500 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL. No. 1032 



which, since the road to civilization parted 

 from that on which savagery was left to 

 linger, have built up the mentality of civil- 

 ized folk ; it is essential to try to see as the 

 most primitive Fijian saw and to conceive 

 what these islanders thought as to them- 

 selves and as to the world in which they 

 found themselves. 



It seems safe to assume that the primi- 

 tive man, absolutely self-centered, had 

 hardly begun to puzzle out any explanation 

 even of his own nature, still less of the real 

 nature of all the other beings of which he 

 must have been vaguely conscious in the 

 world outside himself. To put it bluntly, 

 he took things very much as they came, and 

 had hardly begun to ask questions. 



He was — he could not but be, as the 

 lower animals are — in some vague way con- 

 scious of himself, and from that one en- 

 tirely self-centered position he could not 

 but perceive from time to time that other 

 beings, more or less like himself, were 

 about him, and came more or less in con- 

 tact with him. 



The place in which he was conscious of 

 being appeared to him limitless. He did 

 not realize that he could move about only 

 in the islet which was his 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 be- 

 tween his own home and that which he 

 spoke of as wai-langi-lala (water-sky-empti- 

 ness) and we speak of as the horizon. To 

 him the world was not limited by any line, 

 even the furthest which his sight disclosed 

 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 occa- 

 sionally 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 be- 

 yond 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 be- 

 came conscious, must have been corre- 

 spondingly indefinite. 



He was, to a degree almost if not quite 

 beyond our power of conception, a spiritu- 

 alist 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 corresponding non-recog- 

 nition of things material. 



In passing I here disclaim, for myself at 

 least, the use of the misleading word "be- 

 lief" in speaking of the ideas of really 

 primitive man — as, for instance, in the 

 phrase the "belief in immortality." Pos- 

 sibly primitive men of somewhat more ad- 

 vanced thought, though not yet beyond the 

 stage of "savagery," may have "believed" 

 in spirits, in immortality, and so on ; but it 



