516 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



now and then pushing his body with a force he has some difficulty in 

 overcoming. What may be the nature of this agent there is nothing 

 to tell him ; but one thing is irresistibly thrust on his consciousness 

 that sounds can be made, things about him can be moved, and he 

 himself can be buffeted, by an existence he can neither grasp nor see. 



What primitive ideas arise out of these experiences derived from 

 the inorganic world ? In the absence of hypothesis (which is foreign 

 to thought in its earliest stages), what mental association do these 

 multitudinous occurrences, some at long intervals, some daily, some 

 hourly, some from minute to minute, tend to establish ? They pre- 

 sent, under many forms, the relation between a perceptible and an 

 imperceptible mode of existence. In what way does the savage think 

 of this relation ? He cannot think of it in terms of dissipation into 

 vapor and condensation from it, nor in terms of optical relations pro- 

 ducing illusions, nor in any terms of physical science. How, then, 

 does he formulate it ? A clew to the answer will be furnished by re- 

 calling certain remarks of young children. When an image from the 

 magic lantern, thrown on a screen, suddenly disappears on withdrawal 

 of the slide, or when the reflection from a looking-glass, cast for a 

 child's amusement on the wall or ceiling, is made to vanish by chang- 

 ing the attitude of the glass, the child asks, " Where is it gone to ? " 

 The notion arising in its mind is, not that this something no longer 

 seen has become non-existent, but that it has become non-apparent ; 

 and it is led to think this by daily observing persons disappear behind 

 adjacent objects, by seeing things put away out of sight, and by now 

 and again finding a toy that had been hidden or lost. Similarly, the 

 primitive idea is, that these various existences now manifest them- 

 selves and now conceal themselves. As the animal which he has 

 wounded hides itself in the brushwood, and, if it cannot be found, is 

 supposed by the savage to have escaped in some incomprehensible 

 way, but to be still existing, so, in the absence of accumulated and 

 organized knowledge, the implication of all these experiences is that 

 many of the things above and around pass often from visibility to in- 

 visibility, and conversely. Bearing in mind how the actions of wind 

 prove that there is an invisible form of existence which manifests 

 power, we shall see this belief to be plausible. 



It remains only to be pointed out that along with this conception of 

 a visible condition and an invisible condition, which each of these many 

 things has, there comes the conception of duality. Each of them is in 

 a sense double, since it has these two complementary modes of being. 



Significant facts of another order, from time to time disclosed, may 

 next be noted facts irresistibly impi-essing the primitive man with 

 the belief that things are transmutable from one kind of substance 

 to another. I refer to the facts forced on his attention by embedded 

 remains of animals and plants. 



