rubbed amber. These trivial things were not known to be allied to the
lightning, or to indicate a force which man could tame and use. But just
as the Indians, by a rapid careless inference, attributed the Aurora
Borealis to electric influences, so (as anthropology assures us) savages
everywhere have inferred the existence of soul or spirit, intelligence
that

'Does not know the bond of Time,
Nor wear the manacles of Space,'

in part from certain apparently trivial phenomena of human faculty. These
phenomena, as Mr. Tylor says, 'the great intellectual movement of the last
two centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless.'[1] I refer to alleged
experiences, merely odd, sporadic, and, for commercial purposes, useless,
such as the transference of thought from one mind to another by no known
channel of sense, the occurrence of hallucinations which, _prima facie_,
correspond coincidentally with unknown events at a distance, all that is
called 'second sight,' or 'clairvoyance,' and other things even more
obscure. Reasoning on these real or alleged phenomena, and on other quite
normal and accepted facts of dream, shadow, sleep, trance, and death,
savages have inferred the existence of spirit or soul, exactly as the
Indians arrived at the notion of electricity (not so called by them, of
course) as the cause of the Aurora Borealis. But, just as the Indians
thought that the cosmic lights were caused by the rubbing together of
crowded deer in the heavens (a theory quite childishly absurd), so the
savage has expressed, in rude fantastic ways, his conclusion as to the
existence of spirit. He believes in wandering separable souls of men,
surviving death, and he has peopled with his dreams the whole inanimate
universe.