I. MAGIC AND PRIMITIVE MENTALITY

Few words of African origin have survived and found a permanent place in the popular speech of the English West Indies. One of these is “obeah.” Of this word, J. Graham Cruickshank, in a little pamphlet entitled Black Talk says:

Obeah—which is Negro witchcraft, and whose worst aspect was the poisonous idea put into the mind of the subject—has gone under to a great extent. Extraordinary cases of it crop up now and again in the newspapers. It is the most difficult of all anthropological data on which to “draw” the old Negro. Burton gives an Old Calabar proverb: “Ubio nkpo ono onya” (They plant Obeah for him) and adds this note: “‘Ubio’ means any medicine or charm put in the ground to cause sickness or death. It is manifestly the origin of the West Indian ‘obeah.’ We shall be the less surprised to hear that the word has traveled so far when told by Clarkson, in his History of the Slave Trade, that when the traffic was a legitimate branch of commerce as many slaves were annually exported from Bonny and the Old Calabar River as from all the rest of the West African Coast.”^[63]

Obeah is Negro magic. The paper which follows was suggested by observation on Negro magic during a recent visit to the English Islands in the Caribbean.

During the past year two very important books have been published, in English, dealing with the subject of magic. The first is a translation of Lévy-Bruhl’s La Mentalité Primitive, and the other is Lynn Thorndyke’s A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries of the Christian Era.

In venturing to include two volumes so different in content and point of view in the same general category, I have justified myself by adopting Thorndyke’s broad definition, which includes under “magic” “all occult arts and sciences, superstition and folklore.”

Lévy-Bruhl’s book is an attempt, from a wide survey of anthropological literature, to define a mode of thought characteristic of primitive peoples.

Thorndyke, on the other hand, is interested mainly, as the title of his volume indicates, in the beginnings of empirical science. The points of view are different, but the subject matter is the same, namely, magical beliefs and practices, particularly in so far as they reflect and embody a specific type of thought.

Lévy-Bruhl has collected, mainly from the writings of missionaries and travelers, an imposing number of widely scattered observations. These have been classified and interpreted in a way that is intended to demonstrate that the mental life and habits of thought of primitive peoples differ fundamentally from those of civilized man.

Thorndyke, on the other hand, has described the circumstances under which, during the first thirteen centuries of our era, the forerunners of modern science were gradually discarding magical practices in favor of scientific experiment.

There is, of course, no historical connection between the culture of Europe in the thirteenth century and that of present-day savages, although the magical beliefs and practices of both are surprisingly similar and in many cases identical, a fact which is intelligible enough when we reflect that magic is a very ancient, widespread, characteristically human phenomenon, and that science is a very recent, exceptional, and possibly fortuitous manifestation of social life.

Lévy-Bruhl described the intelligence and habits of thought characteristic of savage peoples as a type of mentality. The civilized man has another and a different mentality. “Mentality,” used in this way, is an expression the precise significance of which is not at once clear. We use the expression “psychology” in a similar but somewhat different way when we say, for example, that the rural and urban populations “have a different ‘psychology,’” or that such and such a one has the “psychology” of his class—meaning that a given individual or the group will interpret an event or respond to a situation in a characteristic manner. But “mentality,” as ordinarily used, seems to refer to the form, rather than to the content, of thought. We frequently speak of the type or grade of mentality of an individual, or of a group. We would not, however, qualify the word “psychology” in any such way. We would not, for example, speak of the grade or degree of the bourgeoisie, or the proletarian “psychology.” The things are incommensurable and “psychology,” in this sense, is a character but not a quantity.

The term “mentality,” however, as Lévy-Bruhl uses it, seems to include both meanings. On the whole, however, “primitive mentality” is used here to indicate the form in which primitive peoples are predisposed to frame their thoughts. The ground pattern of primitive thought is, as Lévy-Bruhl expresses it, “pre-logical.”

As distinguished from Europeans and from some other peoples somewhat less sophisticated than ourselves, the primitive mind “manifests,” he says, “a decided distaste for reasoning and for what logicians call the discursive operations of thought. This distaste for rational thought does not arise out of any radical incapacity or any inherent defect in their understanding,” but is simply a method—one might almost say a tradition—prevalent among savage and simple-minded people of interpreting as wilful acts the incidents, accidents, and unsuspected changes of the world about them.

What is this pre-logical form of thought which characterizes the mentality of primitive people? Lévy-Bruhl describes it as “participation.” The primitive mind does not know things as we do, in a detached objective way. The uncivilized man enters, so to speak, into the world about him and interprets plants, animals, the changing seasons, and the weather in terms of his own impulses and conscious purposes. It is not that he is lacking in observation, but he has no mental patterns in which to think and describe the shifts and changes of the external world, except those offered by the mutations of his own inner life. His blunders of interpretation are due to what has been described as the “pathetic fallacy,” the mistake of attributing to other persons, in this case, to physical nature and to things alive and dead, the sentiments and the motives which they inspire in him. As his response to anything sudden and strange is more likely to be one of fear than of any other emotion, he interprets the strange and unfamiliar as menacing and malicious. To the civilized observer it seems as if the savage lived in a world peopled with devils.

One difference between the savage and the civilized man is that the savage is mainly concerned with incidents and accidents, the historical, rather than scientific, aspects of life. He is so actively engaged in warding off present evil and meeting his immediate needs that he has neither time nor inclination to observe routine. It is the discovery and explanation of this routine that enables natural science to predict future consequences of present action and so enable us to prepare today for the needs of tomorrow. It is the discovery and explanation, in terms of cause and effect, of this routine that constitutes, in the sense in which Lévy-Bruhl uses the term, rational thought.

What the author of primitive mentality means by “participation” is familiar enough, though the expression itself is unusual as description of a form of thought. Human beings may be said to know one another immediately and intuitively by “participation.” Knowledge of this kind is dependent, however, upon the ability of human beings to enter imaginatively into one another’s minds and to interpret overt acts in terms of intentions and purposes. What Lévy-Bruhl’s statement amounts to, then, is that savage people think, as poets have always done, in terms of wills rather than forces. The universe is a society of wilful personalities, not an irrefragable chain of cause and effect. For the savage, there are events, but neither hypotheses nor facts, since facts, in the strict sense of the word, are results of criticism and reflection and presuppose an amount of detachment that primitive man does not seem to possess. Because he thinks of his world as will rather than force, primitive man seeks to deal with it in terms of magic rather than of mechanism.

II. MAGIC AS A FORM OF THOUGHT

Thorndyke’s History of Magic is an account of the manner and circumstances under which, within the period it covers, not all at once, but gradually, first in one field of knowledge and practice, and then in another—haltingly, painfully, and step by step—the transition from magic to science was made.

Anthropologists have not always agreed as to the precise relation between magic and science. Is magic to be regarded as an earlier and more primitive form of science, or is it not? It is at least true that science, as means of control of the external world, has always found some form of magic in existence, and has always displaced it. But magic is probably never merely a tool or a technique which men use to control and fashion the world after their desire. It is primarily a form of emotional expression, a gesture, or dramatic performance. It has something, also, of the character of a prayer or solemn formulation of a wish, but always with the hope that in some—not quite intelligible—way the formulation of the wish will bring its own fulfilment. Magic ceases to interest us where the relation of the means to ends assumes the definiteness and certainty of a scientific demonstration.

Farmers in some parts of the country still pray for rain—at least they did so up to a few years ago. They will quit doing so, however, as soon as someone invents a sure-fire device for making it.^[64]

We still believe in magic in medicine and in politics—partly, I suspect, because in those fields science has not been able to give us the positive knowledge it has in other regions of our experience, and partly because in the field of medicine and of politics our solemn formulations of our wishes so frequently bring the results desired. In many cases the method of social reformers in dealing with social evils is not unlike the technique of Christian Science in dealing with bodily and spiritual ailments; it consists mainly in solemnly and ceremonially asserting that a given evil no longer exists. Society formulates its wish, consecrates it—through the solemn referendum of a popular election, perhaps—and writes it on the statute books. As far as the public is concerned, the thing is then finished. Fortunately, this form of magic often works—but unfortunately, it does not work so often as it used to.^[65]

What has been said indicates that magic may be regarded as a form of thought characteristic of, but not confined to, primitive—or what Professor Ellsworth Faris has called preliterate—man. It suggests, also, that primitive thought and primitive mentality are ordinarily associated with a definite organization of life and experience, perhaps even a definite economic organization of society. We all are disposed to think in magical terms in those regions of our experience that have not been rationalized, and where our control is uncertain and incomplete. The stock exchange and the golf course, where success is uncertain and fortuitous, all tend to breed their own superstition.

“Magic,” as Thorndyke says, “implies a mental state, and so may be viewed from the standpoint of the history of thought.” But magic, if it is a form of thought, is not science; neither is it art. The arts may be said to begin with the lower animals. But in the art with which the beaver constructs a dam and the bird builds a nest there is neither magic nor science.

We can best understand magic and its relation to science if we recall that thought is itself an interrupted act, “a delayed response” to use the language of the behaviorists. There is the impulse to act, which is interrupted by reflection, but eventually the impulse completes itself in action. Magic has the character of thought in so far as it is an impulse that is interrupted and so becomes conscious. But it is not rational thought because it does not foresee and seek to define the relation between the end it seeks and the means necessary to achieve that end. Between ends and means there is always a hiatus in which there is feeling but not clear intuition of how that end is to be achieved.

All human activities tend to assume the character of magic in so far as they become purely traditional and conventional, defined in some sacred formula piously transmitted. It is peculiarly characteristic of modern life, however, that all our inherited forms of behavior tend to become rationalized. It is characteristic of modern life that nothing is accepted merely on authority, every tradition is subject to criticism.

It is only in very recent years that we have achieved scientific agriculture and scientific cooking. On the other hand we have already scientific advertising and scientific “cheering.” “Yelling” at ball games, once so spontaneous, has now become an art, if not a duty.^[66]

The reason the modern man is a more rational animal than his more primitive ancestor is possibly because he lives in a city, where most of the interests and values of life have been rationalized, reduced to measurable units, and even made objects of barter and sale. In the city—and particularly in great cities—the external conditions of existence are so evidently contrived to meet man’s clearly recognized needs that the least intellectual of peoples are inevitably led to think in deterministic and mechanistic terms.

The embodiment of rational thought is the tool, the machine, in which all the parts are manifestly designed to achieve a perfectly intelligible end. The primitive man lives in a vastly different world, where all the forces about him are mysterious and uncontrollable, and where nature seems as wild, as romantic, and as unpredictable as his own changing moods. The primitive man has almost no machinery, and relatively few tools.

The mentality of the modern man, on the other hand, is based upon the machine and upon the application of science to all the interests of life—to education, to advertising, and, presently, perhaps, to politics. The culture of the modern man is characteristically urban, as distinguished from the folk culture, which rests on personal relations and direct participation in the common life of the family, the tribe, and the village community.

In fact, if we define them strictly, as Lévy-Bruhl seems to do, we may say that reason and reflective thinking were born in the city. They came, if not into existence, at least into vogue, in Athens, in the time of Socrates and the Sophists. The Sophists were, in fact, a distinctly urban phenomenon, and we owe to Socrates—who was one of them—the first clear recognition of conceptional, as distinguished from perceptional, knowledge. We owe to Plato, Socrates’ disciple, the definition of the most fundamental tool of modern scientific thought, namely, the concept, i.e., the Platonic idea.

Magic may be regarded, therefore, as an index, in a rough way, not merely of the mentality, but of the general cultural level of races, peoples, and classes. It is even possible that a more thoroughgoing analysis of the mental processes involved in magic and rational thought will permit us to measure the mentalities of social groups with as much precision, at least, as we now measure and grade—with the aid of the Binet-Simon tests—the intelligence of individuals. At least we should know in this case what we were measuring, namely, the extent and degree to which a given group or class had acquired the ability and the habit of thinking in rational rather than magical terms.

With a more precise conception of the nature of magic and of the mechanisms of pre-logical thinking, we shall, no doubt, be able not merely to compare and perhaps measure with a certain degree of accuracy and objectivity the mentality and cultural levels of different cultural groups, but we shall be able also to describe the process by which races and peoples make the transition from one cultural level to another. This transition, which Thorndyke has described in his history of magic, is everywhere in progress. These changes in a contemporary and living society are open and accessible to investigation, now that history has enabled us to see them, as they can never see them later, when they have become history.

In a recent paper in the American Journal of Sociology, Professor U. G. Weatherly has called attention to the advantages of the West Indies as a sociological laboratory.

Islands are peculiarly interesting sociologically, provided, of course, that they are inhabited. For one thing, they are physically defined. The island community is, for this reason, invariably isolated, geographically and socially, and because the means of communication are known, the extent of isolation can be reduced to relatively measurable terms.

This isolation tends to give to each separate island community an individuality that one rarely finds elsewhere. Because islands are geographically limited and isolated, the influence of climate and physiographic characteristics, as well as of economic organization, in defining cultural traits, can be estimated and assessed with greater accuracy than elsewhere. Until one has visited some of the Lesser Antilles, he is not likely to understand or appreciate Frederick A. Ober’s rather drastic summary of their history—“Discovered by the Spaniards, appropriated by the Dutch, Danish, or English, and finally abandoned to the semi-barbarous blacks from Africa, this has been the usual succession in the islands.”^[67]

The rather bitter note of this statement probably reflects the tone of the white planters, whose position in the islands has gradually declined since the emancipation of the slaves.

It directs attention, however, to what is, from the point of view of the student of human nature and of society, the most interesting and unique feature of the islands, namely, the racial situation. As Professor Weatherly has said, “Perhaps nowhere else is there a better opportunity for securing definite evidence bearing on the opposing theories of race and contact as factors in cultural growth.” Every island, in fact, is a separate racial melting-pot in which the mingled cultures and races of Europe, Africa, and Asia seem to be gradually, very gradually, simmering down to a single cultural, and eventually, also, to a single racial, blend.

IV. OBEAH: THE MAGIC OF THE BLACK MAN

Outside the Spanish Islands, Negroes are the dominant race in the West Indies. In regions where they have not been replaced by Hindus, as they have been in Trinidad and Demerara, British Guiana, they constitute 90 per cent of the population. They are, in fact, the only people who regard themselves as natives. The Asiatics and the Europeans are, for the most part, mere sojourners.

So far as the islands now have a native culture it is the culture of the Negro folk. It is, at the same time, the most characteristic manifestation of the mentality of the West Indian black man, so far as he has preserved what Lévy-Bruhl describes as the mentality of primitive man.

What is more interesting about obeah is that while as a practice and a belief it is universal among the uneducated classes of the black population in the islands, it is everywhere different, and everywhere in process of change. Practices that were originally imported from Africa tend to assimilate and fuse with related practices and traits of the European and Hindu cultures wherever the Africans have come into contact with them.

This is evident, in the first place, from the fact that the obeah man is not always a Negro; he may be, and not infrequently is, a Hindu. In the second place, the ritual of obeah may include anything from patent medicine to Guinea pepper. Among the instruments of obeah in the possession of the police of Trinidad recently were a stone image, evidently of Hindu origin, and a book of magic ritual published in Chicago, which pretended to be, and no doubt had been, translated originally from the writings of Albertus Magnus, the great medieval writer on magic. A book called Le Petit Albert is said to be extremely popular among obeah men in the French Islands.

The favorite decoctions in use among witch doctors consist of bones, ashes, “grave dirt,” human nail parings—mixed, perhaps, with asafetida or any other substance having a pungent odor. But in addition to these, obeah men in the West Indies use the candles, the little shrines, or “chapels,” as they call them, and various other portions of the ritual of the Catholic church.

In January, 1917, a woman known as Valentine Sims, a native of St. Lucia, was convicted, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, of obtaining money by the assumption of supernatural powers. The testimony in the case showed that, among other things, she attended the Roman Catholic church, and, on pretense of receiving holy communion, took the altar bread distributed to the worshipers during the communion, and used it in practicing obeah.

All this suggests that obeah, as one finds it in the West Indies, is not so much a tradition and a cultural inheritance as it is an innate predisposition, like a sense of humor, or “the will to believe,” as James describes it. Behind these practices, and supporting them, are all sorts of fears and a general sense of insecurity in regard to the physical and spiritual environment that more cultivated persons either do not feel, or they find escape from in quite different practices.

This is clearly indicated in the letters found among the papers of obeah adepts which have been confiscated from time to time by the police. From these letters one gains an insight into the nature and extent of the terrors, anxieties, and perils of the soul which trouble the dreams and imaginations of the black man, whom we ordinarily think of as roaming, cheerful, care-free, and unconcerned in a worried and troubled world.

The black man in the West Indies is greatly troubled about a great many things. He has more than the usual number of obscure pains and aches, which he worries about a great deal, and for which he, like most of us, is in search of some sovereign remedy. He is disturbed about his relations with his employer. Not that, like the workingman we know, he talks or thinks about his rights and the rights of labor. He is not class-conscious. Quite the contrary, he is constantly worried because he is not in favor with his employer. If he is scolded or scowled at, he is troubled. His first assumption, in such circumstances, is that some fellow-employee in some dark way is influencing his employer against him, and he seeks the obeah charm which will discover and circumvent his enemy and win back his employer’s good will.

If he gets into a quarrel with the family next door, if his sweetheart looks coldly upon him, if his wife deserts him, he inevitably assumes that there are personal and magical influences at work, seeking to undermine otherwise sweet and happy relations. Frequently he is right. At any rate the obeah man exploits these suspicions, and that is the reason strenuous efforts are being made in the British Islands to stamp the superstition out.

Visiting the police courts in the English islands, one is profoundly impressed by the patient efforts of most of the judges to discover and apply the rules of law to the petty personal and neighborhood difficulties that the natives are so fond of airing in the courts. One gets the impression that the most difficult thing for the primitive mind to conceive and administer for himself is justice. On the other hand, the Negro, at least, knows and appreciates justice when he meets it. That is probably one reason why he likes to take his troubles to court.

V. FASHIONS IN OBEAH

One gets the impression that there are fashions in obeah. Dominica, for example, is noted for its use of love-philters; in Montserrat, obeah is mainly a protection against evil spirits and a means of communication with the dead; in Antigua, obeah is most generally a form of medicine. Amulets, “guards,” as they are popularly called, intended to ward off evil spirits or protect one against the ill-will of an evil-minded neighbor are also popular. Nevis has a reputation for “black magic.”

The older generation of obeah men were supposed to have a knowledge of vegetable poisons the effects of which cannot be detected on postmortem. In Nevis the older tradition has apparently lingered longer than elsewhere. At any rate, magical practices seem to have assumed a more malignant form in Nevis than in some of the other islands.

In 1916 an old woman, Rose Eudelle, deaf and bedridden, was convicted of practicing obeah. She seems to have been one of the few witch doctors who believed sincerely in the efficacy of their own practices. She had a great reputation, and boasted that she had killed one man and sent another to the asylum. Curiously enough, she practiced obeah mainly through correspondence, and when she was finally arrested, some fifty letters from clients in various islands, one of them in New York City, were discovered. There was great excitement in Nevis when she was arrested. As she had solemnly threatened the colored police sergeant who arrested her, the whole black population was confidently expecting that some dramatic misfortune would overtake him. Here there seemed to be something more nearly approaching primitive and African magic than in any of the other thirty-eight cases of which I obtained some sort of record.

Not only is the fashion in obeah different in the different islands, but interest in magic, which is said to be declining everywhere, is less modified in some islands than in others. In Barbados, though the practices still persist, prosecutions for obeah have almost entirely ceased. In the police station at Castries, St. Lucia, on the other hand, there are still preserved the heart and hand of a Negro boy who was killed some years ago to furnish an obeah man with the instruments of magic to enable him to open the vaults of the local bank and rob it of the treasure which was supposed to be amassed there.

The fact is, then, that the mentality of the black population of the West Indies, as that of Africa, is changing under the influence of contact with the white man’s culture, and particularly under the influence of the very energetic prosecutions which not only have made the profession less profitable, but by undermining faith in his supernatural powers, have robbed the obeah man of the terror which he at one time inspired.

Aside from the superficial changes in the original superstition and the gradual decline of interest and belief in magic, it seems as if certain more fundamental changes, reflected in these practices, were taking place. First, the obeah man tends to become, on the one hand, a sort of unlicensed physician, as in the case of Percival Duval, an obeah man who maintained regular office hours, wrote prescriptions, and prescribed medicines. Actually, Duval seems to have used a little less medicine and a little more hocus pocus than the average medical practitioner in our own country did a few years ago. But he was convicted, and upon appeal to the higher court his conviction was confirmed. Another obeah man in St. John’s, Antigua, was found to be dealing, along with the other instruments of obeah, very largely in patent medicines and homely household remedies. Among the instruments of obeah taken from his office when it was raided were the following: (1) Exhibit labeled “ground bones and ashes.” The sample consisted of a mixture of a calcium compound and probably lime, wood-ashes, and incense. The incense content was 26.3 per cent. (2) Exhibit labeled “ground glass and smith coal.” This sample consisted of a coarse commercial oxygen mixture. (3) Yellow powder. This consisted of a cheap, scented starch powder. (4) Supposed dog’s tongue. This consisted entirely of vegetable matter composed principally of starch cells. (5) Exhibit labeled “ashes and incense.” The sample consisted of incense, wood-ashes, and charcoal, earth, and small pebbles, with a small proportion of oxygen mixture. It contained 17.3 per cent of incense in lump and powdered form. (6) Exhibit “vial with yellow liquid.” The sample consisted of ordinary commercial oil of anise. (7) Vial with brownish liquid. The sample consisted of a solution of iodine in potassium iodine of approximately 15 per cent strength.

The fact is, the obeah man in the West Indies is in a way to become a quack doctor. This represents one direction in which change is taking place.

On the other hand, there is a disposition of the obeah man to become a sort of confessor and privy counselor in all the intimate and personal affairs of the common people. The black people—and not only black, but occasionally Portuguese, who are the traders in the smaller islands—go to him with affairs of business and of the heart. They write him long personal letters, and he sends them a magical prayer or incantation to cure them of bodily ailments, to protect them from dangers of travel, and to insure general good fortune. In an affair of the heart, the witch doctor frequently prescribed a magic powder, sweetly scented, to accompany and lend a delicate and stimulating fragrance to a love letter. In principle, this aspect of the obeah man’s practice is like Mr. Coué’s—“Every day, in every way, I am better and better”—only that the uses of obeah are more specific. In any case, there is here a very evident tendency of the practice to assume a form in which the ritual of obeah is merely a device, like the prayers of primitive folk, for magically re-enforcing the expression of a wish. So closely are the magical practices of the obeah man connected—in the mind of the ordinary black man—with religion that in one case, at any rate, he pretended to cure a boy of insanity by making believe that he was operating as the agent or proxy of the priest.

This, then, represents a second tendency to change in the practices of magic by the black man. If obeah in some instances seems to be taking the form of popular medicine, in others it tends to assume the form of a pagan religious ceremony, adapting itself to the forms and the ritual of the local church.

VI. THE PROBLEM STATED

In a recent volume, Studies in Human Nature, Mr. J. B. Baillie has suggested that the disposition and the ability to think abstractly, disinterestedly, and scientifically is not only a relatively recent acquisition of the human race, but at the same time is a local phenomenon.

This geographical limitation of science is indeed a remarkable fact, the importance of which our familiarity with the scientific mood and our insularity of mind constantly tend to obscure.... We should not forget that millions of human beings have no interest in the scientific mood at all, and seem by constitution to have no capacity for it.... Some individuals among these nonscientific peoples may, and do, assimilate the science of the West. But experience seems to show that such acquisition is at best a mere accomplishment, and leaves the racial structure and composition of their minds unaffected.... The nonscientific peoples take up science as they put on Western clothes. One may change one’s clothes, but there is no changing the skin. The fact is that the scientific mood arises from a peculiar attitude of the mind to the world found amongst certain peoples of the globe; and without this attitude science will always appear a curiosity or an irrelevance.^[68]

The author assumes that the disposition to think rationally and to cultivate abstract and scientific thought is a racial attribute. Perhaps a more accurate statement of the matter would take account of the fact that even within the comparatively limited area where science is in vogue, there are large numbers of people who still—even while using the language of science—think in the more elementary forms of folk-thought. This seems to be true wherever large masses of the population are still illiterate, or where, for any reason, even when able to read, they habitually think in terms of the spoken language, rather than in the language of the printed page. Literacy itself is very largely a product of modern city life. Books and reading which used to be, and to a certain extent are yet, a luxury in the country, become a necessity in the city.

The Negroes migrating in such large numbers from the West Indies to the United States are bringing with them habits of thought which have largely disappeared among the Negro population native to this country. The obeah men of the West Indies have many clients in the United States, and a recent issue of the New York Age announced that the Negro quarter around 135th Street, New York, was overrun with fortune tellers and witch doctors, many or most of them from the West Indies.

Within a few years, however, most of these superstitions will have disappeared, or at any rate will have assumed those more conventional forms with which we are familiar and have learned to tolerate. This is certainly true of the city population.

Great changes are taking place, with the introduction of modern methods of education, in our own insular possessions. Mr. Axel Holst, of the National Bank of the Danish West Indies, who has been a close and assiduous student of Negro folklore in the Virgin Islands, says that the effect of the American system of education will within a few years totally change the mental habits of the natives of St. Thomas. Since the younger generation have begun to read books, they are not so interested as they were in the Nansi stories, which correspond to the Bre’r Rabbit stories of the States. Since the introduction of American rule, newspapers have come into vogue, and the young men have taken to political discussion.

The changes in the “mentality” of the Negro population are, Mr. Holst says, going on visibly, and at a surprising rate. These changes, if they are actually taking place, should be made the subject of further investigation. Such study should enable us to determine, among other things, more precisely than we have been able to determine hitherto, the rôle which cultural contacts, social heritages, and racial temperament play in the whole cultural process.

It is evident that we are not to assume, as otherwise we might, that there is no area of the experience in which primitive or preliterate people think realistically and rationally. On the other hand, in contrasting primitive mentality with that of civilized man, we need not assume—except for the sake of the contrast—that the thinking of civilized man is always and everywhere either rational or scientific. As a matter of fact, there are still wide areas of our experience that have not as yet been fully rationalized, notably the fields of medicine and religion. In medicine, at least—if we are to believe a recent medical critic of what, in imitation of Lévy-Bruhl, we might call “medical mentality”—the majority of practitioners still think of diseases as morbid entities instead of convenient labels for groups of symptoms.

The following paragraph from a recent writer states the matter from the point of view of a critic of “medical mentality.”

It is not to be thought that any educated medical man indeed believes “a disease” to be a material thing, although the phraseology in current use lends colour to such supposition. Nevertheless, in hospital jargon, “diseases” are “morbid entities,” and medical students fondly believe that these “entities” somehow exist in rebus Naturae and were discovered by their teachers, much as was America by Columbus.... In fact, for these gentlemen “diseases” are Platonic realities; universals ante rem. This unavowed belief, which might be condoned were it frankly admitted, is an inheritance from Galen, and carries with it the corollary that our notions concerning this, that, or the other “diseases” are either absolutely right or absolutely wrong, and are not merely matters of mental convenience.

But if the practitioners think of diseases in pre-logical terms what can we expect of the layman, whose medical education has been largely confined to the reading of patent medical advertisements? What has been said suggests a problem which may be perhaps stated in this way: How far is the existence of magic and magical mode of thought a measure of the mentality of a racial or cultural group in which it is found to persist? How far is what Ballie calls “the scientific mood” an effect of the urban environment?