102 THE BIRD WATCHER 
had been there before me.” If such an effect, 
so produced, may B® strong—and it varies greatly 
—in the civilised man, it is likely to be much 
stronger in the savage, who does not distinguish 
so clearly between the world without him and what 
is in his own mind. To him, therefore, the visual 
image of a deceased person, that is summoned up 
by the sight of anything that more particularly 
appertained to him, during life, might well seem to 
be that person himself, and thus, as it appears to me, 
a belief might arise of the continual presence amongst 
us of the departed, even without anything else to 
help it. That there is much else—real, as well as 
seeming evidence—I know, or at any rate I am of 
that opinion. Ido not write as a disbeliever in real 
apparitions, in clairvoyance, premonitions, thought- 
transference, or a host of other things, for I am one 
of those who really go by evidence in such matters 
—very few do—and to me no one thing in “this 
great world of shows” is in itself more wonderful or 
incredible than another—which is my own idea of 
what the scientific attitude of mind should be. But 
because there may be much that goes to prove what 
Myers calls the survival of human (which, to me, 
involves animal) personality after physical death, it 
does not, therefore, follow that the belief in man’s 
immortality has originated through this, and still less 
that it could not have arisen without it. Association 
of ideas, producing a strong mental image, with the 
confusion between thought and objective reality, 
1 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, p. 11. 
