The idea of the soul

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CHAP.

I. Psychology and Primitive Culture .... I

Chapter I Psychology And Primitive Culture

§ I. Nature of the Investigation.

Few conceptions can show the universality and permanence, the creative power and morphological influence which have characterised throughout history the Idea of the Soul.

To it we owe the conception of an order of spiritual beings, and of a spiritual world existing now and hereafter. At some relatively late stage of culture it became absolute in the idea of God. It is thus the basis of all religion. One typical case may be cited. The highest authority on the religions of China concludes that " the human soul is the original form of all beings of a higher order. Its worship is the basis of religion in that country. . . . Taoism was originally a compendium of customs and practices framed upon the prevailing ideas concerning the human soul. . . . It cast these into a system of philosophy, alchemy, and religion." ^

But neither its origin nor its influence is confined to the religious sphere.

Just as the soul itself is concerned with every mode of apprehending its total environment, so the idea of

1 J. J. M. De Groot, The Religious System of China (1891), I. xiii. i.

I I the soul is bound up with the evolution of mind in general. We may go farther and assert that not only have its results upon the mind, and the difficulties which its comprehension has produced, assisted mental development, or rather have been inevitable conditions of it, but its origin and development also are identical with the earliest steps in mental evolution. Both in the race and in the individual we shall find it to be the first purely intellectual result of human reaction to environment. It is thus our first effort towards an explanation of things, our first act of thought. In the early stages of culture the idea provides a form for consciousness, and in all stages its development involves the search for reality. This search is one aspect of that desire for knowledge, that instinct of curiosity, which is the mainspring of science. It is not too much to say that from the earliest culture known or inferable, up to the triumph of experimental science to-day, the idea has been the inspiration of all intellectual speculation — theological, metaphysical, and scientific.

We may, therefore, employ another metaphor and describe it as the original cell out of which all thought and consequently all knowledge have been evolved. To trace its origin and development is thus in great measure to trace the origin and development of the soul itself, and the history of man's efforts to understand both himself and his world.

This evolution has not been adequately expounded, and the reason is obvious. The anthropology of culture possesses an abundant material, but, as is often urged against it, its results are untrustworthy because its methods are inexact. The fact is that its methods are merely those of unaided common sense. Primitive psychology has yet to be written, but it cannot be written by methods like these. Their ineffectiveness is well illustrated by the present problem. This, the most important and far-reaching of all sociological questions, the genesis of that great conception which divides man into body and soul, and the universe into matter and spirit, still, after years of study, remains unanswered. The statement which to-day passes for a solution is little more advanced than that of Hobbes, two hundred and fifty years ago, or even than those of Aristotle and the still earlier Greek thinkers whom Lucretius followed. For all practical purposes we are no nearer a solution than were the thinkers of more than two thousand years ago. Yet this problem is the simplest, as it is the first, of all the problems presented by mental evolution in man. When once anthropology employs the verified experimental results of psychology the solution is obvious. The origin not only of the idea of the soul itself, but of the idea of a spiritual or supernatural world, is then automatically explained.

§ 2. Tylors Theory.

The only classical work on the subject has been done by Tylor, who colligated the facts of savage and barbarous culture by the principle of animism, " the doctrine of souls." ^ His study illustrated the influence of the idea in the evolution of culture. But he was more concerned with its influence than with its origin. In his explanation of the latter there is no psychological precision — the fact being that his explanation was

1 E. B. Tylor, "The Religion of Savages" in The Fortnightly Renjieiu, August 1866 ; "The Philosophy of Religion among the Lower Races of Mankind," Journal of the Ethnological Society, 1870 ; Primitinje Culture — first edition 1871, second 1873, third 1891, fourth 1903. His Gifford Lectures on the subject have not yet been published.

completed before the development of experimental psychology. Nevertheless, its main features have not been materially altered ; all other work on the subject has been mainly descriptive. Tylor's explanation, therefore, must be a starting-point for further inquiry.

We shall give an abstract of his account of animism and of his explanation of its origin, and shall then discuss some attempts at improving the explanation, and finally the explanation itself.

Tylor described animism as " a belief in the animation of all nature, rising at its highest pitch to personification." This belief is " bound up with that primitive mental state where man recognises in every detail of his world the operation of personal life and will," and is, in short, a conception of " pervading life and will in nature."

Animism is divided into " two great dogmas, forming part of one consistent doctrine." The first concerns the souls of individual creatures ; the second concerns other spirits up to the rank of powerful deities. He speaks of the whole as " an ancient and world-wide philosophy, of which belief is the theory and worship is the practice," and gives as " a minimum definition " of religion " the belief in spiritual beings." ^ For an explanation of the origin of the idea of souls in natural objects he relies on the presupposed belief in the animation of all nature. The idea of the soul of man he explains thus : the earliest men were confronted with two intellectual problems, (i) What makes the difference between a living body and a dead ? What causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death .^ (2) What are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions ?

The solution was that man possessed a " life " and a " phantom " ; these were separable, but could be, and, in the end, were combined as a dual manifestation of one and the same " soul." ^

This explanation was partially anticipated by Hobbes. " For the matter or substance of the Invisible Agents so fancyed, they could not by naturall cogitation fall upon any other concept, but that it was the same as that of the Soule of man, and that the Soule of man was of the same substance with that which appeareth in a Dreame to one that sleepeth ; or in a Looking-glasse to one that is awake ; which, men not knowing that such apparitions are nothing else but creatures of the Fancy, think to be reall and external Substances." " From this ignorance of how to distinguish Dreams and other strong fancies from Vision and Sense did arise the greater part of the religion of the Gentiles in times past that worshipped Satyres, Faunes, Nymphs, and the like ; and nowadays the opinion that rude people have of Fayries, Ghosts, and Goblins, and of the power of Witches." ^

§ 3. Supplementary Theories.

Little has been taken from or added to the Tylorian theory of the origin of animism. On it have been based many important descriptive studies of the development of cultural and social institutions.

Some students assume that hallucination, such as is found to-day in persons who see ghosts, was a more or less normal characteristic of primitive man.

1 E. B. Tylor, Primit't've Culture^, i. 428, 4.29. We shall preserve, as far as possible, the useful distinction between "soul," as connected with " corporeal realities," and " spirit," as incorporeal.

2 T. Hobbes, Lenj'tathan (1651), chapters ii. and xii.

Others emphasise the belief in a " life " or *' vital principle " animating all nature. This belief has been distinguished by the term animatism. The theory is half of the Tylorian, and complementary to the other half expounded by Hobbes.

Others point to facts which, as they urge, are with difficulty brought into the category of animism, such as those " supreme beings " occasionally found in the lower culture. These are not *' spirits," but complete material personalities, magnified men.

Others, again, cite various phenomena which may indicate an age before spirits, a pre-animistic period, and infer that the mysterious, the awful, or the unusual became the " supernatural," and in particular led men to conceive a material '* force " or objectified "will," existing in such objects as produced the feelings of awe and mystery, and manifesting itself after the fashion of electric energy. This force would develop into " personified " beings. The first half of this view is as old as Hobbes and the Greek and Latin thinkers.

It is elaborated by Westermarck. " It is not," he says, " correct to say that ' as the objects of the visible world are conceived as animated, volitional, and emotional, they may be deemed the originators of those misfortunes of which the true cause is unknown.' " Man's belief in supernatural agents " is an attempt to explain strange and mysterious phenomena which suggest a volitional cause. The assumed cause is the will of a supernatural being. ... If an object of nature is looked upon as a supernatural agent, mentality and life are at the same time attributed to it as a matter of course. Inanimate things are conceived as volitional, emotional, and animate, because they are deemed the originators of startling events." ^ This he conceives to be the true origin of animism.

Frazer has analysed funeral and mourning customs in connection with the emotion of fear. He has also developed the idea of the external soul, and has emphasised the frequent belief that the soul is a miniature duplicate of the thing.^

Kruijt, confining his conclusions to the East Indian Islanders, holds that they distinguish sharply between the soul of a living and of a dead man. The former is part of the pantheistic life which fills all Nature ; the latter alone is individual. It does not come into being until a man is dead. These two " souls " are never combined ; the soul of a man in life is an absolutely different thing from his soul after death. ^

Wundt has applied psychology to the development of religion, ritual, and myth, but has not given a new explanation of the origin of animism.*

§ 4. Criticism of Supplementary Theories.

These further views require some brief discussion.

Hallucination is no more frequent in the lower culture than in civilisation. The biological probability is that its frequency, never considerable, decreases the nearer man is to the animals. By hypothesis, animism was a very early step in progress. Hallucination, moreover, is abnormal, but, in order to explain a

1 E. Westermarck, The Origin and Denjelopment of the Moral Ideas (1908), ii. 395 f., quoting Peschcl, Kacei of Man, 245.

2 J. G. Frazer, " On certain Burial Customs as illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul," in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xv. 6+ ff. ; The Golden Bough (1890).

2 A. C. Kruijt, Het Animisme in den Indischen Archipel (1906). * W. Wundt, V'6lkerpsychologie : My thus und Religion (1908-9).

universal phenomenon, such as the belief in the soul, normal and universal, not abnormal and occasional causes must be assigned. There is a further point : hallucinational apparitions are as real as the real objects.^ They might thus, in the case of a subject, who by hypothesis has not yet acquired the idea of the soul, produce a belief in duplicate reality or bilocation, namely, that a person or thing can be in two places at once. They could not produce, even for their occasional percipients, a belief in an entity like the soul, less real and less material than the body.

The " supreme beings," not to be confused with " heroes," like those of the Torres Islanders,^ or with " ancestral spirits," like those of the Kafirs,^ or with the " first men," so generally assumed by the early biologist,^ are frequent in the higher barbarism ; in the lowest savagery, as among the Australians, their occurrence is not established.^ If they did exist here they would be explainable as premature sports of the mythologising imagination. Their presence or absence, however, has nothing to do with the origin of the idea of the soul, but only concerns the origin of the idea of a God. If this did not originate in the same way as the idea of the soul, it must have originated from notions of causality. These, however, are not early,

* For convenience we shall employ the terms "real" and "reality" in opposition to " ideal " and " ideality," to express the " thing " or " object,'* as the phenomenal in space in opposition to the mental reality.

2 A. C. Haddon, Report of the Cambridge Expedition to Torres Strait, v. 256, 367, 377.

^ See below, ch. iv.

* J. Perham, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1881), No. viii. 144.

* Wundt decides, on psychological grounds, against the existence of a primitive Monotheism or Cryptomonotheism, V'dlkerpsychologie (1909), ii. iii. ; 395, 404 ff.

and the notion of *' cause " cannot originate a personal entity.

The phenomena supposed to result in " pre-animistic " ideas of an objectified " will " are the unusual, practically the abnormal experiences of life. Notions like the mana of the Melanesians, the orenda ^ of the Hurons, the wakan of the Dacotas, expressing mysterious power, such as is exercised by the professional seer, shaman, or medicine-man, and by impressive natural " forces " or objects, as, for instance, electricity or curious rocks, or by anything unusual, are psychologically late developments. They are also merely different in degree from other ideas of activity. Again, though awe and wonder, terror and admiration, have had their share in the making of religion, the point here is the origin of the soul. Now, emotions cannot be separated from the sensations which institute them, and an emotion comes at the end, not at the beginning of a psychic process. Thus, we feel terror because we run away or want to run away ; we do not actually run away because we feel terror. This order is still constant when the sensation does not end in action. Again, an emotion, as such, cannot originate a sensible form. A personal concrete entity like the soul can only be developed from sensations, chiefly visual. Lastly, the assumption that early man conceived the idea of an impersonal, abstract "power," and subsequently, whether from this or otherwise, evolved the idea of a personal concrete soul, is an argument from the abstract to the concrete. The psychological order is always the other way, from the concrete to the abstract.

Westermarck corrects this view by taking the

1 Hewitt, the authority for orenda, denies that it ever is personified ; Codrington, the authority for mana, says the same.

lo THE IDEA OF THE SOUL

psychological order. He also corrects the theory of the animation and personification of Nature as preceding the development of the soul. But his argument does not give us the origin of animism, that Is, of the idea of the soul. If the object is regarded as a supernatural being first, and later credited, as a matter of course, with a soul, we have two fallacies. First, an object Is supernatural because it is extraordinary, it therefore becomes animlsed. But why ? Because it behaves like an extraordinary person. But this need not Involve the Idea that the extraordinary is the supernatural or spiritual. We must have the idea of the spiritual first. In any case also there is here the analogy, which Is always late, from subject to object. Lastly, this view assigns a universal result to exceptional and sporadic causes.

An argument may here be noticed as a curiosity of science, and a reduction to absurdity of the theory that emotions can produce the Idea of a supernatural or spiritual world. It Is to the efi^ect that the higher animals possess the germ of animism, whatever that may be. This Is supposed to be proved by familiar facts like these : — Romanes frightened a dog by tying a thread to a bone, and drawing the bone away from the animal. Most animals are alarmed by any unusual noise or appearance.^ The theory might derive support from the well-known beliefs that pigs can see wind, and that dogs can see spirits. The Euahlayi people in Australia hold the latter opinion. In Maryland there is a belief that horses can see ghosts. Irish peasants suppose that when a horse becomes frightened suddenly, and the driver can see nothing to account

^ G. J. Romanes, Animal Intelligence, 455 ff. ; Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence, 339.

for it, the horse is in visual communion with the spirit-world.^

Kruijt's observation that the " life-soul " and the •'after-death-soul " are never combined is an important contribution to the subject. He may be said to have completely established his view. His opinion, however, that the "life-soul" is impersonal is modified by himself. He also ignores the possibility, which his facts suggest, of a personal soul, not merely a " life-soul," being developed during life. That the ''life-soul " is merely a part of a pantheistic " life-force " pervading nature is an argument differing only in words from the Tylorian animation and personification of all nature, and suffers from the same defects.

The inferences made in anthropology from savagery to primitive life are too often based neither on psychology, linguistics, nor biology. Phenomena from widely separated stages of evolution are too often classed together. There is a good deal of the unscientific process from the abstract to the concrete. The anthropologist is perpetually guilty of the psychologist's fallacy ; he is always putting his own problems and ideas into the mind of primitive man.

As a matter of fact the ordinary savage is not, and primitive man is still less likely to have been, confronted by any problems at all. If he had been they would not have taken the shape given to them by modern speculation. Man, of course, has always been trying to understand and to control his environment, but in the early stages this process was unconscious. The matters which are problems for us existed latent in the primitive brain ; there, undefined,

1 K. Langloh Parker, The Euahlayi Tribe (1905), 46 ; Journal of American Folklore, viii. 25, xi. 11.

lay both problem and answer ; through many ages of savagery, first one and then another partial answer emerged into consciousness ; at the end of the series, hardly completed to-day, there will be a new synthesis in which riddle and answer are one.

The theory of animatism will be discussed later.

§ 5. Criticism of Tylors Theory.

Tylor explained animism before psychology could assist the explanation. The sole object of the present inquiry is to apply what psychology gives us to the problem of the origin of the idea of the soul. We have no desire to demolish any theory, still less to attempt to discredit any work of permanent value. But that anthropology is in need of some exactness of method is obvious from the chaos that still exists ; that such a state of things is mischievous is well shown by the following case : "A recent admirable manual of a Semitic language, by way of explaining objective gender, informs the pupil that ' to primitive man all nature seemed endowed with life ; he, therefore, ascribed the distinction of sex to every existing thing.' Rarely," adds Payne, " has more error been got into two lines. The writer has been misled by ' animism.' "^ We shall frequently have occasion to refer to similar misconceptions arising from similar causes.

Tylor himself over-estimated the importance of certain pathological or abnormal states as direct or indirect sources of animism. The '* trance," for instance, is pathological, that is to say, in the sense of the term established by Virchow, biologically abnormal, if we may apply this term to a psychological pheno-

1 E. J. Payne, History of the Neiu IVorld called America (1899), ii. 264.

menon. " Vision," in Tylor's use, is identical with hallucination of sight, an abnormal process. As we have already observed, it is illegitimate to base a universal phenomenon on abnormal facts. Yet he places " vision " and " trance " on a causational equality with dreams. " What causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death ? Nothing but dreams and visions could have ever put into men's minds such an idea as that of souls being ethereal images of bodies." ^ Hallucinations we have already discussed, and concluded that they would perhaps produce the ideas of bilocation and of dupHcation of objects. The incidental influence of epilepsy, hysteria, delirium, and mania, upon the ideas of inspiration and incarnation, has nothing to do with the actual origin of animism. Rare disturbances like these might corroborate an already existing idea of a separable or unattached " spirit."

Dreams themselves are psychologically abnormal. Dreaming, in Wundt's phrase, is a normal temporary insanity. For practical purposes, however, dreams are normal enough, and, as the dream-theory of the origin of animism has been established for two thousand years or more, we have to reckon with it.

Here, as always, we must assume a tabula rasa, the naive mind of a child or primitive person, who has not even dreamt of such a thing as the soul.

Are then the inferences from and about dreams sufficient to originate the idea of the soul } Children, innocent of spiritualistic doctrine, regard dreaming as a matter of course, a process as natural and nonmysterious as ordinary sensation. Yet they realise a difference between the experiences of dreams and of

1 Tylor, Primiti've Culture*, i. 450.

waking.^ But there is no case on record of such a child inferring from dreams the existence of a soul, or of a reality different from the phenomenal. The Port Darwin Australians are described as having been unable to distinguish between body and soul. This as it may be, whatever it means. We are also told that they could give no explanation of dreams, though they believed in their reality.^ A Kafir, describing a dream, said that the dead man of whom he dreamed " came not as a snake or shade, but in very presence," and that he did not think it was the dead man until he awoke.^ This, of course, is the universal experience during the process of dreaming, but it is the inference made on waking that is the point. A difference is then, as a rule, inferred. Savages who have the idea of the soul say that the soul leaves the body and sees persons or things, or, more rarely, that the souls of persons and things visit the sleeper. But it is psychologically impossible for the idea of the soul, as we actually find it, to be originated by the inferences from dreams. In the first place, there is frequently at some point during the dream a semi-conscious realisation of self, that is to say, of the self as viewing things and persons in the dreams. In the next place, dream-figures are no less intense, generally more intense, and therefore more real, sometimes even larger, than what is seen when awake. It is quite erroneous to speak of dream-figures as " phantoms." It is in accordance with this super-reality that the naive consciousness speaks of seeing " him " or " her," or " it " in a dream, not their souls. Can such an intensely real sight produce the idea of " souls

' Dudley Kidd, Sa'vage Childhood (1906), 105.

2 P. Foelsche in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxiv. 198.

3 R. Callaway, The Religious System of the Amazulu^, 231.

being ethereal images of bodies," or the idea of a still more ethereal " phantom " ? ^

The " realities " of dreams might, equally with those of hallucinations, have produced the idea of bilocation, of duplicate "real" bodies; they might also have produced at a later stage, and probably have assisted in producing, the idea that the visual energy of the brain can leave the body during sleep ; but they could not have produced the idea of an ethereal, rarefied, and often miniature entity, much less the idea of a ghostly phantom. The chief characteristic of the soul in all its stages is this inferiority to the body in the qualities of solidity and extension. As we shall find, there is a simple process by which this ethereal body is produced. When produced, of course, dreams and other phenomena may corroborate it, or rather, may be explained by it, in spite of their greater " reality," but that they should have originally produced it is psychologically impossible. Equally important is the fact that, in spite of their intense reality, dream -figures are soon forgotten when the subject wakes ; as a rule they are not remembered at all. They have none of the persistence, except in their occasional momentary continuance on waking, of other impressions.

In an earlier work Tylor had spoken of the life of primitive man as resembling " a long dream." ^ The description seems intended to suggest a habit of brooding over cosmic problems. Such did not exist. The phrase also gives an erroneous picture of a quick, alert, and hardy animal, whose senses were sharpened

1 Codrington concludes from the Melanesian evidence, that the phenomena of dreams did not produce the idea of the soul. See below, p. 10 1. 2 E, B. Tylor, T^he Early History of Mankind^ 137.

by hunger and experienced in the continual search for food and in the avoidance of danger. In animals and children philosophical rumination and introspection do not occur ; they are rare in the lowest and highest savages alike. Their place is pre-empted by another habit which we shall discuss at a later stage.^ If, however, as is perhaps more probable, a sort of hallucinational confusion between subjective and objective reality is implied by the "long dream," this is equally false.^ Man's very existence depended on a rapid and precise distinction between subjective impressions and objective facts. Such a state of mind as this confusion involves would lead, if the subject of it survived, to a mystical monism, hardly to a dualism between body and soul.

Next comes the question, What causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death ? Of these we need discuss two only, sleep and death. Now it must be admitted that savage accounts of the soul, when viewed together without distinction of peoples or stages of development, are roughly divisible, to all appearance, into what we may call in our phraseology a "life" and a " form." It is this which has caused misconception. We may observe at once that the former is abstract, the latter concrete ; they are for this and for other reasons not contemporaneous. As in the case ot dreams, the naive mind, observing a sleeper, regards the difference from the waking state as a matter of course. Some other fact of consciousness is required to institute thought on the subject. And when thought begins, will the first inference be that the soul or the " life " or anything is absent ^ Assuredly not, for the mind cannot conceive the absence of anything until

1 See below, ch. vi. - See below, ch. v.

it has acquired the idea of that thing, and the notion of " life " as a thing is a late abstraction.

Similar objections lie against the answer to the questions — What causes death ? and What makes the difference between a living body and a dead ? As we have already implied, the inference of " life " from the contrast of life and death is a case of proceeding from the abstract to the concrete. It is also a case of recognising a thing first in its absence. Primitive perception involved a difference between the sight of a living body and a dead, but made no analysis or conscious inference, any more than the savage mourner does when she treats her dead, for a time, as being still alive, though "different," or than the civilised mourner does, who, for a time, refuses against fact to believe that her loved ore is dead. Feeling and mental habit are paramount. Inference, when it comes, will not result primarily in the conception of a vital principle, thus emphasised by contrast. Concepts like " life," *' force," " energy," are not and cannot be abstracted from the things in which they inhere, whether they are present or absent from them, either by early language or by early thought, just as they are not in scientific thought except artificially for analytical convenience. *' Living-man," " dead-man," and the like, are ideas and expressions which precede by long ages the conceptions of *'life" and "death," and when formed are not formed by any " combination " of the concepts " life " and " man," " death " and "man."