64 THE DESCENT Otf MAN. [Part I. 



tive impressions. When a savage dreams, the figures 

 which appear before him are believed to have come from 

 a distance and to stand over him ; or " the soul of the 

 dreamer goes out on its travels, and comes home with a 

 remembrance of what it has seen." 63 But until the above- 

 named faculties of imagination, curiosity, reason, etc., had 

 been fairly well developed in the mind of man, his dreams 

 would not have led him to believe in spirits, any more 

 than in the case of a dog. 



The tendency in savages to imagine that natural ob- 

 jects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living es- 

 sences, is perjiaps illustrated by a little fact which I once 

 noticed : My dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, 

 was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day ; but at 

 a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an 

 open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded 

 by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every 

 time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled 

 fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to 

 himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that move- 



63 Tylor, ' Early'History of Mankind,' 1865, p. 6. See also the three 

 striking chapters on the Development of Religion, in Lubbock's ' Origin 

 of Civilization,' 1870. In a like manner Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his in- 

 genious essay in the 'Fortnightly Review' (May 1, 1870, p. 535), ac- 

 counts for the earliest forms of religious belief throughout the world, by 

 man being led through dreams, shadows, and other causes, to look at 

 himself as a double essence, corporeal and spiritual. As the spiritual 

 being is supposed to exist after death and to be powerful, it is propi- 

 tiated by various gifts and ceremonies, and its aid invoked. He then 

 further shows that names or nicknames given from some animal or other 

 object to the early progenitors or founders of a tribe, are supposed after 

 a long interval to represent the real progenitor of the tribe ; and such 

 animal or object is then naturally believed still to exist as a spirit, is held 

 sacred, and worshipped as a god. Nevertheless I cannot but suspect that 

 there is a still earlier and ruder stage, when any thing which manifests 

 power or movement is thought to be endowed with some form of life, and 

 with mental faculties analogous to our own. 



