By far the most wonderful and seemingly intelligent work of the soul is that by which it builds up, nourishes, repairs, developes, and finally reproduces the body it dwells in. Yet in all this it is almost as passive and unconscious as a vegetable. The effect is (as far as our comprehension of it goes) altogether preternatural and inexplicable; yet it is far less our effect than what we do by reason and by taking thought. What we pay for in dignity we lose in efficiency. While Nature carries us in her arms we move swiftly enough, but when she sets us on our feet to learn independence and self-rule, we cut a sorry figure. In our helplessness she does all for us as though we were yet part of her; but in the measure that we are weaned and begin to fend for ourselves as responsible agents, we are deprived of the aids and easements befitting the childhood of our race.
If this be true, if man in his primitive state possessed intuitive powers which have sunk into abeyance, either through the diversion of psychic energy to the development of other powers, or through desuetude, or as the instincts of the new-born babe are lost when their brief purpose is fulfilled; if the occasional recrudescence of these powers among civilized peoples is really a survival of an earlier state; then indeed we can understand that the evidence, or apparent evidence, for the existence of an X-region, or spirit-world, may have been immeasurably more abundant in the infancy of the human race, than it is now even among contemporary savages.
Put it how we will, it cannot be denied that belief in divination, in diabolic possession, and in magic, has largely contributed to belief in spirits; and that to ignore this contribution by throwing the whole burden on ordinary dreams is unscientific. During sleep Mr. Tylor himself is as much a prey to delusion as the most primitive savage; but the criteria by which on waking we condemn most of our dreams as illusions, seem really as accessible and obvious to the child or savage as to the philosopher; though the former through carelessness or poverty of language will perhaps say: "I saw," instead of: "I dreamt I saw." Children will speak as it were historically of even their day-dreams and imaginings, not from any untruthfulness or wish to deceive, but from that romancing tendency rightly reprehended in their elders, who should be alive to the conventional value of language. But the first and most natural use of speech is simply to express and embody the thought that is in us, not to assert, or affirm, or to instruct others. The child's romancing is not intended as assertion, although so taken by prosaic adults. It is from the same instinct which lies at the back of his eternal monologue, of the "Let's pretend" by which he is for the moment transformed into a soldier, or a steam-engine, or a horse. Eye-reading without articulation is impossible for the beginner, and thought that is not talked and acted is impossible for the child. Yet deeply as the child is wrapped up in his dreams, there is nothing more certain than that he is as clear as any adult as to the difference between romance and fact; and so it is no doubt with the savage, who can hardly be denied to have at least as much reason as an average child.
Closer study of the savage points to the conclusion that the civilized man falls into the same error in his regard as many adults do with respect to children, whom they fail hopelessly to interpret through lack of imagination, and to whom they are but tedious and ridiculous when they would fain be instructive and amusing; forgetting that the difference between the two stages of life is rather in the size of the toys played with, than in the way they are regarded. So too we are apt to look on foreign, and still more on savage language, symbolism, ways, and customs, as indicative of a far more radical difference and greater inferiority of mental constitution and ethical instincts than really exists. Mr. Kidd, in his book on Social Evolution, has contended with some plausibility that the brain-power of the Bushman and of the Cockney is much on a par at starting, and that the subsequent divergence is due chiefly to education and moral training; and certainly much of the evidence brought forward in Mr. Lang's volume seems to look that way. If the aboriginal Australian has a faith in the immortality of the soul and in a supreme God, the rewarder of righteousness, if he summarizes the laws of God under the precept of unselfishness; if in all this he is but a type of the universal savage, surely it were well if some of the missionary zeal which is devoted to supplying the heathen with Bibles which they cannot understand, were turned to the work of bringing our own godless millions up to their religious level.
But this takes us to the second and still more interesting part of The Making of Religion, which we shall have to discuss in the next section. At present we only wish to insist that it is a mistake to assume that because savages and children are, when compared with ourselves, so little, therefore their thoughts and ideas can be understood with little difficulty. Contrariwise, as the apparent difference in life and language is greater, the deeper and more patient investigation will it need to detect that radical sameness of mental and moral constitution which binds men together far more than diversity of education and environment can ever separate them. It is, therefore, exceedingly unlikely that either the child or the savage should, by failing to distinguish between dream and reality, introduce into his whole life that incoherence which is just the distinguishing characteristic of dreaming and lunacy. And, as a fact, do we really find the savage as depressed, on waking, by a dreamt-of calamity as by a real one; or as elated after a visionary scalping of foes as after a real victory? Does he on waking look for the said scalps among his collection of trophies, and is he perplexed and incensed at not finding them? Even if, like ourselves, he has occasionally a very vivid and coherent dream reconcilable with his waking circumstances, will he not judge of it by the vast majority of his dreams which are palpable illusions, and not by the few exceptional cases? If at times we ourselves doubt whether we witnessed something or dreamt it, yet we do so not because the seeming fact is one which makes for the existence of another world of a different order to this, but for the very contrary reason. If the savage only dreamt of the dead, he might find in this an evidence of their survival, but he dreams far more often of the living, and that, with circumstances which make the illusion manifest on waking. Seeing the awe and terror which all men have of the supernatural region, we ought, on the animistic hypothesis, to find among savages a great reluctance to go to bed—"to sleep! Perchance to dream—aye, there's the rub!" But we do not. Finally, just as the Chinese, who are supposed to mistake epilepsy for possession, have, unfortunately for the supposition, got two distinct words for the two phenomena, so it will doubtless be found that there is no savage who has not some word to express illusion; or whose language does not prove that he knows dreams are but dreams. We may well doubt if even animals on waking are affected by their dreams as by realities, or if a dog ever bit a man for a kick received in a dream. In short the dream-theory of souls is plausible only in the gross, but melts away under closer examination bit by bit.
Whether the S.P.R. will ever succeed in bottling a ghost, and in submitting it to the tests necessary to convince science, matters little. The real fruit of its labours will be to "convince men of sin," to convict science of being unscientific, and criticism of being uncritical—of being biassed by fashion to the extent of refusing to examine evidence which must be either admitted or explained away. Scepticism and credulity alike are hostile both to science and religion, and it is the common interest of these latter to secure a full recognition, on the one side of the principle of faith, that with God all things are possible; and on the other, of the principle of science which is: to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good. Credulity tends to make the actual co-extensive with the possible; while scepticism would limit the possible to the known actual. The true mind would be one in which faith and criticism were so tempered as to secure width without slovenliness, and exactitude without narrowness.
II.
How, apart from the imperfect lingering tradition of some primitive revelation, the belief in a surviving soul originates with contemporary savages, or might have originated among still ruder past races, is a question of some interest, not only for its own sake, but for the sake of whatever little light it may throw upon the more vital question as to the value of that belief. Had the doctrine of souls no other origin than a false inference from the ordinary phenomena of sleeping and dreaming; were it in no sense an instinctive belief, suggested perhaps and confirmed by supernormal facts, it would still have interest for the anthropologist as one of those almost necessary and universal errors through which the human mind struggles to the truth, such as the errors of astrology or alchemy; but it would in no way contribute to the argument for immortality ex consensu hominum—an argument of much avail when it is a case of man's instinctive judgments and primary intuitions, which are God-given, but of ever less value in proportion as there is a question of deductions, inferences, and self-formed judgments. Even if we discard the dream-theory altogether, we get no support from the consensus of savages as to the soul's survival, unless we have reason to think that the facts on which their inference rests are truly, and not only apparently, supernormal, and are, moreover, such as leave no other inference possible.
We know only too well that there are universal fallacies as well as universal truths of the human mind. For the practical necessities of life the imagination stands to man in good stead, but as the inadequate instrument of speculative thought its fertile deceitfulness is betrayed in his very earliest attempts at philosophy; nor are his subsequent efforts directed to anything else than the endeavour to correct and allow for its refractions and distortions, to transcend its narrow limitations, to force it to express, meanly and clumsily, truths which otherwise it would entirely obscure and deny. There might well be facts, nay, there are undoubtedly facts, which to the untutored mind necessarily and always seem altogether supernormal, but which science rightly explains to be, however unusual, yet natural, and in no way outside the ordinary laws. So far as the marvels of sorcerers and medicine-men are the work of chicanery, they will lack that persistence and ubiquity which justifies the investigation of other marvels for whose universality some basis must be sought in the uniform nature of things. Cheats will not always and everywhere hit on the same plan, nor will the independent testimony of false witnesses be found agreeing.
But if besides facts and appearances that science can really explain away, there be a residue which takes us into a region wherein science as yet has set no foot, then we may indeed be on our way to a confirmation of the usually accepted arguments for immortality by which the positivist may be met upon his own ground. In truth, metaphysical, moral, and religious arguments, however much they may avail with individuals who are subjectively disposed to receive them, cannot in these days influence the crowd of men who need some sort of violence offered to their intellect if they are to accept truths against which they are biassed. The temper of the majority is positivist; it will believe what it can see, touch, and handle, and no more. If then the natural truth of the independent existence of spirits can be inade experimentally evident—and à priori, why should it not?—men may not like it, but they will have either to accept it, or to deny all that they accept on like evidence. Such unwilling concession would of itself make little for personal religion in the individual; but its widespread acceptance could not fail to counteract the ethics of materialism, and so prepare the way for perhaps a fuller return to religion on the part of the many.