Tylor is writing about known savages as they differ from ourselves. But
the savages who _ex hypothesi_ evolved the doctrine of souls lie beyond
our ken, far behind the modern savages, among whom we find belief not
only in souls and ghosts, but in moral gods. About the psychical condition
of the savages who worked out the theory of souls and founded religion we
necessarily know nothing. If there be such experiences as clairvoyance,
telepathy, and so on, these unknown ancestors of ours may (for all that we
can tell) have been peculiarly open to them, and therefore peculiarly apt
to believe in separable souls. In fact, when we write about these far-off
founders of religion, we guess in the dark, or by the flickering light of
analogy. The lower animals have faculties (as in their power of finding
their way home through new unknown regions, and in the ants' modes of
acquiring and communicating knowledge to each other) which are mysteries
to us. The terror of dogs in 'haunted houses' and of horses in passing
'haunted' scenes has often been reported, and is alluded to briefly by Mr.
Tylor. Balaam's ass, and the dogs which crouched and whined before Athene,
whom Eumaeus could not see, are 'classical' instances.

The weakness of the anthropological argument here is, we must repeat, that
we know little more about the mental condition and experiences of the
early thinkers who developed the doctrine of Souls than we know about
the mental condition and experiences of the lower animals. And the more
firmly a philosopher believes in the Darwinian hypothesis, the less, he
must admit, can he suppose himself to know about the twilight ages,
between the lower animal and the fully evolved man. What kind of creature
was man when he first conceived the germs, or received the light,
of Religion? All is guess-work here! We may just allude to Hegel's
theory that clairvoyance and hypnotic phenomena are produced in a
kind of temporary _atavism_, or 'throwing hack' to a remotely ancient
condition of the 'sensitive soul' (_füklende Seele_). The 'sensitive'