existence of these barbaric parallels to our modern problems of this kind.
But his interest in them practically ends when he has shown that the
phenomena helped to originate the savage belief in 'spirits,' and when he
has displayed the 'survival' of that belief in later culture. He does not
ask 'Are the phenomena real?' he is concerned only with the savage
philosophy of the phenomena and with its relics in modern spiritism and
religion. My purpose is to do, by way only of _ébauche_, what neither
anthropology nor psychical research nor psychology has done: to put the
savage and modern phenomena side by side. Such evidence as we can give for
the actuality of the modern experiences will, so far as it goes, raise a
presumption that the savage beliefs, however erroneous, however darkened
by fraud and fancy, repose on a basis of real observation of actual
phenomena.
Anthropology is concerned with man and what is in man--_humani nihil
a se alienum putat_. These researches, therefore, are within the
anthropological province, especially as they bear on the prevalent
anthropological theory of the Origin of Religion. By 'religion' we mean,
for the purpose of this argument, the belief in the existence of an
Intelligence, or Intelligences not human, and not dependent on a material
mechanism of brain and nerves, which may, or may not, powerfully control
men's fortunes and the nature of things. We also mean the additional
belief that there is, in man, an element so far kindred to these
Intelligences that it can transcend the knowledge obtained through the
known bodily senses, and may possibly survive the death of the body. These
two beliefs at present (though not necessarily in their origin) appear
chiefly as the faith in God and in the Immortality of the Soul.
It is important, then, to trace, if possible, the origin of these two
beliefs. If they arose in actual communion with Deity (as the first at
least did, in the theory of the Hebrew Scriptures), or if they could be
proved to arise in an unanalysable _sensus numinis_, or even in 'a
perception of the Infinite' (Max Müller), religion would have a divine, or
at least a necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevitable cannot but
be divinely ordained, therefore religion is divinely preordained,
therefore, in essentials, though not in accidental details, religion is
true. The atheist, or non-theist, of course draws no such inferences.
But if religion, as now understood among men, be the latest evolutionary
form of a series of mistakes, fallacies, and illusions, if its germ be a
blunder, and its present form only the result of progressive but
unessential refinements on that blunder, the inference that religion is
untrue--that nothing actual corresponds to its hypothesis--is very easily
drawn. The inference is not, perhaps, logical, for all our science itself
is the result of progressive refinements upon hypotheses originally
erroneous, fashioned to explain facts misconceived. Yet our science is
true, within its limits, though very far from being exhaustive of the
truth. In the same way, it might be argued, our religion, even granting
that it arose out of primitive fallacies and false hypotheses, may yet
have been refined, as science has been, through a multitude of causes,
into an approximate truth.
Frequently as I am compelled to differ from Mr. Spencer both as to facts
and their interpretation, I am happy to find that he has anticipated me
here. Opponents will urge, he says, that 'if the primitive belief' (in
ghosts) 'was absolutely false, all derived beliefs from it must be
absolutely false?' Mr. Spencer replies: 'A germ of truth was contained in
the primitive conception--the truth, namely, that the power which
manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of
the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness.' In fact, we find
Mr. Spencer, like Faust as described by Marguerite, saying much the same
thing as the priests, but not quite in the same way. Of course, I allow
for a much larger 'germ of truth' in the origin of the ghost theory than
Mr. Spencer does. But we can both say 'the ultimate form of the religious
consciousness is' (will be?) 'the final development of a consciousness
which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous
errors.'[8]
'One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.'
Coming at last to Mr. Tylor, we find that he begins by dismissing the idea
that any known race of men is devoid of religious conceptions. He
disproves, out of their own mouths, the allegations of several writers who
have made this exploded assertion about 'godless tribes.' He says:
'The thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to
intellectual clues which run back through far pre-Christian ages to the
very origin of human civilisation, _perhaps even of human existence_.'[9]
So far we abound in Mr. Tylor's sense. 'As a minimum definition of
religion' he gives 'the belief in spiritual beings,' which appears
'among all low races with whom we have attained to thoroughly intimate
relations.' The existence of this belief at present does not prove that no
races were ever, at any time, destitute of all belief. But it prevents us
from positing the existence of such creedless races, in any age, as a
demonstrated fact. We have thus, in short, no opportunity of observing,
_historically_, man's development from blank unbelief into even the
minimum or most rudimentary form of belief. We can only theorise and make
more or less plausible conjectures as to the first rudiments of human
faith in God and in spiritual beings. We find no race whose mind, as to
faith, is a _tabula rasa_.
To the earliest faith Mr. Tylor gives the name of _Animism_, a term not
wholly free from objection, though 'Spiritualism' is still less desirable,
having been usurped by a form of modern superstitiousness. This Animism,
'in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future
state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits.' In Mr. Tylor's
opinion, as in Mr. Huxley's, Animism, in its lower (and earlier) forms,
has scarcely any connection with ethics. Its 'spirits' do not 'make for
righteousness.' This is a side issue to be examined later, but we may
provisionally observe, in passing, that the ethical ideas, such as they
are, even of Australian blacks are reported to be inculcated at the
religious mysteries (_Bora_) of the tribes, which were instituted by and
are performed in honour of the gods of their native belief. But this topic
must be reserved for our closing chapters.
Mr. Tylor, however, is chiefly concerned with Animism as 'an ancient and
world-wide philosophy, of which belief is the theory, and worship is the
practice.' Given Animism, then, or the belief in spiritual beings, as the
earliest form and minimum of religious faith, what is the origin of
Animism? It will be seen that, by Animism, Mr. Tylor does not mean the
alleged early theory, implicitly if not explicitly and consciously held,
that all things whatsoever are animated and are personalities.[10] Judging
from the behaviour of little children, and from the myths of savages,
early man may have half-consciously extended his own sense of personal and
potent and animated existence to the whole of nature as known to him. Not
only animals, but vegetables and inorganic objects, may have been looked
on by him as persons, like what he felt himself to be. The child (perhaps
merely because _taught_ to do so) beats the naughty chair, and all objects
are persons in early mythology. But this _feeling_, rather than theory,
may conceivably have existed among early men, before they developed the
hypothesis of 'spirits,' 'ghosts,' or souls. It is the origin of _that_
hypothesis, 'Animism,' which Mr. Tylor investigates.
What, then, is the origin of Animism? It arose in the earliest traceable
speculations on 'two groups of biological problems:
(1) 'What is it that makes the difference between a living body and a
dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death?'
(2) 'What are those human shapes which appear in dreams and
visions?'[11]
Here it should be noted that Mr. Tylor most properly takes a distinction
between sleeping 'dreams' and waking 'visions,' or 'clear vision.' The
distinction is made even by the blacks of Australia. Thus one of the
Kurnai announced that his _Yambo_, or soul, could 'go out' during sleep,
and see the distant and the dead. But 'while any one might be able to
communicate with the ghosts, _during sleep_, it was only the wizards who
were able to do so in waking hours.' A wizard, in fact, is a person
susceptible (or feigning to be susceptible) when awake to hallucinatory
perceptions of phantasms of the dead. 'Among the Kulin of Wimmera River a
man became a wizard who, as a boy, had seen his mother's ghost sitting at
her grave.'[12] These facts prove that a race of savages at the bottom of
the scale of culture do take a formal distinction between normal dreams in
sleep and waking hallucinations--a thing apt to be denied.
Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer offers the massive generalisation that savages do
not possess a language enabling a man to say 'I dreamed that I saw,'
instead of 'I saw' ('Principles of Sociology,' p. 150). This could only be
proved by giving examples of such highly deficient languages, which Mr.
Spencer does not do.[13] In many savage speculations there occur ideas as
subtly metaphysical as those of Hegel. Moreover, even the Australian
languages have the verb 'to see,' and the substantive 'sleep.' Nothing,
then, prevents a man from saying 'I saw in sleep' (_insomnium_,
[Greek: enupnion]).
We have shown too, that the Australians take an essential distinction
between waking hallucinations (ghosts seen by a man when awake) and the
common hallucinations of slumber. Anybody can have these; the man who sees
ghosts when awake is marked out for a wizard.
At the same time the vividness of dreams among certain savages, as
recorded in Mr. Im Thurn's 'Indians of Guiana,' and the consequent
confusion of dreaming and waking experiences, are certain facts. Wilson
says the same of some negroes, and Mr. Spencer illustrates from the
confusion of mind in dreamy children. They, we know, are much more
addicted to somnambulism than grown-up people. I am unaware that
spontaneous somnambulism among savages has been studied as it ought to be.
I have demonstrated, however, that very low savages can and do draw an
essential distinction between sleeping and waking hallucinations.
Again, the crystal-gazer, whose apparently telepathic crystal pictures are
discussed later (chap. v.), was introduced to a crystal just because she
had previously been known to be susceptible to waking and occasionally
veracious hallucinations.
It was not only on the dreams of sleep, so easily forgotten as they are,
that the savage pondered, in his early speculations about the life and the
soul. He included in his materials the much more striking and memorable
experiences of waking hours, as we and Mr. Tylor agree in holding.
Reflecting on these things, the earliest savage reasoners would decide:
(1) that man has a 'life' (which leaves him temporarily in sleep, finally
in death); (2) that man also possesses a 'phantom' (which appears to
other people in their visions and dreams). The savage philosopher would
then 'combine his information,' like a celebrated writer on Chinese
metaphysics. He would merely 'combine the life and the phantom,' as
'manifestations of one and the same soul.' The result would be 'an
apparitional soul,' or 'ghost-soul.'
This ghost-soul would be a highly accomplished creature, 'a vapour, film,
or shadow,' yet conscious, capable of leaving the body, mostly invisible
and impalpable, 'yet also manifesting physical power,' existing and
appearing after the death of the body, able to act on the bodies of other
men, beasts, and things.[14]
When the earliest reasoners, in an age and in mental conditions of which
we know nothing historically, had evolved the hypothesis of this
conscious, powerful, separable soul, capable of surviving the death of the
body, it was not difficult for them to develop the rest of Religion, as
Mr. Tylor thinks. A powerful ghost of a dead man might thrive till, its
original owner being long forgotten, it became a God. Again (souls once
given) it would not be a very difficult logical leap, perhaps, to conceive
of souls, or spirits, that had never been human at all. It is, we may say,
only _le premier pas qui coûte_, the step to the belief in a surviving
separable soul. Nevertheless, when we remember that Mr. Tylor is
theorising about savages in the dim background of human evolution, savages
whom we know nothing of by experience, savages far behind Australians and
Bushmen (who possess Gods), we must admit that he credits them with great
ingenuity, and strong powers of abstract reasoning. He may be right in his
opinion. In the same way, just as primitive men were keen reasoners, so
early bees, more clever than modern bees, may have evolved the system of
hexagonal cells, and only an early fish of genius could first have hit
on the plan, now hereditary of killing a fly by blowing water at it.
To this theory of metaphysical genius in very low savages I have no
objection to offer. We shall find, later, astonishing examples of savage
abstract speculation, certainly not derived from missionary sources,
because wholly out of the missionary's line of duty and reflection.
As early beasts had genius, so the earliest reasoners appear to have been
as logically gifted as the lowest savages now known to us, or even as some
Biblical critics. By Mr. Tylor's hypothesis, they first conceived the
extremely abstract idea of Life, 'that which makes the difference between
a living body and a dead one.'[15] This highly abstract conception must
have been, however, the more difficult to early man, as, to him, all
things, universally, are 'animated.'[16] Mr. Tylor illustrates this
theory of early man by the little child's idea that 'chairs, sticks, and
wooden horses are actuated by the same sort of personal will as nurses and
children and kittens.... In such matters the savage mind well represents
the childish stage.'[17]
Now, nothing can be more certain than that, if children think sticks are
animated, they don't think so because they have heard, or discovered, that
they possess souls, and then transfer souls to sticks. We may doubt, then,
if primitive man came, in this way, by reasoning on souls, to suppose
that all things, universally, were animated. But if he did think all
things animated--a corpse, to his mind, was just as much animated as
anything else. Did he reason: 'All things are animated. A corpse is not
animated. Therefore a corpse is not a thing (within the meaning of my
General Law)'?
How, again, did early man conceive of Life, before he identified Life
(1) with 'that which makes the difference between a living body and a dead
one' (a difference which, _ex hypothesi_, he did not draw, _all_ things
being animated to his mind) and (2) with 'those human shapes which appear
in dreams and visions'? 'The ancient savage philosophers probably reached
the obvious inference that every man had two things belonging to him, a
life and a phantom.' But everything was supposed to have 'a life,' as far
as one makes out, before the idea of separable soul was developed, at
least if savages arrived at the theory of universal animation as children
are said to do.
We are dealing here quite conjecturally with facts beyond our experience.
In any case, early man excogitated (by the hypothesis) the abstract idea
of Life, _before_ he first 'envisaged' it in material terms as 'breath,'
or 'shadow.' He next decided that mere breath or shadow was not only
identical with the more abstract conception of Life, but could also take
on forms as real and full-bodied as, to him, are the hallucinations of
dream or waking vision. His reasoning appears to have proceeded from the
more abstract (the idea of Life) to the more concrete, to the life first
shadowy and vaporous, then clothed in the very aspect of the real man.
Mr. Tylor has thus (whether we follow his logic or not) provided man with
a theory of active, intelligent, separable souls, which can survive the
death of the body. At this theory early man arrived by speculations on the
nature of life, and on the causes of phantasms of the dead or living
beheld in 'dreams and visions.' But our author by no means leaves out of
sight the effects of alleged supernormal phenomena believed in by savages,
with their parallels in modern civilisation. These supernormal phenomena,
whether real or illusory, are, he conceives, facts in that mass of
experiences from which savages constructed their belief in separable,
enduring, intelligent souls or ghosts, the foundation of religion.
While we are, perhaps owing to our own want of capacity, puzzled by what
seem to be two kinds of early philosophy--(1) a sort of instinctive or
unreasoned belief in universal animation, which Mr. Spencer calls
'Animism' and does not believe in, (2) the reasoned belief in separable
and surviving souls of men (and in things), which Mr. Spencer believes in,
and Mr. Tylor calls 'Animism'--we must also note another difficulty. Mr.
Tylor may seem to be taking it for granted that the earliest, remote,
unknown thinkers on life and the soul were existing on the same psychical
plane as we ourselves, or, at least, as modern savages. Between modern
savages and ourselves, in this regard, he takes certain differences, but
takes none between modern savages and the remote founders of religion.
Thus Mr. Tylor observes:
'The condition of the modern ghost-seer, whose imagination passes on
such slight excitement into positive hallucination, is rather the rule
than the exception among uncultured and intensely imaginative tribes,
whose minds may be thrown off their balance by a touch, a word, a
gesture, an unaccustomed noise.'[18]
I find evidence that low contemporary savages are _not_ great ghost-seers,
and, again, I cannot quite accept Mr. Tylor's psychology of the 'modern
ghost-seer.' Most such favoured persons whom I have known were steady,
unimaginative, unexcitable people, with just one odd experience. Lord
Tennyson, too, after sleeping in the bed of his recently lost father on
purpose to see his ghost, decided that ghosts 'are not seen by imaginative
people.'
We now examine, at greater length, the psychical conditions in which,
according to Mr. Tylor, contemporary savages differ from civilised men.
Later we shall ask what may be said as to possible or presumable psychical
differences between modern savages and the datelessly distant founders of
the belief in souls. Mr. Tylor attributes to the lower races, and
even to races high above their level, 'morbid ecstasy, brought on by
meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, or disease.' Now, we may
still 'meditate'--and how far the result is 'morbid' is a matter for
psychologists and pathologists to determine. Fasting we do not practise
voluntarily, nor would we easily accept evidence from an Englishman as to
the veracity of voluntary fasting visions, like those of Cotton Mather.
The visions of disease we should set aside, as a rule, with those of
'excitement,' produced, for instance, by 'devil-dances.' Narcotic and
alcoholic visions are not in question.[19] For our purpose the _induced_
trances of savages (in whatever way voluntarily brought on) are analogous
to the modern induced hypnotic trance. Any supernormal acquisitions of
knowledge in these induced conditions, among savages, would be on a par
with similar alleged experiences of persons under hypnotism.
We do not differ from known savages in being able to bring on non-normal
psychological conditions, but we produce these, as a rule, by other
methods than theirs, and such experiments are not made on _all_ of us, as
they were on all Red Indian boys and girls in the 'medicine-fast,' at
the age of puberty.
Further, in their normal state, known savages, or some of them, are more
'suggestible' than educated Europeans at least.[20] They can be more
easily hallucinated in their normal waking state by suggestion. Once more,
their intervals of hunger, followed by gorges of food, and their lack of
artificial light, combine to make savages more apt to see what is not
there than are comfortable educated white men. But Mr. Tylor goes too far
when he says 'where the savage could see phantasms, the civilised man has
come to amuse himself with fancies.'[21] The civilised man, beyond all
doubt, is capable of being _enfantosmé_.
In all that he says on this point, the point of psychical condition, Mr.
Tylor is writing about known savages as they differ from ourselves. But
the savages who _ex hypothesi_ evolved the doctrine of souls lie beyond
our ken, far behind the modern savages, among whom we find belief not
only in souls and ghosts, but in moral gods. About the psychical condition
of the savages who worked out the theory of souls and founded religion we
necessarily know nothing. If there be such experiences as clairvoyance,
telepathy, and so on, these unknown ancestors of ours may (for all that we
can tell) have been peculiarly open to them, and therefore peculiarly apt
to believe in separable souls. In fact, when we write about these far-off
founders of religion, we guess in the dark, or by the flickering light of
analogy. The lower animals have faculties (as in their power of finding
their way home through new unknown regions, and in the ants' modes of
acquiring and communicating knowledge to each other) which are mysteries
to us. The terror of dogs in 'haunted houses' and of horses in passing
'haunted' scenes has often been reported, and is alluded to briefly by Mr.
Tylor. Balaam's ass, and the dogs which crouched and whined before Athene,
whom Eumaeus could not see, are 'classical' instances.
The weakness of the anthropological argument here is, we must repeat, that
we know little more about the mental condition and experiences of the
early thinkers who developed the doctrine of Souls than we know about
the mental condition and experiences of the lower animals. And the more
firmly a philosopher believes in the Darwinian hypothesis, the less, he
must admit, can he suppose himself to know about the twilight ages,
between the lower animal and the fully evolved man. What kind of creature
was man when he first conceived the germs, or received the light,
of Religion? All is guess-work here! We may just allude to Hegel's
theory that clairvoyance and hypnotic phenomena are produced in a
kind of temporary _atavism_, or 'throwing hack' to a remotely ancient
condition of the 'sensitive soul' (_füklende Seele_). The 'sensitive'
[unconditioned, clairvoyant] faculty or 'soul' is 'a disease when it
becomes a state of the self-conscious, educated, self-possessed human
being of civilisation.'[22] 'Second sight,' Hegel thinks, was a product
of an earlier day and earlier mental condition than ours.
Approaching this almost untouched subject--the early psychical condition
of man--not from the side of metaphysical speculations like Hegel, but
with the instruments of modern psychology and physiology, Dr. Max Dessoir,
of Berlin, following, indeed, M. Taine, has arrived, as we saw, at
somewhat similar conclusions. 'This fully conscious life of the spirit,'
in which we moderns now live, 'seems to rest upon a substratum of reflex
action of a hallucinatory type.' Our actual modern condition is _not_
'fundamental,' and 'hallucination represents, at least in its nascent
condition, the main trunk of our psychical existence.'[23]
Now, suppose that the remote and unknown ancestors of ours who first
developed the doctrine of souls had not yet spread far from 'the main
trunk of our psychical existence,' far from constant hallucination. In
that case (at least, according to Dr. Dessoir's theory) their psychical
experiences would be such as we cannot estimate, yet cannot leave, as a
possibility influencing religion, out of our calculations.