500 Darwinism and the Study of Religions 



mind of the thinker, they have in some shadowy way spatial exten- 

 sion. Yet ancient philosophies and primitive man alike needed and 

 possessed for practical purposes a distinction which served as well as 

 our subjective and objective. To the primitive savage all his thoughts, 

 every object of which he was conscious, whether by perception or 

 conception, had reality, that is, it had existence outside himself, but 

 it might have reality of various kinds or different degrees. 



It is not hard to see how this would happen. A man's senses 

 may mislead him. He sees the reflection of a bird in a pond. To 

 his eyes it is a real bird. He touches it, he puts it to the touch, and 

 to his touch it is not a bird at all. It is real then, but surely not 

 quite so real as a bird that you can touch. Again, he sees smoke. 

 It is real to his eyes. He tries to grasp it, it vanishes. The wind 

 touches him, but he cannot see it, which makes him feel uncanny. 

 The most real thing is that which affects most senses and especially 

 what affects the sense of touch. Apparently touch is the deepest 

 down, most primitive, of senses. The rest are specialisations and 

 complications. Primitive man has no formal rubric "optical de- 

 lusion," but he learns practically to distinguish between things that 

 affect only one sense and things that affect two or more — if he did 

 not he would not survive. But both classes of things are real to 

 him. Percipi est esse. 



So far, primitive man has made a real observation ; there are 

 things that appeal to one sense only. But very soon creeps in con- 

 fusion fraught with disaster. He passes naturally enough, being eco- 

 nomical of any mental effort, from what he really sees but cannot feel 

 to what he thinks he sees, and gives to it the same secondary reality. 

 He has dreams, visions, hallucinations, nightmares. He dreams that 

 an enemy is beating him, and he wakes rubbing his head. Then 

 further he remembers things ; that is, for him, he sees them. A 

 great chief died the other day and they buried him, but he sees 

 him still in his mind, sees him in his war-paint, splendid, victorious. 

 So the image of the past goes together with his dreams and visions 

 to the making of this other less real, but still real world, his other- 

 world of the supersensuous, the supernatural, a world, the outside 

 existence of which, independent of himself, he never questions. 



And, naturally enough, the future joins the past in this super- 

 sensuous world. He can hope, he can imagine, he can prophesy. 

 And again the images of his hope are real ; he sees them with that 

 mind's eye which as yet he has not distinguished from his bodily eye. 

 And so the supersensuous world grows and grows big with the in- 

 visible present, and big also with the past and the future, crowded 

 with the ghosts of the dead and shadowed with oracles and portents. 

 It is this supersensuous, supernatural world which is the eternity, the 



