Introduction. xvii 



the intellectual atmosphere necessary for the serious 

 adoption of beliefs such as these, which, in spite of their 

 persistence in folklore, seem so puerile to us moderns. 



It was the time when the serious attention of mankind 

 probably first became rivetted on the problems of the 

 nature of life and death. The realisation of the fact that 

 sometimes the bodies of the dead did not undergo a pro- 

 cess of dissolution when buried seems to have given 

 support to the vague longings for a continued existence 

 after death, with which no doubt imagination may often 

 have played before then, and set men thinking of the 

 elements of which death had robbed the once living body. 

 The outcome of these enquiries was the development of 

 ritual procedures which aimed at restoring to the corpse 

 the breath of life (by the ceremony of opening the mouth), 

 the waters of life (by the offering of libations), and the 

 odour and sweat of life (by the burning of incense). But 

 for us in this enquiry, the more important result was the 

 bod}' of beliefs which grew up in association with these 

 ritual observances as the definite formulation of a coherent 

 system of primitive biological and psychological con- 

 ceptions. 



The idea of the heart and the blood as the vehicles 

 of knowledge and the will was probably much older than 

 this, and already had probably prompted such ceremonial 

 procedures as the drawing of blood, whether by incision 

 or circumcision, by ear-piercing or by skin-gashing, many 

 centuries before the first real scientific attack u[)on the 

 problems of vitalism, to which I have been referring ; but 

 incidentally it helped to give more definite shape and 

 precision to these early conceptions of the vascular system. 

 So also the belief in the vitalising power of water was 

 definitely more ancient ; for it came to be vaguely recog- 

 nised as soon as the art of agriculture first was put into 



