death, the idea of the immortality of the spirit would be the
most natural of conceptions. The immortal spirit, indeed, would
be but a correlative of the immortal body, and the idea which we
shall see prevalent among the Egyptians that the soul persists
only as long as the body is intact--the idea upon which the
practice of mummifying the dead depended--finds a ready
explanation. But this phase of the subject carries us somewhat
afield. For our present purpose it suffices to have pointed out
that the conception of man's mortality--a conception which now
seems of all others the most natural and "innate"--was in all
probability a relatively late scientific induction of our
primitive ancestors.

5. Turning from the consideration of the body to its mental
complement, we are forced to admit that here, also, our primitive
man must have made certain elementary observations that underlie
such sciences as psychology, mathematics, and political economy.
The elementary emotions associated with hunger and with satiety,
with love and with hatred, must have forced themselves upon the
earliest intelligence that reached the plane of conscious
self-observation. The capacity to count, at least to the number
four or five, is within the range of even animal intelligence.
Certain savages have gone scarcely farther than this; but our
primeval ancestor, who was forging on towards civilization, had
learned to count his fingers and toes, and to number objects
about him by fives and tens in consequence, before be passed
beyond the plane of numerous existing barbarians. How much beyond
this he had gone we need not attempt to inquire; but the
relatively high development of mathematics in the early
historical period suggests that primeval man had attained a not