INTRODUCTORY

...influences, so (as anthropology assures us) primitive peoples original: "savages" everywhere have inferred the existence of a soul or spirit—an intelligence that:

‘Does not know the bond of Time,
Nor wear the manacles of Space,’

in part from certain apparently trivial phenomena of human faculty. These phenomena, as Mr. Tylor says, ‘the great intellectual movement of the last two centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless.’¹ I refer to alleged experiences—merely odd, sporadic, and, for commercial purposes, useless—such as the transference of thought from one mind to another by no known channel of sense, the occurrence of hallucinations which, at first glance original: "prima facie", correspond coincidentally with unknown events at a distance, all that is called ‘second sight’ or ‘clairvoyance,’ and other things even more obscure. Reasoning on these real or alleged phenomena, and on other quite normal and accepted facts of dreams, shadows, sleep, trance, and death, primitive peoples original: "savages" have inferred the existence of a spirit or soul, exactly as the Northern Indians arrived at the notion of electricity (not so called by them, of course) as the cause of the Aurora Borealis. But, just as the Indians thought that the cosmic lights were caused by the rubbing together of crowded deer in the heavens (a theory that is quite childishly absurd), so the primitive person original: "savage" has expressed his conclusion about the existence of spirit in unrefined and fantastic ways. He believes in wandering, separable souls of men that survive death, and he has peopled the whole inanimate universe with his dreams.

My suggestion is that, in spite of his fantasies, the primitive person original: "savage" had possibly drawn from his premises an inference that was not wholly, or at least not demonstrably, erroneous. Just as the sparks from the deer-skin indicated electricity, so the strange lights in the night of human nature may indicate faculties...

¹ Primitive Culture, vol. 1, p. 156. London, 1891.