ON TRACES OF THE EARLY MENTAL CONDITION OF MAN. 3[5 



provide the dead man with his favorite liorse, and at the same time with his bow 

 and arrows; while the fishing- tri])es bury the dead man in his canoe, with the 

 paddle and the fish spear ready to his hand, what diileronce can we discern 

 between the purpose of the animate and of the inanimate offerings, which alike are 

 to serve the spirit of their owner? When the dead chief's wives and his slaves, 

 his horses, his weapons, his clothes and ornaments, are indiscriminately buried 

 Avith him ; when food is put in the grave with the dead man, and fresh supplies 

 brought every month ; when the little child is provided with its rattle and play- 

 things, and the dead wai-rior has the ceremonial pipe put in his hand, that he 

 may hold it out as a symbol of peace when he comes to the other world, while 

 a store of paint is buried with him that he may appear decently among his 

 brother warriors; in these and hundreds of other instances, the spirit of the dead 

 man is to use the spirits alike of men and animals, and of weapons, clothes, and 

 food. Then we should expect savages to be found recognizing the existence of 

 something of the nature of a spirit or ghost belonging to inanimate ol)jects; and 

 this in fact they do.* The existence of the Fijian opinion is well authenticated, 

 that lifeless objects have spirits, and that the souls of canoes, houses, plants, 

 broken pots, and weapons may bo seen floating down the river of death into the 

 land of souls ; and crossing into North America we find the same idea, not only 

 that souls are like shadow^s, and that everything is animate in the universe, but 

 that the souls of hatchets, kettles, and such like things, as well as of men and 

 animals, have to pass across the water which lies between their home in this life 

 and the Great Village where the sun sets in the far West. We must not expect 

 the spirits of spears and kettles to have the same distinctness and vitality in 

 savage philosophy as the spirits of men and horses. Inanimate objects want 

 those signs of life that are given to men and animals by the breath, the blood, 

 the independence of voluntary action ; but at any rate they have shadows, as in 

 the New Zealand tale of Te Kanawa, who offered the fairies his neck ornament 

 and ear-rings ; they took the shadows of them, but the substance they left behind. 

 They have also that property which in the mind of the savage has so much to 

 do with defining the nature of ghosts — their impalpable phantoms can and do 

 appear far away from where their real substance is, in the dreams and hallucina- 

 tions which savages look on as real events. When we meet with notions of 

 apparitions among more civilized people, it seems that they hold a theory inher- 

 ited from the full animism of the lower races, but much damaged in its consist- 

 ency by the interference of a better knowledge of facts. When the ghost of 

 Hamlet's father appeared, he ''wore his beaver up." What beaver? To an 

 European believer in ghosts, it would seem foolish to talk of the ghost of a 

 helmet ; but to a North American Indian it is quite reasonable that a helmet 

 should have a ghost as well as the warrior who puts it on his ghostly head. The 

 opinion of the European ghost-seer is no doubt the more scientific, the more 

 affected by knowledge of the facts of nature ; but the broader spiritualism of 

 the savage is more full, more thoroughly consistent, because, as there is much 

 reason to think, it is nearer to its source. 



A slight acquaintance with the spiritualism of the savage has sometimes led 

 to its being considered as the result of a degeneration from the opinions of more 

 cultured races ; but more conq)leto knowledge of the facts tends to show that 

 such an opinion inverts the real history of events. The way in which the fullest 

 and most consistent theory of ghosts is at home among savage tribes is w«ll 

 shown by the belief that the spirit aiTives in the next world whole or mutilated, 

 according to the condition of the body at death. For instance, there is an Aus- 

 tralian tribe who believe that if a man bo left unbm'ied, his soul l)ecomes a 

 wandering ghost. If one of then- warriors kills his enemy, he is sometimes 



*' The speaker meutioned that he had just found iu the works of an American writer, Mr. 

 Alger, independent contirmati m of the view ho had taken of the savage theory of spirits, 

 as including spectres of inanimate as well as of auiuiate objects. 



