that the scientific stage tries merely to describe the facts without any metaphysics whether of the sensory or supersensory sort. The savage, however, imports metaphysics into the case and that of a very naive kind, at least if we are to interpret their language as it appears to represent the case. But as all language is symbolical and our own highly refined abstractions originated in similar imagery it is only our familiarity with abstract ideas that makes us notice the real or apparent absurdity of the primitive man's conceptions. "The Salish Indians of Oregon," continues Tylor, "regard the spirit as distinct from the vital principle and capable of quitting the body for a short time without the patient being conscious of its absence; but to avoid fatal consequences it must be restored as soon as possible, and accordingly the medicine man in solemn form replaces it down through the patient's head."

Tylor summarizes many of these phenomena in the following manner: "Such temporary exit of the soul has a world-wide application to the proceedings of the sorcerer, priest, or seer himself. He professes to send forth his spirit on distant journeys, and probably often believes his soul released for a time from its bodily prison, as in the case of that remarkable dreamer and visionary, Jerome Cardan, who describes himself as having the faculty of passing out of his senses as into ecstasy whenever he will, feeling when he goes into this state a sort of separation near the heart as if his soul were departing, this state beginning from his brain and passing down his spine, and he then feeling only that he is out of himself. Thus the Australian native doctor is alleged to obtain his information by visiting the world of spirits in a trance of two or three days' duration; the Khond priest authenticates his claim to office by remaining from one to fourteen days in a languid dreamy state, caused by one of his souls being away in the divine presence; the Greenland angekok's

soul goes forth from his body to fetch his familiar demon; the Turanian shaman lies in lethargy while his soul departs to bring hidden wisdom from the land of spirits."

Any one familiar with the modern phenomena of spiritualism can recognize very accurate resemblances to phenomena all about us. In this narrative are the phenomena of trance, of clairvoyant diagnosis and the "feeling of being out of the body." The separation of the soul from the body to communicate is one of the claims made in nearly all mediumistic phenomena, and that too when the medium has had no familiarity with the idea in his or her normal life. No wonder Tylor adds: "Modern Europe has kept closely enough to the lines of early philosophy, for such ideas to have little strangeness to our own time. Language preserves record of them in such expressions as 'out of oneself,' 'beside oneself,' 'in an ecstasy,' and he who says that his spirit goes forth to meet a friend can still realize in the phrase a meaning deeper than metaphor."

"This same doctrine," continues Tylor, "forms one side of the theory of dreams prevalent among the lower races. Certain of the Greenlanders, Cranz remarks, consider that the soul quits the body in the night and goes out hunting, dancing, and visiting; their dreams which are frequent and lively, having brought them to this opinion. Among the Indians of North America, we hear of the dreamer's soul leaving his body and wandering in quest of things attractive to it. These things the waking man must endeavor to obtain, lest his soul be troubled, and quit the body altogether.

The New Zealanders considered the dreaming soul to leave the body and return, even traveling to the region of the dead to hold converse with its friends. The Tagals of Luzon object to waking a sleeper on account of the absence of his soul. The Karens, whose theory of the wandering soul has just been noticed

(in a previous paragraph), explains dreams to be what this lá (soul) sees and experiences in its journeys when it has left the body in sleep. They even account with much acuteness for the fact that we are apt to dream of people and places which we knew before; the leippya ("butterfly"; another word for spirit or soul), they say, can only visit the regions where the body it belongs to has been already. Onward from the savage state, the idea of the spirit's departure in sleep may be traced into the speculative philosophy of higher nations, as in the Vedanta system, and the Kabbala.

St. Augustine tells one of the double narratives which so well illustrate theories of this kind. The man who tells Augustine the story relates that, at home one night before going to sleep, he saw coming to him a certain philosopher, most well known to him, who then expounded to him certain Platonic passages, which, when asked previously, he had refused to explain. And when he (afterwards) inquired of this philosopher why he did at his house what he had refused to do when asked at his own: 'I did not do it,' said the philosopher, 'but I dreamt that I did.' And thus, says Augustine, that was exhibited to one by phantastic image while waking, which the other saw in dream."

There is in this last incident an illustration of coincidental dreams with which psychic research has had so much to do and the verification of veridical forms of them goes far to make credible the story of St. Augustine, though it has in itself no evidential value. The main thing, however, is the resemblance of primitive ideas to this and the probable source of them.

A savage has not reached the stage of culture in which he can appreciate the difference between the subjective and the objective, the distinction between external objects and the creations of his own imagination. Even we in our sleep do not imagine that what we see is not real. We interpret it in accordance with

all the categories of reality and discover our illusion only when we awake and remember the dream. Savages are no better than civilized sleepers and most naturally take dream images and hallucinations as real. It requires a theory of idealism to bring out the liabilities of illusion. But given the tendencies to make dreams realistic, their logical development would know no limits, and the curious stories about primitive peoples are quite rational on that basis, though not true.

The "voices" of which modern spiritualists speak find their equivalent among savages. The spirit voice was a "low murmur, chirp, or whistle, as it were the ghost of a voice." This reminds us of Isaiah's "wizards that peep and mutter" and Shakespeare's ghosts that squeak and gibber. It is the same with visions. Tylor remarks of these: "There is no doubt that honest visionaries describe ghosts as they really appear to their perception, while even the impostors who pretend to see them conform to the descriptions thus established; thus, in West Africa, a man's kla or soul, becoming at his death a sisa or ghost, can remain in the house with the corpse, but is visible only to the wongman, the spirit doctor. Sometimes the phantom has the characteristic quality of not being visible to all of an assembled company. Thus the natives of the Antilles believed that the dead appeared on the roads when one went alone, but not when many went together; thus among the Finns the ghosts of the dead were to be seen by the shamans, but not by men generally unless in dreams. Such is perhaps the meaning of Samuel's ghost, visible to the witch of Endor, while Saul yet has to ask her what it is she sees."

How like modern seances these incidents are, and this whether we regard the modern phenomena as genuine or fraudulent, as we may apply suspicion to the ancient as well. But there is the same distinction here as we observe in modern life, even though we treat

them as hallucinations. It is no wonder that some men whose reading in psychic phenomena has not gone beyond that of primitive peoples should call the work in it "troglodyte psychology," and for our purposes it matters not whether it is so or not. We are examining ideas, not their validity. The unity between the past and the present does not guarantee the truth of either of them, but if we can obtain credentials for the occurrence of similar phenomena to-day, we may well ask whether the ancient superstitions did not have a basis of truth in them distorted by the ignorance of those who received the facts.

As suggesting a possible origin of Greek ideas about the soul as fine matter, possibly in the conceptions of the less civilized people from whom they had themselves come, we may quote another passage from Tylor: "Explicit statements as to the substance of the soul are to be found both among low and high races, in an instructive series of definitions. The Tongans imagined the human soul to be the finer or more aeriform part of the body, which leaves it suddenly at death; something comparable to the perfume and essence of a flower as related to the more solid vegetable fibre.

"The Greenland seers described the soul as they perpetually perceived it in their visions; it is pale and soft, they said, and he who tries to seize it feels nothing for it has no flesh nor bone nor sinew. The Caribs did not think the soul so immaterial as to be invisible, but said it was subtle and thin like a purified body. Turning to higher races, we may take the Siamese as an example of a people who conceive of souls as consisting of subtle matter escaping sight and touch, or as united to a swiftly moving aerial body."

This last instance is only another among the semibarbarous races of a conception that reminds us of the Pauline "spiritual body" the theosophic “astral body" and the Epicurean "ethereal organism," a view