As early beasts had genius, so the earliest reasoners appear to have been
as logically gifted as the lowest savages now known to us, or even as some
Biblical critics. By Mr. Tylor's hypothesis, they first conceived the
extremely abstract idea of Life, 'that which makes the difference between
a living body and a dead one.'[15] This highly abstract conception must
have been, however, the more difficult to early man, as, to him, all
things, universally, are 'animated.'[16] Mr. Tylor illustrates this
theory of early man by the little child's idea that 'chairs, sticks, and
wooden horses are actuated by the same sort of personal will as nurses and
children and kittens.... In such matters the savage mind well represents
the childish stage.'[17]

Now, nothing can be more certain than that, if children think sticks are
animated, they don't think so because they have heard, or discovered, that
they possess souls, and then transfer souls to sticks. We may doubt, then,
if primitive man came, in this way, by reasoning on souls, to suppose
that all things, universally, were animated. But if he did think all
things animated--a corpse, to his mind, was just as much animated as
anything else. Did he reason: 'All things are animated. A corpse is not
animated. Therefore a corpse is not a thing (within the meaning of my
General Law)'?

How, again, did early man conceive of Life, before he identified Life
(1) with 'that which makes the difference between a living body and a dead
one' (a difference which, _ex hypothesi_, he did not draw, _all_ things
being animated to his mind) and (2) with 'those human shapes which appear
in dreams and visions'? 'The ancient savage philosophers probably reached
the obvious inference that every man had two things belonging to him, a
life and a phantom.' But everything was supposed to have 'a life,' as far