204 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



It would draw us too far away from our present 

 subject to consider the speculations of mankind on 

 the multiplicity of the human soul. Suffice it to say 

 that such speculations have been recorded of nations 

 in almost every part of the globe. They may be 

 traced with probability to the conflict of opinion 

 inevitably arising when men who have fled from their 

 dead friends, or comfortably deposited them in sub- 

 stantial graves with all precautions against their return, 

 continue to be haunted by them in dreams or in 

 the phenomena of " possession," or trace their linea- 

 ments in the corporeal form and mental characteristics 

 of their descendants. The earliest efforts to solve the 

 riddle of another life were necessarily crude material- 

 istic and limited by the experiences of this life. As 

 those experiences gradually widened and higher planes 

 of civilisation were painfully won, fresh aspects of 

 the problem presented themselves, different solutions 

 of the riddle were reached. When these came into 

 contact more or less conscious attempts to synthesise 

 them would be made. The fresh contradictions that 

 resulted, as soon as they emerged into consciousness 

 (often a very long process), had to be reconciled 

 as best they could. One of these appears to be 

 preserved in the Egyptian doctrine, as indicated by 

 Professor Wiedemann in the sentence just quoted. 

 The West African Negroes and other peoples in a 

 lower stage of culture than that of the Egyptian 

 official classes, travelling in a similar direction to find 

 the key to the puzzle, have arrived at a similar but far 

 less complex scheme. Indeed in Egypt itself there 

 seems to have lain beneath the official doctrine a 

 more primitive folk-belief differing as much from that 



