SOCIETY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN. 39 



tliat person or persons as to the nature of the mind, the soul, the spirit, its 

 relation to the body, the existence and powers of disembodied spirits, of 

 supernatural spirits, and the like ; for example, the " psychology " of Maeter- 

 linck. On the other hand the term may mean (2) our theory or view of the 

 mental make-up of the person or persons to whom the term is applied, as 

 when we speak of the psychology of childhood, or of genius. It is in the 

 latter sense primarily that the word is used in this paper. At the same time 

 since the most interesting feature of primitive life is the customs and habits 

 which expressed, or, more strictly, were connected with, their beliefs about 

 the nature of the soul and of life generally, we shall mainly deal with those 

 mental qualities which gave rise to, or led up to the customs and beliefs 

 about sickness, death, the other world, ghosts, fairies, and the relation of 

 these to the ordinary world in which we live. 



Our means of interpretation will necessarily be those common and 

 universal tendencies of the human mind, which are present either actually or 

 potentially in every healthy child at birth, in the Negro, the Australian, the 

 Maori, the Malay, the Esquimaux, as in the British, French, or German native. 

 All that separates the European or North American white from his black, 

 red, or yellow neighbour is a product of culture, that is to say, something for 

 which the capacity indeed is present at the beginning, in every mind, but 

 which has to be built up anew by each individual, each generation, before it 

 can take advantage of it. Nothing of all our British culture is transmitted 

 through physical heredity, and a British child brought up from the beginning 

 among Hottentots would not only have the Hottentot mind when it grew up 

 but would no longer be capable of acquiring the British mind. It is not 

 denied that there may be physical differences in the nervous system which 

 made it impossible for a Negro ever to reach the same level of education or 

 culture as the White American. That is an arguable point. It is denied 

 only that there is anything in the white American child at birth which 

 represents the white American culture, and which is inherited from the 

 civilised parents or remoter ancestors. 



Hence in trying to explain primitive beliefs we must appeal to the same 

 powers by which the modern man acquires the beliefs of his parents and 

 forms new ones for himself, i.e., instinct, observation, suggestion, inference, 

 working by slow changes on what is already in the mind. It is extremely 



