520 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
(or something of that nature) which is the life of personality, not amounting to 
a separable or apparitional soul, which, it has been supposed, some primitive 
folk have attributed to what we call ‘inanimate things.’ 
It seems, though I say this with all due deference, that this identification 
and naming of various kinds of spiritual beings, though it may hold good of 
animism at a higher stage, does not fit the case of the more primitive animist 
(say, that of the Melanesian in the very backward state in which, as far as we 
know, he first reached Fiji), for presumably he had not as yet recognised nor 
differentiated between the various kinds just enumerated. He recognised some- 
thing which may be called the ‘soul,’ which was the separable personality of the 
living man or other being. But he did not recognise—perhaps it would be 
better to say that he had not yet attained to recognition of—the ghost, or the 
same thing after death; for he had not even recognised any real break, involving 
change, at death. Nor, as I think, did he recognise a spirit, i.e., a soul-like 
being which had never been associated with a human or animal body; for he 
had no idea of any spiritual being which did not, or could not, on occasion 
associate itself with a human, animal, or other material body, nor seemingly 
had he reached the stage, labelled animatism, in which he would have attributed 
life and personality to things (which I take to mean things which are to us 
inanimate). 
All that the most primitive man would recognise would be that he himself— 
the essential part of him—was a being (for convenience and for want of a better 
name it may be called ‘soul’) temporarily separable at any time from the 
material body in which it happened to be, and untrammelled—except to some 
extent by the clog of the body—-by any such conditions as time and space; he 
had found no reason to think that in these respects the many other beings of 
which from time to time he became aware (whether these were what we should 
class as men, other animals, or the things which we speak of as inanimate, such 
as stocks and stones, or bodiless natural phenomena, such as winds) differed 
from himself only in the comparatively unimportant matter of bodily form; 
moreover, it seemed to him that, as he himself could to some extent do all 
these, the other beings, and some perhaps even more easily, were able to pass 
from one body to another. 
He felt that these ‘souls’ were only temporarily and more or less loosely 
attached to the particular material forms in which they happened to manifest 
themselves at any moment, and that the material form in which the soul (and 
noticeably this held good even of his own soul) happened at any moment to be 
embodied was of little or no real importance to that soul, which could continue 
to exist just as well without as with that body. 
Another point which it is important to note is the egoism of the savage man 
as distinguished from the altruism of the civilised man; for it was perhaps the 
beginning of the idea of altruism, of duty to one’s neighbour, that gave the 
start to civilisation, and it was because the ancestors of the savage had never 
got hold of this fundamental principle of altruism that they were left behind. 
The uncivilised man, complete egoist as he was, thought and acted only for his 
own personal interests. It is true that he was to a certain extent kind (as we 
might call it) to the people of his own small community, and possibly still more 
kind to such of the community as seemed to him more immediately of his own 
kindred. But this kindness was little more than instinctive—little more than a 
way of attracting further service. It is also true that on the occasions, which 
must have been very rare till a late period in the Melanesian occupation of Fiji, 
when strangers—i.e., persons of whom he had not even dreamed—came, so sur- 
prisingly, into his purview, he was sometimes civil or even hospitable to those 
strangers (it should not be forgotten that to him these were souls embodied by 
separable accident in material forms) ; but this would have been only on occasions 
on which he knew, or suspected, that these visitors were stronger than himself 
and able to injure or benefit him. 
Another point of great significance in the character of this primitive man 
was that he had no conception of ownership of property. To him all that we 
should class as goods and chattels, his land, or even his own body, was his only 
so long as he could retain it. He might if he could and would take any such 
property from another entirely without impropriety ; nor would he resist, or even 
