REDMEN ; SOME OF THEIR THOUGHTS. g 
sight seem strange that primitive thought should be capa- 
ble of the conception of so immaterial a thing as a spirit. 
Yet but little reflection is needed to bring conviction that 
it is impossible that man, being rational and having 
once seen death, should be without this conception. 
When a man dies, something goes, something is left. 
The survivors necessarily distinguish in thought between 
these two parts, and they call them respectively by some 
such names as spirit and body. A good illustration of 
this is afforded by the saying of some of our Redmen, 
as they point out that the small human figure to which 
they are accustomed, has disappeared from the pupil of 
a dead man's eye, that " his spirit has gone." This 
alone is sufficient reason to the Redman for belief in the 
distinctness of body and spirit — the two parts that 
separate at death. Nor is it only at death that the dis- 
tinct existence of these two parts is obvious to the most 
primitive thinker. To him his dream-acts and his wak- 
ing-a6ts seem to differ only in that the former are done 
only by the free spirit, the latter are done by the spirit 
clothed in its bodily form. For, seeing other men 
asleep, and afterwards hearing from the sleepers the 
things which these suppose themselves to have done 
when asleep, the Redman can only reconcile that which 
he hears with the fact that the bodies of the sleepers 
were in his sight and motionless throughout the time of 
supposed action, by assuming, by never questioning, 
that their spirits, leaving the sleepers, played the parts 
he is told of in dream-adventures. Examples of this 
have often come under my notice, and I have recorded 
many of them elsewhere. One may be repeated here. 
"In the middle of one night I was wakened by a Red. 
B 
