Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

x] Holophrase and Holopsychosis 473
produce a dairnon-functionary, as little individualized as may be,
you must crown a king. The reason is clear, the king, the
daimon-functionary, is the utterance of the group and each
individual in the group claims him as in part himself.
The highly personalized, individualized god is fashioned on
the highly personalized, individualized self, and the essence of the
sense of self is separateness 1 ,
one self from other selves 2 ,
or consciousness of the severance of
and of that self as subject and distinct
from objects. Now primitive consciousness for the most part lacks
this sense of segregation, because it is mainly absorbed in activities,
in 'doing things.' The things of which the savage is mainly
conscious are not envisaged as external objects, they are parts of
his doing, of his ' warm stream of human consciousness.' We
have already 3 seen this in the case of weapons and tools which
are felt as extensions of personality. Your stick is part of your
act of brandishing, or of your sense of walking. You are not
conscious of it as a stick till you let it fall. The sense of action,
of relation, is vivid and submerges subject and object. This comes
out very clearly in certain aspects of primitive language.
It used to be thought that language began with nouns, the
names of things, to which later were added qualifying adjectives.
Still later, it was held, these separate nouns were joined by verbs
expressing relations between subject and object, and these again
were qualified by adverbs. Modern linguistic tells quite another
and, for psychology and primitive religion, a very instructive
tale. Language, after the purely emotional interjection, began
with whole sentences, holoplirases 4
, utterances of a relation in
1 See supra, p. 86. Separateness, individuality, is a characteristic of life, but it
is eternally combated by the tendency to reproduce other life which prevents com-
plete individuality. See Prof. Bergson, UEvolution Creatrice, p. 14, 'on peut dire
que si la tendance a s'individuer est partout presente dans le monde organise, elle
est partout combattue par la tendance a se reproduire.' Hence the Eniautos-daimon
resisted complete individualization.
- The correlative of this, the process of individualizing the soul, is very clearly
stated by M. Levy-Bruhl in his Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Societes Inferieures,
l'individu humain prend une conscience claire de lui-meine en tant
p. 430, ' Quand
qu'individu, quand il se distingue formellement du groupe auquel il se sent appartenir,
alors les 6tres et les objets exterieurs commencent aussi a lui apparaitre
comme pourvus d'ames ou d'esprits individuels, duraut cette vie et apres la niort.'
'
4
Supra, p. 86.
For this illustration from language I am indebted to Mr E. J. Payne's sections
on language in his History of the New World, 1899, vol. n. p. 114 ff. In the discussion
of personalization that follows from it I owe much to Mr Crawley's Idea
of the Soul, 1909, p. 35.