14 TlMEHRI. 
is a spirit, as clothed in a bodily form which it can 
often vary at will or which may be instantaneously varied 
by accidental circumstances. The primitive man has 
no means of even roughly grouping the innumerable 
individual beings which constitute his world. 
The third part in this primitive philosophy is the re- 
cognition of a difference between various spirits, which 
difference is, however, merely a difference in degree of 
cunning. This cunning, it must be understood, is not 
the immoral form of that quality to which we are most 
accustomed to apply that term, but rather that praise- 
worthy cunning, so difficult of perfect attainment, which 
even in our stage of civilization enables the skilled 
sportsman to follow, to lure and to capture his prey. 
The quality, indeed, when thus manifested, in the skill 
of the perfect sportsman, in a civilized state of society 
is a distinct and direct survival, in almost full purity, of 
the one mental quality which, comparatively useless 
now, was of the utmost, indeed almost of sole, import- 
ance to the very life of the uncivilized man. For the 
latter sees in perfect and fearful clearness, owing to the 
simplicity of the conditions, the all-involving struggle 
for existence, in which he, a single individual, has to 
fight with every other individual, none being armed with 
any of the weapons, material or intellectual, which in 
each succeeding stage of civilization so greatly compli- 
cate, and at the same time obscure, the great world con- 
test. He sees himself and every other being of the 
visible world involved in one unending struggle for exis- 
tence, each with each, each armed only with the one 
weapon of cunning. That uncivilized man should recog- 
nize this one mental quality, it being the one developed, 
