Content of Primitive Supersensnons World 501 



other-world, of primitive religion, not an endlessness of time, but a 

 state removed from full sensuous reality, a world in which anything 

 and everything may happen, a world peopled by demonic ancestors 

 and liable to a splendid vagueness, to a "once upon a time-nan" 

 denied to the present. It not unfrequently happens that people who 

 know that the world nowadays obeys fixed laws have no difficulty 

 in believing that six thousand years ago man was made direct from 

 a lump of clay, and woman was made from one of man's superfluous 

 ribs. 



The fashioning of the supersensuous world comes out very clearly 

 in primitive man's views about the soul and life after death. Herbert 

 Spencer noted long ago the influence of dreams in forming a belief in 

 immortality, but being very rational himself, he extended to primitive 

 man a quite alien quality of rationality. Herbert Spencer argued 

 that when a savage has a dream he seeks to account for it, and in so 

 doing invents a spirit world. The mistake here lies in the " seeks to 

 account for it 1 ." Man is at first too busy living to have any time 

 for disinterested thinking. He dreams a dream and it is real for 

 him. He does not seek to account for it any more than for his hands 

 and feet. He cannot distinguish between a conception and a per- 

 ception, that is all. He remembers his ancestors or they appear to 

 him in a dream; therefore they are alive still, but only as a rule 

 to about the third generation. Then he remembers them no more 

 and they cease to be. 



Next as regards his own soul. He feels something within him, 

 his life-power, his will to live, his power to act, his personality — what- 

 ever we like to call it. He cannot touch this thing that is himself, 

 but it is real. His friend too is alive and one day he is dead ; he 

 cannot move, he cannot act. Well, something has gone that was his 

 friend's self. He has stopped breathing. Was it his breath? or he is 

 bleeding ; is it his blood ? This life-power is something ; does it live 

 in his heart or his lungs or his midriff? He did not see it go; per- 

 haps it is like wind, an anima, a Geist, a ghost. But again it comes 

 back in a dream, only looking shadowy ; it is not the man's life, it is 

 a thin copy of the man; it is an "image" (eidolon). It is like that 

 shifting distorted thing that dogs the living man's footsteps in the 

 sunshine; it is a "shade" (slcia) 2 . 



1 Primitive man, as Dr Beck observes, is not impelled by an Erkettntnisttrieb. Dr Beck 

 says he has counted upwards of 30 of these mythological Triebe [tendencies) with which 

 primitive man has been endowed. 



- The two conceptions of the soul, as a life-essence, inseparable from the body, and 

 as a separable phantom seem to occur in most primitive systems. They are distinct 

 conceptions but are inextricably blended in savage thought. The two notions KHrper- 

 icelc and Psyche have been very fully discussed in Wuudt's Volkerpsychologie, n. 

 pp. 1—142, Leipzig, 1900. 



