502 



SCIENCE 



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



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 un- 

 \ trammeled — except to some extent by the 

 clog of the body — by any such conditions 

 as time and space; he had found no rea- 

 son 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 ani- 

 mals, 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 compara- 

 tively unimportant matter of bodily form ; 

 moreover, it seemed to him that, as he him- 

 self 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 at- 

 tached to the particular material forms in 

 which they happened to manifest them- 

 selves at any moment, and that the mate- 

 rial form in which the soul (and notice- 

 ably 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 

 disting-uished from the altruism of the civil- 

 ized man ; for it was perhaps the beginning 

 of the idea of altruism, of duty to one's 

 neighbor, that gave the start to civiliza- 

 tion, and it was because the ancestors of 

 the savage had never got hold of this funda- 

 mental principle of altruism that they were 

 left behind. 



The uncivilized 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 commu- 

 nity 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 instinc- 

 tive — little more than a way of attract- 

 ing further service. It is also true that 

 on the occasions, which must have been 

 very rare till a late period in the Mela- 

 nesian occupation of Fiji, when strangers 

 — i. e., persons of whom he had not 

 even dreamed — came, so surprisingly, 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 sus- 

 pected, 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 wish to resist, the 

 taking from himself of any such property 

 by any one who could and would take it. 



Again, the primitive man must have 

 been far less sensitive to pain, and far less 

 subject to fear, than the normal civilized 

 man. I do not mean that the primitive 

 Fijian was without the ordinary animal 

 shrinking from physical pain, but that he 

 can not have been nearly as sensitive even 

 to physical pain as is the more sophisti- 

 cated man; nor had he the same mental 

 pain, the same anticipation and fear of 

 pain, that the civilized man has. 



