Without dwelling on the causes, physical or psychological, which have been said by Frazer of Tiree (1707), Ferrier, Hibbert, Scott, and others, to account for the hallucinations of the sane, for ‘ghosts,’ Mr. Tylor has ably erected his theory of animism, or the belief in spirits. Thinking savages, he says, ‘were deeply impressed by two groups of biological phenomena,’ by the facts of living, dying, sleep, trance, waking and disease. They asked: ‘What is the difference between a living body and a dead one?’ They wanted to know the causes of sleep, trance and death. They were also concerned to explain the appearances of dead or absent human beings in dreams and waking visions. Now it was plain that ‘life’ could go away, as it does in death, or seems to do in dreamless sleep. Again, a phantasm of a living man can go away and appear to waking or sleeping people at a distance. The conclusion was reached by savages that the phantasm which thus appears is identical with the life which ‘goes away’ in sleep or trance. Sometimes it returns, when the man wakes, or escapes from his trance. Sometimes it stays away, he dies, his body corrupts, but the phantasm endures, and is occasionally seen in sleeping or waking vision. The general result of savage thought is that man’s life must be conceived as a personal and rational entity, called his ‘soul,’ while it remains in his body, his ‘wraith,’ when it is beheld at a distance during his life, his ‘ghost,’ when it is observed after his death. Many circumstances confirmed or illustrated this savage hypothesis Breath remains with the body during life, deserts it at death. Hence the words spiritus, ‘spirit,’ πνευμα, anima, and, when the separable nature of the shadow is noticed, hence come ‘shade,’ ‘umbra,’ σκια, with analogues in many languages. The hypothesis was also strengthened, by the great difficulty which savages feel in discriminating between what occurs in dreams, and what occurs to men awake. Many civilised persons feel the same difficulty with regard to hallucinations beheld by them when in bed, asleep or awake they know not, on the dim border of existence. Reflection on all these experiences ended in the belief in spirits, in souls of the living, in wraiths of the living, in ghosts of the dead, and, finally, in God.
This theory is most cogently presented by Mr. Tylor, and is confirmed by examples chosen from his wide range of reading. But, among these normal and natural facts, as of sleep, dream, breath, life, dying, Mr. Tylor includes (not as facts, but as examples of applied animistic theory) cases of ‘clairvoyance,’ apparitions of the dying seen by the living at a distance, second sight, ghostly disturbances of knocking and rapping, movements of objects, and so forth. It is not a question for Mr. Tylor whether clairvoyance ever occurs: whether ‘death-bed wraiths’ have been seen to an extent not explicable by the laws of chance, whether disturbances and movements of objects not to be accounted for by human agency are matters of universal and often well-attested report. Into the question of fact, Mr. Tylor explicitly declines to enter; these things only concern him because they have been commonly explained by the ‘animistic hypothesis,’ that is, by the fancied action of spirits. The animistic hypothesis, again, is the result, naturally fallacious, of savage man’s reasonings on life, death, sleep, dreams, trance, breath, shadow and the other kindred biological phenomena. Thus clairvoyance (on the animistic hypothesis) is the flight of the conscious ‘spirit’ of a living man across space or time; the ‘deathbed wraith’ is the visible apparition of the newly-emancipated ‘spirit,’ and ‘spirits’ cause the unexplained disturbances and movements of objects. In fact it is certain that the animistic hypothesis (though a mere fallacy) does colligate a great number of facts very neatly, and has persisted from times of low savagery to the present age of reason. So here is a case of the savage origin and persistent ‘survival’ of a hypothesis,—the most potent hypothesis in the history of humanity.
From Mr. Tylor’s point of view, his concern with the subject ceases here, it is not his business to ascertain whether the abnormal facts are facts or fancies. Yet, to other students, this question is very important. First, if clairvoyance, wraiths, and the other alleged phenomena, really do occur, or have occurred, then savage man had much better grounds for the animistic hypothesis than if no such phenomena ever existed. For instance, if a medicine-man not only went into trances, but brought back from these expeditions knowledge otherwise inaccessible, then there were better grounds for believing in a consciousness exerted apart from the body than if there were no evidence but that of non-veridical dreams. If merely the dream-coincidences which the laws of chance permit were observed, the belief in the soul’s dream-flight would win less favourable and general acceptance than it would if clairvoyance, ‘the sleep of the shadow,’ were a real if rare experience. The very name given by the Eskimos to the hypnotic state, ‘the sleep of the shadow,’ proves that savages do make distinctions between normal and abnormal conditions of slumber.
In the same way a few genuine wraiths, or ghosts, or ‘veridical hallucinations,’ would be enough to start the animistic hypothesis, or to confirm it notably, if it was already started. As to disturbances and movements of objects unexplained, these, in his own experience, suggested, even to De Morgan, the hypothesis of a conscious, active, and purposeful will, not that of any human being present. Now such a will is hardly to be defined otherwise than as ‘spiritual’. This order of phenomena, like those of clairvoyance and wraiths, might either give rise to the savage animistic hypothesis, or, at least, might confirm it greatly. In fact, if the sets of abnormal phenomena existed, or were held to exist, savage man scarcely needed the normal phenomena for the basis of his spiritual belief. The normal phenomena lent him such terms as ‘spirit,’ ‘shadow,’ but much of his theory might have been built on the foundation of the abnormal phenomena alone. A ‘veridical hallucination,’ of the dying would give him a ‘wraith’; a recognised hallucination of the dead would give him a ghost: the often reported and unexplained movements and disturbances would give him a vui, ‘house spirit,’ ‘brownie,’ ‘domovoy,’ follet, lar, or lutin. Or these occurrences might suggest to the thinking savage that some discontented influence survived from the recently dead.
Four thousand years have passed since houses were haunted in Egypt, and have left some sane, educated, and methodical men to meet the same annoyances as the ancient Egyptians did, by the same measures. We do not pretend to discover, without examination, the causes of the sounds and sights which baffle trained and not superstitious investigators. But we do say that similar occurrences, in a kraal or an Eskimo hut, in a wigwam, in a cave, or under a gunyeh, would greatly confirm the animistic hypothesis of savages. The theory of imposture (in some cases) does undeniably break down, for the people who hold it cannot even suggest a modus operandi within the reach of the human beings concerned, as in the case of the Wesleys. The theory of contagious hallucination of all the senses is the property of Coleridge alone. The hypothesis of a nervous force which sets up centres of conscious action is confined to Hartmann, and to certain Highland philosophers, cavalierly dismissed by the Rev. Robert Kirk as ‘men illiterate’. Instead of making these guesses, the savage thinkers merely applied the animistic hypothesis, which they had found to work very well already, and, as De Morgan says, to colligate the phenomena better than any other theory. We cannot easily conceive men who know neither sleep nor dreams, but if the normal phenomena of sleep and dreams had not existed, the abnormal phenomena already described, if they occurred, as they are universally said to do, could have given rise, when speculated upon, to the belief in spirits.
But, it may reasonably be urged, ‘the natural familiar facts of life, death, sleep, waking, dreams, breath, and shadows, are all versæ causæ, do undeniably exist, and, without the aid of any of your abnormal facts, afford basis enough for the animistic hypothesis. Moreover, after countless thousands of years, during which superstition has muttered about your abnormal facts, official science still declines to hear a word on the topic of clairvoyance or telepathy. You don’t find the Royal Society investigating second sight, or attending to legends about tables which rebel against the law of gravitation.’
These are cogent remarks. Normal facts, perhaps, may have suggested the belief in spirits, the animistic hypothesis. But we do not find the hypothesis (among the backward races) where abnormal facts are not alleged to be matters of comparatively frequent experience. Consequently we do not know that the normal facts, alone, suggested the existence of spirits to early thinkers, we can only make the statement on a priori grounds. Like George Eliot’s rural sage we ‘think it sounds a deal likelier’. But that, after all, though a taking, is not a powerful and conclusive syllogism.
Again, we certainly do not expect to see the Royal Society inquiring into second sight, or clairvoyance, or thought transference. When the Royal Society was first founded several of its members, Pepys, F.R.S.; Mr. Robert Boyle, F.R.S.; the Rev. Joseph Glanvill, F.R.S., went into these things a good deal. But, in spite of their title, they were only amateurs. They had no professional dignity to keep up. They were well aware that they, unlike the late Mr. Faraday, did not know, by inspiration or by common-sense, the limits of the possible. They tried all things, it was such a superstitious age. Now men of science, or the majority of them, for there are some exceptions, know what is, and what is not possible. They know that germs of life may possibly come down on meteorites from somewhere else, and they produced an argument for the existence of a bathybius. But they also know that a man is not a bird to be in two places at once, like Pythagoras, and that nobody can see through a stone wall. These, and similar allegations, they reckon impossible, and, if the facts happen, so much the worse for the facts. They can only be due to imposture or mal-observation, and there is an end of the matter. This is the view of official science. Unluckily, not many years ago, official science was equally certain that the ordinary phenomena of hypnotism were based on imposture and on mal-observation. These phenomena, too, were tabooed. But so many people could testify to them, and they could be so easily explained by the suggestive force of suggestion, that they were reluctantly admitted within the sacred citadel. Many people, sane, not superstitious, healthy, and even renowned as scientific specialists, attest the existence of the still rarer phenomena which are said, in certain cases, to accompany the now more familiar incidents of hypnotism. But these phenomena have never yet been explained by any theory which science recognises, as she does recognise that suggestion is suggestive. Therefore these rarer phenomena manifestly do not exist, and cannot be the subject of legitimate inquiry.
These are unanswerable observations, and it is only the antiquarian who can venture, in his humble way, to reply to them. His answer has a certain force ad hominem, that is, as addressed to anthropologists. They, too, have but recently been admitted within the scientific fold; time was when their facts were regarded as mere travellers’ tales. Mr. Max Müller is now, perhaps, almost alone in his very low estimate of anthropological evidence, and, possibly, even that sturdy champion is beginning to yield ground. Defending the validity of the testimony on which anthropologists reason about the evolution of religion, custom, manners, mythology, law, Mr. Tylor writes:—
‘It is a matter worthy of consideration that the accounts of similar phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts of the world, actually supply incidental proof of their own authenticity. . . . The test of recurrence comes in. . . . The possibility of intentional or unintentional mystification is often barred by such a state of things as that a similar statement is made in two remote lands by two witnesses, of whom A lived a century before B, and B appears never to have heard of A.’