Content of Primitive Supersensuous World 501 
other-world, of primitive religion, not an endlessness of time, but a 
state removed from full sensuous reality, a world in which anything 
and everything may happen, a world peopled by demonic ancestors 
and liable to a splendid vagueness, to a “once upon a time-ness” 
denied to the present. It not unfrequently happens that people who 
know that the world nowadays obeys fixed laws have no difficulty 
in believing that six thousand years ago man was made direct from 
a lump of clay, and woman was made from one of man’s superfluous 
ribs. 
The fashioning of the supersensuous world comes out very clearly 
in primitive man’s views about the soul and life after death. Herbert 
Spencer noted long ago the influence of dreams in forming a belief in 
immortality, but being very rational himself, he extended to primitive 
man a quite alien quality of rationality. Herbert Spencer argued 
that when a savage has a dream he seeks to account for it, and in so 
doing invents a spirit world. The mistake here lies in the “seeks to 
account for it'.” Man is at first too busy living to have any time 
for disinterested thinking. He dreams a dream and it is real for 
him. He does not seek to account for it any more than for his hands 
and feet. He cannot distinguish between a conception and a per- 
ception, that is all. He remembers his ancestors or they appear to 
him in a dream; therefore they are alive still, but only as a rule 
to about the third generation. Then he remembers them no more 
and they cease to be. 
Next as regards his own soul. He feels something within him, 
his life-power, his will to live, his power to act, his personality—what- 
ever we like to call it. He cannot touch this thing that is himself, 
but it is real. His friend too is alive and one day he is dead; he 
cannot move, he cannot act. Well, something has gone that was his 
friend’s self. He has stopped breathing. Was it his breath? or he is 
bleeding; is it his blood? This life-power 2s something; does it live 
in his heart or his lungs or his midriff? He did not see it go; per- 
haps it is like wind, an anima, a Geist, a ghost. But again it comes 
back in a dream, only looking shadowy; it is not the man’s life, it is 
a thin copy of the man; it is an “image” (e¢délon). It is like that 
shifting distorted thing that dogs the living man’s footsteps in the 
sunshine; it is a “shade” (skea)?. 
1 Primitive man, as Dr Beck observes, is not impelled by an Erkenntnisstrieb. Dr Beck 
says he has counted upwards of 30 of these mythological Triebe (tendencies) with which 
primitive man has been endowed. 
2 The two conceptions of the soul, as a life-essence, inseparable from the body, and 
as a separable phantom seem to occur in most primitive systems. They are distinct 
conceptions but are inextricably blended in savage thought. The two notions Kérper- 
secle and Psyche have been very fully discussed in Wundt’s Vélkerpsychologie, u. 
pp. 1—142, Leipzig, 1900. 
