spirits who are beings of an order higher than mankind, and the disembodied spirits of men, which have become, in the vulgar sense of the word, ghosts."[1] He warns us that "from the neglect of this distinction great confusion and misunderstanding arise".[2]
But the anecdote that follows gives us a key which till now has surely been somewhat neglected. A certain chief, we read, "told one of the first missionaries how he proposed to treat him. 'If you die first,' said he, 'I shall make you my god.' And the same Tuikilakila would sometimes say of himself, 'I am a god.' It is added that he believed it too; and his belief was surely correct. For it should be observed that the chief never said he was or should be a god, in English, but that he was or should be a kalou, in Fijian, and a kalou he no doubt became; that is to say, on his decease his departed spirit was invoked and worshipped as he knew it would be."[3] How many current versions of primitive belief may be shattered by this unsuspected difference? How many such declarations have been taken for what we now call objective, when all the time the speaker may have meant what is now defined as the subjective?
Animism in the ordinary sense appears not to exist in Melanesia; no spirit animates any natural object as the soul does a man.[4] A Vui or spirit has no form to be seen, and is apparently an intelligence, but can somehow be connected with a stone or other like object.[5] But in order to communicate with such a spirit there must be two links: the natural object and a human person—nature and man! Suppose we here call the spirit. Mind. Both are alike useful symbols, but have acquired a fictitious isolation and substance. "The native mind", observes Dr. Codrington, "aims high when it conceives a being who lives and thinks and knows and has power in nature without a gross body or even form; but it fails when it comes to deal with an individual being of such a nature."[6] There lies the key, I would suggest. Has not failure followed the attempt to translate the generic into the definite, the individual, the concrete? Yet more, has it not resulted from the desertion of what may perhaps be called the dynamic mode of conception, identifying the meaning of life with its functions and activities, and linking these with all natural forms of energy? This seems,
