which is repeated in the work of psychic research, whether it have any more validity or not than savage ideas.

Many primitive peoples extended their doctrine of the soul to plants or even inanimate objects, such as stones and domestic utensils. This is evidenced in the burial of such objects with their owners at death. It was assumed or believed that the dead carried on the same occupations as when living on the earth. They required the same implements and objects. It was not supposed, however, that it was the same physical object, but its soul that was taken by the dead. This opens up the nature of the after life and to that we turn.

2. The Nature of the Future Life

One cannot read the stories of primitive peoples and of their habits without seeing that their conception of the next life is the same, essentially the same, as that of the present life, the only difference being in the perceptible nature of the one and the imperceptible nature of the other. The dead carried on the same occupations as they had in life, a view which is clearly represented again in the ideas of the Book of Revelation in the Bible. This is a description of a purely sensory life with all the habits of monarchical institutions portrayed in it.

When we examine psychic phenomena we can well understand how such ideas took their rise. Apparitions, for instance, show the dress and manners of the person they represent, whether the apparition be of the living or of the dead. "And thus," says Tylor, "it is the habitual feature of the ghost stories of the civilized, as of the savage world, that the ghost comes dressed, and even dressed in well-known clothing worn in life. Hearing as well as sight testifies to the phantom objects;

the clanking of ghostly chains and the rustling of ghostly dresses are described in the literature of apparitions." He then quotes an interesting statement from the account of Rev. E. B. Cross which shows the theory of the Karens about the future life.

"Every object is supposed to have its kelah. Axes and knives, as well as trees and plants, are supposed to have their separate kelahs. The Karen, with his ax and cleaver, may build his house, cut his rice and conduct his affairs, after death as before."

The whole ghastly custom of human sacrifices, as well as animals, to go with the dead to continue the same life beyond the grave as had been led here, indicates how exactly like the present life the savage conceived the next one. The lives of animals were given up to enable their souls still to serve their masters in the same way as in life. Armor and various implements necessary to the earthly life were buried with the dead or put on the funeral pyre.

"The whole idea," says Tylor, "is graphically illustrated in the following Ojibwa tradition or myth. Gitchi Gauzini was a chief who lived on the shores of Lake Superior, and once, after a few days illness, he seemed to die. He had been a skilful hunter, and had desired that a fine gun which he possessed should be buried with him when he died. But some of his friends, not thinking him really dead, his body was not buried; his widow watched him for four days, he came back to life, and told his story. After death, he said, his ghost traveled on the broad road of the dead toward the happy land, passing over great plains of luxuriant herbage, seeing beautiful groves and hearing the songs of innumerable birds, till at last, from the summit of a hill, he caught sight of the distant city of the dead, far across an intermediate space, partly veiled in mist, and spangled with glittering lakes and streams. He came in view of herds of stately deer, and moose, and

other game, which with little fear walked near his path. But he had no gun, and remembering how he had requested his friends to put his gun in his grave, he turned back to go and fetch it. Then he met face to face the train of men, women, and children who were traveling toward the city of the dead. They were heavily laden with guns, pipes, kettles, meats, and other articles; women were carrying basket-work and painted paddles, and little boys had their ornamented clubs and their bows and arrows, the presents of their friends. Refusing a gun which an overburdened traveler offered him, the ghost of Gitchi Gauzini traveled back in quest of his own, and at last reached the place where he had died. There he could see only a great fire before and around him, and finding the flames barring his passage on every side, he made a desperate leap through, and awoke from his trance. Having concluded his story, he gave his auditors this counsel, that they should no longer deposit so many burdensome things with the dead, delaying them on their journey to the place of repose, so that almost every one he met complained bitterly. It would be wiser, he said, only to put such things in the grave as the deceased was particularly attached to, or made a formal request to have deposited with him."

We could not have a better picture of what was thought about the nature of the after life. The fact that it may be treated as a myth makes no difference in regard to its meaning for indicating that belief and it is probable that some such vision actually took place often in the abnormal conditions of primitive life, and it would make no difference to its meaning for the savage to explain it as a delirium, since he knew no distinction between normal sensation and visions in a trance, except the distinction between the physical and a spiritual world and that distinction subject to qualifications. It is interesting that the story is of the

time when the Indians had come into contact with the white man and his gun and perhaps symbolizes a change of custom or the desire to institute it.

But assuming it fabricated, it was on the basis of similar experiences which marked the savage life. Even fiction is not wholly fiction. The wildest imagination runs along the lines of experience and the only thing that makes its creations grotesque is the exaggeration of its actual experiences in sense, or the combination of exaggerated memories. Hence the most absurd allegations of savages are based on actual experiences and only reflect, when translated, oddities that are made worse by the imperfect translation itself, or the imperfect understanding of his mental operations. The imagination of the savage, however, is untrained and so not subject in any way to critical habits or scientific interest and classification. The remotest analogy has as much significance to him as the most essential resemblances or attributes. Hence what seems to us so grotesque will appear to him perfectly rational.

However, if we take this Ojibwa legend in terms of conceptions at the basis of our ideas of veridical hallucinations and what is involved in the pictographic process of communication between the spiritual and the physical world, we may find that the theory of idealism and of Swedenborg explains very clearly the nature of this savage's experience, and it might even reflect a suggestion from the discarnate to have higher interests, in order to escape the penalties of Sisyphus and Ixion.

With primitive races, the failure to see or appreciate the idealistic point of view forces them to interpret what the civilized man thinks are subjective creations as solid as the objects of normal sense perception. The savage knows nothing of illusions or those subjective creations which men have observed ever since the early Greek philosophers first noted some of them. Since Kant and Leibnitz, who magnified the subjective side

of the mind, it is easy to discredit a transcendental world that claims to be so like sense reality, as appears in savage psychology. What does not stand the test of sense perception is presumably imaginative. Modern psychology, however much it relies upon the phenomena of sense for its data and starting point, regards even these data as having their subjective aspect. This turning of the mind on itself for at least a partial explanation of experience establishes for us a new and more or less independent point of view for determining the nature of things, if we can say anything at all about them apart from the way they appear to us in these data.

The position is anthropocentric as opposed to the point of view of primitive races which is cosmocentric. The savage had and has the most clear sense of dependence; the civilized man the clearest sense of freedom and independence.

Hence the savage sees nature and orders his life most distinctly from the point of view of external reality. He himself came out of it or is the product of the external world. He does not think that he himself has any independent existence. Consciousness is not a factor in what he sees, but merely a dependent spectator. His life is a perpetual struggle with external forces. Hence with so strong a sense of dependence, he will not easily see or adopt the position of the civilized man in which his own free action may count for as much or more in his development than the power of the external world. As the primitive mind does not distinguish one mental state from another and assumes the point of view of external reality, it will not easily discover the subjective factor in any of its life. Hence it is easy for the savage to believe in the supernatural. He discovers a difference between his normal and other life, but that difference is not supposedly due to the difference between normal and abnormal conditions, but