EVOLUTION AND THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 303 



sisted in eating. His total world very soon comes to 

 have an unseen region which is the abode of ordinarily 

 invisible beings having the forms of men, with whom his 

 own dream person can associate ; this unseen sphere is 

 furnished also with ghostly counterparts of the trees and 

 rocks and waters with which he is familiar when he is 

 awake. Before long his soul or ghost or spirit is con- 

 ceived as something which possesses two qualities : it 

 can be disassociated from his body and enter the spirit- 

 world where it seems to defy all the laws of waking life, 

 for with the quickness of thought it visits neighboring 

 islands as readily as it passes to the next hut; and it 

 possesses immortality, for it is exactly like the persistent 

 spirit-individualities of those who have died before him. 

 The other cause for the development of the conception 

 of gods and God in the mind of the savage is the fact 

 that things have been made which neither he nor any 

 other man can make. He can dig a ditch, and make a 

 house, and fashion a canoe, and build ramparts of earth ; 

 but human power has obviously been insufficient to con- 

 struct rivers and mountains and forests and their deni- 

 zens. Mankind itself has certainly been made in some 

 way, for it exists. Because the savage cannot conceive 

 of things being made excepting as they are made by the 

 human hand, and because so much confronts him that is 

 beyond the power of human construction, he comes to 

 postulate the existence of man-like, but greater than 

 human, personalities, and as he cannot see them in the 

 light of day, they belong to the spirit-world to which 

 souls go. Imagination sometimes gives human outlines 

 to shadows among the moon-lit trees, so that elves and 

 pixies, nymphs and fairies, become established in the 



