Considering then the bias of the dominant scientific school, which makes it refuse even to examine the carefully gathered evidence of the S.P.R.; we need not wonder if the reports of travellers concerning the existence of like phenomena among savages and barbarians all over the world are dismissed with a certain à priori superciliousness. Yet surely, on evolutionist principles, the only possible clue to the mode in which belief in spirits and in God may have originated with "primitive man," is the mode in which those beliefs are actually now sustained, and, so to say, "proved" by the most primitive specimens of existing humanity; by, for example, those bushmen of Australia whose facial angle and cerebral capacity is supposed to leave no room for much difference between their mind and that of the higher anthropoids. Doubtless it is hard to get anything like scientific evidence out of people so uncultivated, whose language and modes of conception are so alien to our own. Individual travellers, moreover, have been the victims of their own credulity, stupidity, self-conceit, and prejudice. "But the best testimony of the truth of the reports as to the actual belief in the facts, is the undesigned coincidence of the evidence from all quarters. When the stories brought by travellers, ancient and modern, learned and unlearned, pious or sceptical, agree in the main, we have all the certainty that anthropology can offer."
From this ever-growing mass of evidence, it would appear that the universal belief among savages in a spirit-world is mainly strengthened and sustained, not by the phenomena of dreaming but by what Mr. Spencer would call "alleged" supernormal manifestations, such as those of clairvoyance, crystal-gazing, apparitions, miracles, prophecies, possession, and the like. For belief in such marvels exists beyond doubt, and furnishes a very obvious and logical basis for the further belief in the invisible causes of these visible effects; nor should we have recourse to an hypothetical and more indirect explanation of belief in a spirit-world when an actual and direct explanation is at hand. If we see the branch growing out of the tree, we need not inquire what trunk it sprang from, unless we have strong evidence that it is only a graft. All investigation tends to show that savages believe in spirits and in the spirit-world because they witness, or firmly believe they witness, supernormal phenomena.
Besides this, it must be allowed that together with the normal phenomena of dreaming, there are abnormal dreams which even to cultivated minds seem at times as supernormal as second-sight or prophecy. But it is not on supernormal, but on normal dreams that animists base their explanation. We need not deny that dreams and delirium may have given palpable shape to the conception of a ghost, and may also have helped forward the notion of a spirit by furnishing something intermediary between the grossness of our waking sense-experiences, and the altogether elusive and difficult thought of unembodied will and intelligence independent of space and time.
In the main then it seems more plausible to maintain that the idea of unembodied or disembodied spirits was shaped by that instinctive law of our mind which makes us argue from the nature of effects to the nature of the agency. The first impulse would be to ascribe every intelligent effect to some human agency, but other circumstances would subsequently incline the savage reluctantly to divest the agent of one or more of the limitations of humanity, and to clothe him with preter-human attributes. Nearly all the supernormal phenomena believed in by primitive man—so far as we can judge of him from contemporary savagery—would suggest the agency of an invisible man; clairvoyance, and other manifestations of preternatural knowledge, would suggest independence of the senses in the acquisition of knowledge; every kind of "miracle" would bespeak an extension of power over physical nature beyond human wont; while all these together would point to that freedom from the trammels of space and time, which is of the very essence of immaterial or spiritual subsistence. Thus, by a gradual process of dehumanization, the mind would be instinctively led from the notion of a man magnified in all excellences and refined from all limitations, to the conception of spirit. But coexistently with this progress of the reason, the imagination would ever strain to clothe the thought in bodily form as far as possible, and would cling to the notions suggested by dreams and waking hallucinations, while language, after its wont, would speak of the spirit as the umbra, the imago, the shadow, the breath, the attenuated replica of the body. Thus we find among all men, savage and civilized, a certain unsteadiness in their notion of spirit, whether created or divine—a continual tendency to corruption and anthropomorphism, due to the conflict between reason and imagination, resulting so often in the domination of the latter.
For this view of the subject it is not necessary that we should admit the preternatural character of the phenomena which form the subject-matter of psychical research, but only that we should acknowledge the hardly disputable fact that belief in such marvels is universal and persistent among savages—a fact which science is bound by its own principles to explain, and not to ignore. Whether, as Mr. Lang seems inclined to think, among much illusion, chicanery, and ignorance, there may not be truth enough to make the inference of an X-world legitimate, whether the said universality, persistence, and recrudescence of this seeming credulity can be accounted for in any other satisfactory way, is a further consideration. If in some dim fashion the Northern Indians anticipated modern science in their explanation of the aurora borealis, connecting it with familiar electric manifestations, may it not be, asks Mr. Lang, that in their inference from supernormal facts which experimental science refuses to hear of or to examine, they have again been sagaciously beforehand? Doubtless their explanation is crude and inadequate in both cases; but is it much more so than that offered by supposing electricity to be a fluid subject to currents; or by assigning many inexplicable psychic phenomena to "hysteria"—a mere word-cause?
The supposition is somewhat favoured if we give ear to that crowd of witnesses whose combined evidence, duly discounted and tested, makes it clear that even among those who ought to have been civilized out of all belief in aught behind the veil, the very same superstitions break out, or creep in, time after time, with new names perhaps, new clothes, new faces, but in substance identical with those held by what we esteem the most benighted races.
Further, it is evident that savages pay attention—over-attention, no doubt—to these supernormal phenomena, being free from hostile philosophic bias in the matter, and bent the other way; and that in consequence they have everywhere observed, classified, and systematized them in their own rude, simple way, and have thus forestalled what the S.P.R., in the teeth of science, is now endeavouring to do scientifically. With us, moreover, it is mere chance that reveals a "medium," or hypnotic subject here and there: but with savages they are sought out diligently, and all who have any latent aptitude that way are detected and utilized; and thus the field of their experience is considerably widened.
But besides all this, it seems more than plausible to suppose that among primitive and undeveloped races such preternatural phenomena either occur, or seem to occur, much more frequently and extensively; and that apparently supernormal faculties are more often developed.
Nor can this be explained solely on the score of their readier credulity and their lack of criticism; for there is good evidence to show that the development of the rational and self-directive faculties is at the sacrifice of those instinctive and intuitional modes of operation which do duty for them while man is yet in a state of pupilage. Memory, for example, is fresher and more assimilative in childhood, but deteriorates very often as the higher faculties come into use; and indeed we cannot fail to see how the introduction of printing, writing, and mnemonic arts and artifices of all kinds, has lowered the average power of civilized memory, and made the ordinary feats of more primitive times seem to us magical and incredible. We also notice the high development of hearing, sight, and other forms of perception among savages who live by their five senses rather than by their wits. When we descend to the animal-world we are confronted by cognitive faculties whose effects we see, but of whose precise nature we can form no conjecture whatever. That which guides the migratory birds in their wanderings, and simulates polity in the bee-hive and ant-hill, is not reason, but is something for practical purposes far better than reason. Putting a number of these and of similar considerations together seems to suggest that development in the direction of self-instruction (which is reason) and self-management and independence, is loss as well as gain.
What we gain is no doubt our own in a truer sense than that we had when we hung upon Nature's breast, and were guided passively by instincts and intuitions to purposes that reason can never reach to.