXIII animate life; that is, he interprets the phenomena of the world from the standpoint of the belief that all bodies, like human bodies, are endowed with mind and that they have motives and enjoy pleasures and feel pains and exercise will as men do. The savage man interprets the environment of bodies as if they were human bodies. This is what has been called antliropomorphism. With this view of the world savage man develops a vast body of story lore which reveals his thoughts of the nature of things with the causes and effects of events that constitute the history of life and change. This lore is myth. But more: By agencies which are now well recognized in science, he believes that every body has a dual existence, as gross body and attenuated body, and that the attenuated body may enter the gross body or depart from the gross body at will, and that the attenuated body may sojourn in one gross body or another at will. The attenuated body is known in our language as ghost, but every primitive language has a name of its own, as manitu in the Algonquian languages, and pokunt in the Shoshonean languages, and wakanda in the Siouan languages. This ghost is held to be the cause of things. All events are caused by ghosts. Every distinct linguistic stock of the world has a body of myth consisting of stories related about the doings of human beings and mythic personages, which always assume that the ghosts of the other personages influence the ghosts of men, or that the ghosts of men influence the ghosts of other personages. This is the essence of barbaric myth or romance, for myth and romance are one in this stage of culture. Power myth- In the second stage of myth or romance we discover a radical development in the personages of the story. A new class of deities is found. From the same linguistic cause, which we have set forth, the conspicuous phenomena of nature are personified as gods. The powers of the universe as they are known in that stage of society become the heroes of myth. The animal gods remain, and with them the human \> eings; but all the gods of savagery are assigned minor parts, and the new gods constitute a superior order of beings. |