A white marble sarcophagus occupies the centre of one of the rooms on the basement of the Capitoline Museum in Rome. The cover has been taken off and a sheet of glass fastened over the coffin, so that one can look in. The sarcophagus contains the bones and dust of a little girl. Her ornaments, the flowers that wreathed the poor little head, are all there, and by the side is the child’s wooden doll, precisely like the dolls made and sold to-day.

In the catacomb of St. Agnes one end of a passage is given up to form a museum of the objects found in the tombs of the early Christians, and among these are some very similar dolls, taken out of the graves of Christian children. It was very natural that the parents, whether Pagan or Christian, should put the toys of their dear ones into the last resting-place with them, not with the idea that they would want them to play with in the world beyond the veil, but because the sight of these dolls would rouse painful thoughts, and bring tears into the eyes of the mourners whenever come across in some old cupboard or on some shelf.

Of the greatest interest to the student of mankind are the deposits some 40 ft. deep at La Laugerie on the banks of the VÉzÈre in Dordogne. Here at the close of the glacial period lived the primeval inhabitants of France, at the time of the cave lion, reindeer, and mammoth. That race knew nothing of the potter’s art. The reindeer hunter was, however, rarely endowed with the artistic faculty, and numerous sketches by him on ivory and bone remain to testify to his appreciation of beauty of animal form. One day a workman turned up a doll carved in ivory beside one of the hearths of this primeval man. He secreted and sold it, being under a bond to deliver all such finds to the proprietor of the land. A fellow-workman betrayed him, and he was obliged to pay back the money he had received and take the doll to M. de Vibraye, to whom it was due. In a rage he said, “Anyhow, he shall not have it perfect,” and he knocked off the head. In the accompanying sketch the head is conjecturally restored. The arms were broken off when discovered, if there ever had been arms, which is uncertain.

Was this a child’s toy or an idol of adults? Probably the former. On some of the engraved bones of the reindeer have been found sketches of singular objects which bear more resemblance to fetishes, or the images made and venerated by Ostjaks and Samojeds, than any thing else. With the savage, as with the child, that doll receives most regard which is most inartistic, for it allows greater scope for the imagination to play about it. The favourite miraculous images are invariably the rudest.

In one of the Bruges churches is a beautiful Virgin and Child in white marble, one of the few refined and beautiful things that Michael Angelo’s hand turned out. But this lovely group does not attract worshippers, who will be found clustered about, offering their candles, hanging up silver hearts about a little monstrosity with a black face, and neither shape nor limbs.

Whosoever has little children of his own can learn a great deal from them relative to the early stages of civilisation of mankind. Every race of men that has not been given revelation from above has passed through a period of intellectual and spiritual infancy, and though men grew to be adults, they never grew out of the thoughts of a child relative to what was beyond their immediate sensible appreciation.

I knew a case of a woman of fifty who insisted that a certain river changed the colour of its water as it flowed in one place under the shadow of a wood, there it turned black, in another part of its course it was white. To the intelligent mind it was obvious enough that the water remained unaltered, but that it looked dark where the shadows cut off the light from the sky. No amount of reasoning could convince the woman that the water itself did not change its colour from black to white. She thought as a child, and was incapable of thinking otherwise.

Now observe a little child playing with a doll. It does not regard the doll as a symbol, a representation of a man or babe, it treats it as a creature endowed with an individuality and a life of its own. It talks to it, it feeds it, it puts it to bed, it conjures up a whole world of history connected with it. It believes the doll to be sensible to pain, and will cry to see it beaten. The doll is to it as real a person as one of its playmates.

Now take a savage and his idol. The idol to him is precisely what the doll is to the child. It thinks, it eats, it suffers, it is happy. It requires clothes, it is subject to the same passions as the savage. When a heathen people has advanced to regard an image as the symbol of a deity, it has mounted to a higher intellectual plane; it has stepped from the mental condition of a child of five to that of one of twelve. If we want to see what are the thoughts of a savage, who is in the earliest stage relative to his idol, we must go to the Ostjak or Samojed on the Siberian tundra, or to the negro in Central Africa. The Greek, the Roman, the Egyptian were long past that stage when they become known to us through history and their monumental remains. Their images were symbols, and not properly idols, though there always remained among them individuals, perhaps whole strata of people, whose intellectual appreciation of the images was that of babes. This is not marvellous, for human progress is always subject to this check, that every individual born into the world enters, as to his intellectual state, in the condition of the earliest savage, and has to run through in a few years what races have taken centuries to accomplish. Where this is the case, and it is the case everywhere, there will ever be individuals, perhaps whole classes, whose mental development will suffer arrest at points lower than that attained by the general bulk of the men and women among whom they move.

Even in our own country, the most low and to us inconceivable ideas relative to God may be found among the ignorant. If I tell a story it is not to raise a laugh, but to lift a corner of the veil which covers these dull minds, to show how little they have reached the level to which we have ascended.

A middle-aged man declared to the parson of his parish that he had seen and spoken with the Almighty. He was asked what He was like. He replied that He was dressed in a black swallow-tailed coat of the very best broadcloth and wore a white tie. This was said with perfect gravity, and with intense earnestness of conviction. His highest conception of the Deity was that of a gentleman dressed for a dinner party. Anyone who has had dealings in spiritual matters with the ignorant will be able to cap such a story. This is not to be taken as laughing matter, but as a revelation of a condition of mind to us scarcely intelligible. I feel some hesitation in repeating the incident, but do so because I do not see in what other way I can make those who have not been in communication with the very ignorant understand the full depth of their ignorance.

Now let us look at the ideas that those of a low mental condition among the savage races have relative to their idols. I will take the instance of the Ostjaks and Samojeds. The latter have their Hakes. They are figures—sometimes only bits of root of tree or wood that have a distant resemblance to the human form, or some unusual shape. Every family has its Hake—sometimes has several. These are wrapped up in coloured rags, given necklaces and bangles, and a tent or apartment to themselves. They have their own sledge, the haken-gan, and following after a Samojed family, on its journey from one camping place to another, may be seen a load of these unsightly dolls in their sledge. If some figure out of the usual, in wood or stone, attracts general attention, and is too big to be carried about, it is regarded as the hake of a whole tribe. These images are provided with food. Family affairs are communicated to them, and they are supposed to rejoice with domestic joys, and lament family losses.

When their help is required, offerings are made to them, but if the desired help be not given, the hake gets scolded, refused his food, and sometimes is kicked out into the snow. The face of the hake, or what serves as face, is smeared with reindeer blood. It is the same with the Ostjaks. Their idols are dressed in scarlet, furnished with weapons, and their faces smeared with ochre. They are called Jitjan. “Often,” says CastrÉn, “each of these figures has its special office. One is supposed to protect the reindeers, another to help in the fishery, another to care for the health of the family, etc. When need arrives, the figures are drawn forth and set up in a tent at the reindeer pastures, the hunting or fishing grounds. They are presented with sacrifices now and then, which consist in smearing their lips with train oil or blood, and putting before them a vessel with fish or meat.”[26]

It is very much the same thing with the negro, who stands on the same intellectual level as the Siberian savage. His fetish is anything out of the way—a strangely-shaped stone or bit of bone, a bunch of feathers, a doll, anything about which his imagination may work, and his reason remain torpid.

I have watched a little boy of six play with a piece of ash twig. I drew it, and noted what his proceedings were. He had picked up this twig, and suddenly exclaimed, “I have found a horse. It is lying down. Get up, horse! Get up!” He took it to some grass to make it eat, then went with it to a pond, and made it drink. There the twig fell in, and he cried out that the horse was swimming. I picked out the twig for him. Presently, by throwing it into the air, he found that his horse could fly. Finally, he set to work to build a stable, and furnish it for his horse.

I had been reading CastrÉn’s account of the hakes and jitjan at the time, and under my eyes was a child doing with a bit of stick exactly what a Turanian nomad of full age does now, and has done for thousands of years. In two or three years this boy’s mind will have expanded, and his reason have got in the saddle, and will hold in the imaginative faculty with bit and bridle, and then he will cease to see horses in ash twigs; but the wanderers on the Asiatic tundras have never got beyond the stage of an English child of six and never will.

I quote a passage from “The Beggynhof; or, City of the Single,” to show how that it is possible for a tolerably-educated, religious Belgian of the present day to stand at the same point as that of a child of six, and of an Ostjak savage.

“St. Anthony is a favourite saint with the good, holy, simple-minded Beguines; but woe betide him if he refuse his powerful intercession. I once saw a poor little statuette of this domestic saint left outside on the window-sill when the snow lay deep on the ground. On inquiring why it did not occupy its place on the mantelshelf, I was told that the saint had been refractory; that the Beguine who occupied that room had been very patient and forbearing for some days, but that, finding gentleness had no effect in obtaining what she wanted, she now thought herself justified in trying what effect punishment would have, so she had turned the effigy of the rebellious saint out into the snow, and sat with her back towards it, that her patron might understand she did not intend to address him again until he granted her his protection and influence.”[27] Precisely in like manner, when Germanicus died, did the rabble of Rome pelt the temples and statues of the gods with mud and stones, because they had failed to hear their prayers for the recovery of their beloved prince.

We all of us pass through this stage of intellectual and spiritual growth, except a few who never get beyond it. It is said of the negro that as a child he is clever and bright, but that he never attains the mental condition of an European of fifteen. But there are men and women among us who, in certain matters, never get beyond the condition of mind of a child of six. We may be shocked at this, but we cannot help it; they are so constituted—something in their cranial structure, or some natural deficiency in mental vigour is the occasion of this. In religious matters they cannot get beyond Fetishism; and if we deny them that, we deny them all religious comfort and worship. Sometimes, through some accident, a leg or an arm gets diseased, whereas the rest of the body grows; so is it with the mind—certain faculties get diseased, perhaps the reasoning power, and then the imagination runs riot.

To an ordinary cultured Pagan of Rome, or Greece, or Egypt, idolatry was impossible. The gods, figured in marble and bronze, were to them symbols and nothing else, precisely as to us the letters of the alphabet are symbols of certain sounds, and the pictographic characters of cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing were anciently symbols of certain ideas. So also idolatry is absolutely impossible to anyone who has gone through the elements of modern education. Religious statues and pictures are historic representations of personages and events in the sacred story, but to look upon them with the eyes of an Ostjak or a child of six is a psychological impossibility, except only for such as are mentally stunted like the Beguine of Ghent. It is, therefore, without the smallest scruple that we can employ imagery in our churches, knowing that the possibility of misusing it is gone past reversion to it in nine hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand, and that the thousandth person who would misuse it is incapable of any other religious exercise, and it were better that he had some religious conceptions, however low these were, than none at all.

To draw this moral has not been my object in penning this article, but to direct the attention of the intelligent to the nursery, and show them how that the elements for the study of primitive culture, the means of following the development of ideas in man are to be found wherever there are little children.