In reasoning by induction, the greater the number of facts taken into account, the greater the probability of sound reasoning; and therefore the greater the number of facts a theory will explain, the more likely it is to be true. Had Liebrecht's theory touched only the Swan-maiden group, it would have been more convenient to discuss it in the last chapter. But inasmuch as its truth would involve much wider issues, it seemed better to reserve it to be dealt with here. For if the theory be valid for Melusina, the Lady of the Van Pool, and other water-nymphs, it is valid also for the "water-woman" who, in a Transylvanian story, dwelt in a lake in the forest between Mehburg and Reps. She had two sons, whose father was a man, and the younger of whom became king of that land. But when the Saxon immigration took place the incomers cut down the wood; the lake dried up, and as it dried up, the lives of the water-spirit and her son gradually sank lower and lower, and at last were extinguished with the extinction of the lake.[244] Now I will venture to say that this story is to be explained satisfactorily on no theory yet broached, unless it be the theory that we have in it a survival of the savage doctrine of Spirits. Least of all it is to be explained by any adaptation of what I may call the Ghost theory,--namely, that the water-spirit and her son were already the spirits of dead human beings.
Leaving this one example of the value of Liebrecht's theory, as applied to water-spirits, to stand for all, I turn to another order of beings with supernatural powers referred to several times in the foregoing pages: I mean Witches. I adduced in Chapter X. a Tirolese tale, a variant of the Melusina type, wherein the wife was a witch. It will have been obvious to every reader that the tale is simply that of Cupid and Psyche with the parts reversed; and I might urge that Cupid and the witch were beings of precisely the same nature. Waiving this for the moment, however, no one will deny that the witch takes the place of the Swan-maiden, or fairy, in other stories of the group. But perhaps it may be suggested that the name _witch_ (_Angana_, _Hexe_) has got into the story by accident; and that not a witch in our sense of the word, but a ghost from the dead, is really meant. There might be something to be said for this if there were any substantial distinction to be made between ghosts and witches and fairies. In the tales and superstitions discussed in the present volume we have found no distinction. Whether it be child-stealing, transformation, midnight meetings, possession and gift of enchanted objects, spell-binding, or whatever function, or habit, or power be predicted of one, it will be found to be common to the three. I conclude, therefore, that they are all three of the same nature. This is what a consideration of the superstitions of savages would lead me to expect. The belief in fairies, ghosts, and witches is a survival of those superstitions. It is, of course, not found in equal coherence, equal strength of all its parts, equal logic (if I may so express it) everywhere. We must not be surprised if, as it is gradually penetrated by the growing forces of civilization, it becomes fragmentary, and the attributes of these various orders of supernatural beings begin to be differentiated. They are never completely so; and the proof of this is that what is at one place, at one time, or by one people, ascribed to one order, is at another place, at another time, or by another people, ascribed to another order. The nature of the classical deities was identical too; and hence Cupid and the witch of the Tirolese tale are the masculine and feminine counterparts of the same conception.