Note 3 — Chapter III · RELIGIOUS AND MAGICAL BELIEFS

The hypothesis that seems to be most usually adopted by English writers on anthropology is that the beliefs of savage peoples are due to attempts on the part of primitive man to explain to himself the phenomena of life and nature. The student of human customs, examining his own mind, finds that one of the motives most constantly present in his consciousness is the desire to understand, to explain—in other words what we call scientific curiosity. He concludes that this motive is equally insistent in the mind of primitive man. Thus he supposes that primitive man, wishing to explain the phenomena of death and of sleep and dreams, framed a hypothesis that every man possesses a soul or spiritual double3. The hypothesis, once formulated, is supposed to have been accepted and believed because it satisfied this need of comprehension. On this view the belief in a soul (animism) is exactly similar in character to the scientific belief in atoms, let us say. The same general hypothesis appears in the explanation of totemism as having arisen as a theory invented by primitive man in order to explain the phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth4.