a certain congruity in a theory of the origin of immaterial souls, from observations and meditations on "shadows, reflections, dreams," etc.,[1] there is certainly a most significant incongruity in a theory of the origin of souls conceived, as Dr. Tylor rightly affirms them to be by Savages, as "substantial material beings", from such intangibilities as "shadows, reflections, dreams", etc.[2] And fifthly, the identity, not merely of the general, but of the special conclusions assumed to have been spontaneously arrived at by these Savage Philosophers of every race and clime postulates such an identity in the characteristics of races as is contradicted by all our later ethnological knowledge.
IV.—My fourth Query is: Is not the use of such terms as "soul", "ghost", "spirit", which ordinarily, with us, connote immateriality and (after death) disconnection from the body, in the highest degree misleading when applied to primitive conceptions; and are not these, therefore, terms which should be as much as possible abandoned in scientific discussions of these conceptions?
This Query is founded on the following considerations: First, the greater part of our assumed knowledge hitherto with respect to Savage and Folk Beliefs is derived from the reports of Christian missionaries and travellers who have all had an ingrained belief in an "immaterial soul",
- ↑ For Dr. Tylor's complete list, as distinguished from Mr. Spencer's, see Mind, 1877, ii, 424.
- ↑ See for illustrations of the notion of "souls" as "substantial material beings", Prim. Cult., ii, 409, 412. (I might myself add many other illustrations, and among the rest one of a very striking character from Evliya Effendi's Narrative of Travels, published by the Oriental Translation Fund; but it may here suffice to refer to Shakespeare's "sheeted dead" who leave the "graves tenantless"—Hamlet, Act i, Sc. 1). And Dr. Tylor's conclusion is, that "it appears to have been within the systematic schools of civilised philosophy that the transcendental definitions of the immaterial were obtained by abstraction from the primitive conception of the ethereal-material soul so as to reduce it from a physical to a metaphysical entity" (ii, p. 413). I do not, however, believe that Savages could either form or express the notion either of "ethereal" or "ethereal-material".
