ANNUAL ADDRESS. 



11 



untutored minds the separate existence of the spirit. Sleep, 

 it is true, occupies a unique place in human experience, owing 

 to the regularity of its occurrence among all men ; whatever 

 evidence of the nature or action of the human spirit was 

 derivable from sleep would be universally apprehended and 

 understood. Nor would any man, in recounting the history 

 of his dreams, fail of an actual or a probable response in the 

 positive experience of his fellow men. But there are other 

 phenomena which would equally demand an explanation, 

 although they are not, like sleep, habitual and universal, and 

 would equally find it in the dualism of human nature. It is 

 probable that a state of trance or insensibility would happen 

 to man more frequently in primitive than in civilised society. 

 His ignorance of the laws of nature, his emotional excitability, 

 his misuse of powerful intoxicating drugs would occasion it. 

 But whether it was common or rare, the savage, who saw that 

 a body, which a moment before had been sensitive and vigorous, 

 was reduced to a condition of torpor, would jump to the 

 inference that it had been deserted by the spirit which gave 

 it life ; he would immediately conclude that the spirit had 

 gone out of it, and that, unless and until the spirit returned to 

 it, it would not revive. Every swoon would become a witness 

 to the spirit's existence as independent of the body. And as 

 in a case of swooning no less than of sleep, the man would 

 after a time recover consciousness, it would be assumed that his 

 spirit had returned to him. The word " ecstasy," by its 

 derivation, poetically suggests what would to savage minds 

 appear as literal or actual fact. Two other cases, at least, there 

 are in which the thought of the temporary or permanent 

 divorce of the human spirit from tlie body would not 

 unnaturally recommend itself to primitive minds. 



One is that of illness. If the savage had advanced so far in 

 speculation as to associate the loss of consciousness or energy 

 with a severance, however it might be brought about, between 

 spirit or body, how would he logically argue about the slow 

 and sure fading of human strength under the pressure of 

 disease ? Would it not be to him a natural conception that, as 

 the strength ceased, so the spirit or soul, in which the life resided, 



