* PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 519 
home, or perhaps even only in-a part of a somewhat larger, but according to our 
ideas still small, island; if other islets were in sight from that on which he 
lived, these also would be part of his world, especially if—though such incidents 
must have been rare—he had crossed to, or been visited by strangers from, those 
islands—islands which lay between his own home and that which he spoke of as 
wai-langi-lala (water-sky-emptiness) and we speak of as the horizon. To him 
the world was not limited by any line, even the furthest which his sight dis- 
closed to him. Rarely, but still sometimes, strangers had come from beyond 
that line. Perhaps too he had some time heard that his ancestors had come 
from the somewhere which seemed beyond. Again his ancestors of whom he had 
heard, and even some of the contemporaries whom he had seen, though no longer 
with him except occasionally during his dreams in bodily form, were somewhere, 
somewhere beyond that line of sight. Even he himself (in what were his 
dreams, as we say, but to him were part of his real life) habitually went beyond 
the line, and, as far as his experience had gone, returned each time to the 
island home. 
Moreover, he did not doubt that this limitless region in which it vaguely 
seemed to him that he, and innumerable other beings, moved, extended not 
merely along what we speak of as the surface of the globe, but also, and 
equally without any intervening obstacle, up into the infinite space above and 
beyond the sky. In short, to this primitive man the world, though the part 
of it to which he had actual access was so small, was limitless. 
The thoughts of the dweller in this vague world, as to himself and as to the 
other beings of which from time to time he became conscious, must have been 
correspondingly indefinite. 
He was, to a degree almost if not quite beyond our power of conception, 
a spiritualist rather than a materialist; and it is essential to get some idea of 
the extent and manner of his recognition of spiritual beings—and his correspond- 
ing non-recognition of things material. 
In passing I here disclaim, for myself at least, the use of the misleading 
word ‘ belief ’ in speaking of the ideas of really primitive man—as, for instance, 
in the phrase the ‘ belief in immortality.’ Possibly primitive men of somewhat 
more advanced thought, though not yet beyond the stage of ‘savagery,’ may 
have ‘ believed ’ in spirits, in immortality, and so on; but it seems to me that 
at the earlier stage there can hardly have been more than recognition (admittedly 
very strong recognition) of spiritual beings, and non-recognition of any beginning 
or ending of these spirits. 
To return from this digression, Sir E. B. Tylor long since gave currency to 
the very useful word ‘animism’ as meaning ‘ the belief in spiritual beings,’ and 
this has been taken to mean that animism was the initial stage, or at any rate 
the earliest discoverable stage, of all religion. The primitive Fijian was cer- 
tainly a thorough-going animist, if his extraordinarily strong but vague recog- 
nition of spiritual beings suffices to make him that; but I do not think that the 
ideas of that kind of the primitive ‘savage ’—or, say, of the most primitive Fijian 
—before his ideas had been worked up into somewhat higher thought, during the 
long period while he was secluded in his remote islands and before the advent 
of the Polynesians, had developed far enough to constitute anything which 
could be called ‘ religion,’ though doubtless they were the sort of stuff which, 
had these folk been left to themselves, might, probably did, form the basis 
of the ‘ religion’ towards which they were tending. 
Practically all human beings—savage and civilised alike—and, though in 
lower degree, even animal-folk, have in some degree recognised the existence 
of some sort of spiritual beings. The point then seems to be to discover what 
was the nature of the spiritual beings which the primitive Fijian recognised 
but without understanding. 
Anthropologists have recently defined, or at least described, several kinds of 
spiritual beings as recognised (even here I will not use the word ‘ believed ’) 
by more or less primitive folk. There is, first, the soul, or the separable 
personality of the living man or other being; secondly, the ghost, or the same 
thing after death; thirdly, the spirit, which is said to be a soul-like being which 
has never been associated with a human or animal body; and, fourthly, there 
is, it appears, to be taken into consideration yet another kind of spiritual being 
