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, be- coming 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

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