September 17, 1914] 



NATURE 



7i 



him. Rarely, but still sometimes, strangers had come 

 from beyond that line. Perhaps, too, he had some 

 time heard that his ancestors had come from the 

 somewhere which seemed beyond. Again, his an- 

 cestors of whom he had heard, and even some of the 

 contemporaries whom he had seen, though no longer 

 with him, except occasionally during his dreams, in 

 bodily form, were somewhere, somewhere beyond that 

 line of sight. Even he himself (in what were his 

 dreams, as we say, but to him were part of his real 

 life) habitually went beyond the line, and, so far as 

 his experience had gone, returned each time to the 

 i>Iand home. 



Moreover, he did not doubt that this limitless region 

 in which it vaguely seemed to him that he, and in- 

 numerable other beings, moved, extended not merely 

 along what we speak of as the surface of the globe, 

 but also, and equally, without any intervening ob- 

 stacle, up into the infinite space above and beyond 

 the sky. In short, to this primitive man the world, 

 though the part of it to which he had access was so 

 small, was limitless 



The thoughts of the dweller in this vague world, 

 as to himself and as to the other beings of which 

 from time to time he became conscious, must have 

 been correspondingly indefinite. 



He was,' to a degree almost if not quite beyond our 

 power of conception, a spiritualist rather than a 

 materialist ; and it is essential to get some idea of 

 the extent and manner of his recognition of spiritual 

 beings — and his corresponding non-recognition of 

 things material. 



In passing, I here disclaim, for myself at least, the 

 use of the misleading word "belief" in speaking of 

 the ideas of really primitive man — as, for instance, 

 in the phrase the "belief in immortality." Possibly 

 primitive men of somewhat more advanced thought, 

 though not yet beyond the stage of " savagery," may 

 hav^e "believed" in spirits, in immortality, and so on; 

 but it seems to me that at the earlier stage there 

 can scarcely have been more than recognition (ad- 

 mittedly very strong recognition) of spiritual beings, 

 and non-recognition of any beginning or ending of 

 these spirits. 



To return from this digression. Sir E. B. Tylor 

 long since gave currency to the very useful word 

 'animism," as meaning "the belief in spiritual 

 beings," and this has been taken to mean that anim- 

 ism was the initial stage, or at any rate the earliest 

 discoverable stage, of all religion. The primitive 

 Fijian was certainly a thorough-going animist, if his 

 ' extraordinarily strong but vague recognition of 

 spiritual beings suffices to make him that ; but I 

 do not think that the ideas of that kind of the primi- 

 tive " savage " — or, say, of the most primitive Fijian 

 ■ — before his ideas had been worked up into somewhat 

 higher thought, during the long period while he was 

 luded in his remote islands, and before the advent 

 the Polynesians, had developed far enough to 

 constitute anything which could be called "religion," 

 though doubtless they were the sort of stuff which, 

 h.ad these folk been left to themselves, might, probably 

 did, form the basis of the "religion" towards which 

 they were tending. 



Practically all human beings — savage and civilised 

 alike — and, though in lower degree, even animal-folk, 

 have in some degree recognised the existence of some 

 sort of spiritual beings. The point, then, seems to be 

 to discover what was the nature of the spiritual beings 

 which the primitive Fijian recognised, but without 

 understanding. 



Anthropologists have recently defined, or at least 

 - described, several kinds of spiritual beings as recog- 

 ^_^nised (even here I will not use the word "believed") 



NO. 2342, VOL. 94] 



by more or less primitive folk. There is, first, the 

 soul, or the separable personality of the living man or 

 other being ; secondly, the ghost, or the same thing 

 after death ; thirdly, the spirit, which is said to be 

 a soul-like being which has never been associated 

 with a human or animal body ; and, fourthly, there 

 is, it appears, to be taken into consideration yet 

 another kind of spiritual being (or something of that 

 nature) which is the life of personality, not amounting 

 to a separable or apparitional soul, which, it has been 

 supposed, some primitive folk have attributed to what 

 we call " inanimate things." 



It seems, though I say this with all due deference, 

 that this identification and naming of various kinds 

 of spiritual beings, though it may hold good of 

 animism at a higher stage, does not fit the case of 

 the more primitive animist (say, that of the Melan- 

 esian in the very backward state in which, so far as 

 we know, he first reached Fiji), for presumably he 

 had not as yet recognised or differentiated between 

 the various kinds just enumerated. He recognised 

 something which may be called the "soul," which was 

 the separable personality of the living man or other 

 being. But he did not recognise — perhaps it would 

 be better to say that he had not yet attained to recog- 

 nition of — the ghost, or the same thing after death ; 

 for he had not even recognised any real break, in- 

 volving change, at death. Nor, as I think, did he 

 recognise a spirit, i.e. a soul-like being which had 

 never been associated with a human or animal body ; 

 for he had no Idea of any spiritual being which did 

 not, or could not, on occasion associate itself with a 

 human, animal, or other material body, nor seem- 

 ingly had he reached the stage, labelled anima- 

 tism, In which he would have attributed life and 

 personality to things (which I take to mean things 

 which are to us Inanimate). 



All that the most primitive man would recognise 

 would be that he himself — the essential part of him — 

 was a being (for convenience and for want of a better 

 name it may be called "soul") temporarily separable 

 at any time from the material body in which it hap- 

 pened to be, and untrammelled — except to some extent 

 by the clog of the body — by any such conditions as 

 time and space ; he had found no reason to think that 

 in these respects the many other beings of which 

 from time to time he became aware (whether these 

 were what we should class as men, other animals, 

 or the things which we speak of as inanimate, such 

 as stocks and stones, or bodiless natural phenomena, 

 such as winds) differed from himself only in the com- 

 paratively unimportant matter of bodily form; more- 

 over, it seemed to him that, as he himself could to 

 some extent do all these, the other beings, and some 

 perhaps even more easily, were able to pass from one 

 body to another. 



He felt that these "souls" were only temporarily 

 and more or less loosely attached to the particular 

 material forms in which they happened to manifest 

 themselves at any moment, and that the material 

 form in which the soul (and noticeably this held good 

 even of his own soul) happened at any moment to be 

 embodied was of little or no real importance to that 

 soul, which could continue to exist just as well with- 

 out as with that body. 



Another point which it Is important to note is the 

 egoism of the savage man as distinguished from the 

 altruism of the civilised man ; for it was perhaps the 

 beginning of the idea of altruism, of duty to one's 

 neighbour, that gave the start to civilisation, and It 

 was because the ancestors of the savage had never 

 got hold of this fundamental principle altruism that 

 they were left behind. 



The uncivilised man, complete egoist as he was. 



