Scottish Folk-Lore - William Scott
Scottish Folk-Lore - William Scott [1918] Contents - I. Preliminary - II. Amphibious Fairies - III. Elves and Gnomes - IV. Magicians - V. Men of the Second Sight ------------- I. Preliminary What is 'Folk-lore'? To some minds it is almost identical with superstition; because it consists largely of the mysterious doings of the fantastic people of Fairyland. But what is superstition? To many persons it means a belief in Beings and powers that do not exist. Let this be granted, then there are two kinds of superstitionists - a positive and a negative, i.e., those who believe that things and creatures have been created, and are sustained by numerous intelligent Beings, such as Gods, Angels, Demons, et al., who exist only in the imaginations of the credulous; and those who believe that all things have been created, and are sustained by numerous unintelligent Powers and Abstractions or Negations, such as Motion, Gravitation, Evolution, Struggle-for-Existence, Survival-of-the-Fittest, etc., etc. These are all names for phenomena of Nature, but the name of an appearance is the name of a pure abstraction or negation, which has no existence of its own, apart from the agency which produces the phenomenon. No observation can become possible without at least four factors - the agent, the medium, the action, and the observer. The agent, or actor, is always unseen; the visible body which it uses is the medium; the movement of the used medium is the action; and the one who sees the action is the observer. The action is a pure abstraction or negation, which has no existence, per se, apart from the agent and the medium.
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