5& 
FASCICULI MALA TENSES 
have taught the Malays to worship, not only to personify and dread, the 
natural forces into contact with which they come, without teaching their pupils 
to forego the primitive belief that the very objects of their reverence act in a 
blind and unreasoning way that proves them readily deceived. 
Granted that all organized things have a spirit or soul which pervades 
their substance and preserves from premature decay, and that this spirit is not 
a reasonable being but merely a personified vital or preservative force, much 
of primitive magic is not absurd, as we are often inclined to think, but logical 
even inevitable, founded on a philosophical system. If a soul pervades the 
whole substance of a body, it is natural to regard it as being influenced by the 
form of that body, and seeing that it is not an integral part of the body 
but something which enters it subsequent to, or during, its formation, it is 
obvious that it must become, as it were, adapted by use to the outward 
form of its material shell. 
From these premises sympathetic magic and even the doctrine of signatures 
can be logically deduced. 
The soul is ever liable to escape ; in the case of man it escapes every 
night when he falls asleep. If only it can be induced to leave its proper body 
and enter another which resembles it in form, an image of the body to which 
it properly belongs may be employed by those who know how to coerce spirits 
in effecting a transference of the kind. Spirits judge, if they do not rather 
obey laws than judge, solely by external form and appearance, and by the coercive 
qualities which certain materials possess. Seeing that the soul pervades the 
body, when a piece of the body—even a hair, or the paring of a finger nail-— 
is removed, a portion of the soul goes with it, enabling the transference from 
the proper body to one which contains a portion of it to be performed more 
readily. 
Soul and body are evidently regarded as interacting on one another. If 
something is lacking in the body, something must also be lacking in the soul; 
and the converse is true. If it is possible to transfer a portion of the soul 
of a healthy body to a sick one, it is possible to heal the sickness. As we 
have seen in the present paper, and as is well known from other sources, many 
animals are used in the medicine of primitive races because they possess in an 
eminent degree the qualities which are apt to be deficient in persons, animals, 
plants or things to which these qualities are of importance. This principle, 
if correctly applied, is a strictly scientific one, as when a person suffering from 
the results of deficiency of the thyroid gland is given the extract of the thyroid 
of some animal to eat. But of course the Malay does not see the matter 
in this light. If the actual substance on which the qualities depend cannot be 
