erything that is done by
other things is done by their spirit associated with their
particular mass of matter.... The native will point out to you a
lightning stricken tree and tell you its spirit has been killed. He
will tell you, when the earthen cooking pot is broken, it has lost
its spirit. If his weapon failed him, it is because he has stolen
or made its spirit sick by means of his influence on other spirits
of the same class.... In every action of his life he shows you how
he lives with a great, powerful spirit world around him. You see
him before running out to hunt or fight rubbing stuff in his weapon
to strengthen the spirit that is in it; telling it the while what
care he has taken of it; running through a list of what he had
given it before, though these things had been hard to give; and
begging it, in the hour of his dire necessity, not to fail him....
You see him bending over the face of the river, talking to its
spirit with proper incantations, asking it when it meets an enemy
to upset his canoe and destroy him ... or, as I have myself seen in
Congo Francaise, to take down with it, away from his village, the
pestilence of the spotted death. (_West African Studies_; pp.
394-5).

When Feurbach said that the "realm of memory was the world of souls," he
expressed a profound truth in a striking manner. It is dreams, swoons,
catalepsy, with their allied states which suggest the existence of a
double or ghost. Even in the absence of the mass of evidence from all
quarters in support of this, the fact of the ghost always being pictured
as identical in clothing and figure with the dead man would be almost
enough to demonstrate its dream origin. Into that aspect of the matter,
however, we do not now intend to enter. We are now only concerned with
the bearing of the ghost theory on the origin of God. Another step or
two and we shall have reached that point. Believing himself surrounded
on all sides by a world of ghosts the great concern of the savage is to
escape their ill-will or to secure their favour. Affection and
fear--fear that the ghost, if his wants are neglected, will wreak
vengeance through the agency of disease, famine, or accident--leads
insensibly to the ghosts of one's relations becoming objects of
veneration, propitiation, and petition. All ghosts receive some
attention for a certain time after death, but na