very clearly in
primitive man's views about the soul and life after death. Herbert
Spencer noted long ago the influence of dreams in forming a belief in
immortality, but being very rational himself, he extended to primitive
man a quite alien quality of rationality. Herbert Spencer argued that
when a savage has a dream he seeks to account for it, and in so doing
invents a spirit world. The mistake here lies in the "seeks to account
for it." (Primitive man, as Dr Beck observes, is not impelled by an
Erkenntnisstrieb. Dr Beck says he has counted upwards of 30 of these
mythological Triebe (tendencies) with which primitive man has been
endowed.) Man is at first too busy LIVING to have any time for
disinterested THINKING. He dreams a dream and it is real for him. He
does not seek to account for it any more than for his hands and feet. He
cannot distinguish between a CONception and a PERception, that is all.
He remembers his ancestors or they appear to him in a dream; therefore
they are alive still, but only as a rule to about the third generation.
Then he remembers them no more and they cease to be.

Next as regards his own soul. He feels something within him,
his life-power, his will to live, his power to act, his
personality--whatever we like to call it. He cannot touch this thing
that is himself, but it is real. His friend too is alive and one day he
is dead; he cannot move, he cannot act. Well, something has gone that
was his friend's self. He has stopped breathing. Was it his breath? or
he is bleeding; is it his blood? This life-power IS something; does it
live in his heart or his lungs or his midriff? He did not see it go;
perhaps it is like wind, an anima, a Geist, a ghost. But again it comes
back in a dream, only looking shadowy; it is not the man's life, it is
a thin copy of the man; it is an "image" (eidolon). It is like that
shifting distorted thing that dogs the living man's footsteps in the
sunshine; it is a "shade" (skia). (The two conceptions of the soul, as a
life-essence, inseparable from the body, and as a separable phantom seem
to occur in most primitive systems. They are distinct conceptions but
are inextricably blended in savage thought. The two notions Korperseele
and Psyche have been very fully discussed in Wundt's "Volkerpsychologie"
II. pages 1-142, Leipzig, 1900.)

Ghosts and sprites, ancestor worship, the soul, oracles, prophecy; all
these elements of the primitive supersensuous world we willingly