I am not sure, however, how far we ought to press this “doctrine of universal vitality.”  Does a savage, for instance, when he is hammering at a piece of flint think of it as other than a “thing,” any more than we should?  I doubt it.  He may say “Confound you!” if it suddenly snaps in two, just as we might do.  But though the language may seem to imply a “you,” he would mean, I believe, to impute to the flint just as much, or as little, of personality as we should mean to do when using similar language.  In other words, I believe that, within the world of his ordinary work-a-day experience, he recognizes both things and persons; without giving a thought, in either case, to the hidden principles that make them be what they are, and act as they do.

When, on the other hand, the thing, or the person, falls within the world of supernormal experience, when they strike the imagination as wonderful and wonder-working, then there is much more reason why he should seek to account to himself for the mystery in, or behind, the strange appearance.  Howitt, who knew his Australian natives intimately, cites the following as “a good example of how the native mind works.”  To the black-fellow his club or his spear are part and parcel of his ordinary life.  There is no, “medicine,” no “devil,” in them.  If they are to be made supernaturally potent, they must be specially charmed.  But it is quite otherwise with his spear-thrower or his bull-roarer.  The former for no obvious reason enables him to throw his spear extraordinarily far. (I have myself seen an Australian spear, with the help of the spear-thrower, fly a hundred and fifty yards, and strike true and deep at the end of its flight.) The latter emits the noise of thunder, though a mere chip of wood on the end of a string.  These, then, are in themselves “medicine.”  There is “virtue” in, or behind, them.

Is, then, to attribute “virtue” the same thing, necessarily, as to attribute vitality?  Are the spear-thrower and the bull-roarer inevitably thought of as alive?  Or are they, as a matter of course, endowed with soul or spirit?  Or may there be also an impersonal kind of “virtue,” “medicine,” or whatever the wonder-working power in the wonder-working thing is to be called?  Now there is evidence that the savage himself, in speaking about these matters, sometimes says power, sometimes vitality, sometimes spirit.  But the simplest way of disposing of these questions is to remember that such fine distinctions as these, which theorists may seek to draw, do not appeal at all to the savage himself.  For him the only fact that matters is that, whereas some things in the world are ordinary, and can be reckoned on, other things cannot be reckoned on, but are wonder-working.

Moreover, of wonder-working things, some are good and some are bad.  To get all the good kind of wonder-workers on to his side, so as to confound the bad kind—­that is what his religion is there to do for him.  “May blessings come, may mischiefs go!” is the import of his religious striving, whether anthropologists class it as spell or as prayer.