th both from the one kind of
experience and from the other, that is, both from the phenomena of their
inner life and from the phenomena of what we call the external world.
Thus the savage, with whose beliefs we are chiefly concerned in these
lectures, finds a very strong argument for immortality in the phenomena
of dreams, which are strictly a part of his inner life, though in his
ignorance he commonly fails to discriminate them from what we popularly
call waking realities. Hence when the images of persons whom he knows to
be dead appear to him in a dream, he naturally infers that these persons
still exist somewhere and somehow apart from their bodies, of the decay
or destruction of which he may have had ocular demonstration. How could
he see dead people, he asks, if they did not exist? To argue that they
have perished like their bodies is to contradict the plain evidence of
his senses; for to the savage still more than to the civilised man
seeing is believing; that he sees the dead only in dreams does not shake
his belief, since he thinks the appearances of dreams just as real as
the appearances of his waking hours. And once he has in this way gained
a conviction that the dead survive and can help or harm him, as they
seem to do in dreams, it is natural or necessary for him to extend the
theory to the occurrences of daily life, which, as I have said, he does
not sharply distinguish from the visions of slumber. He now explains
many of these occurrences and many of the processes of nature by the
direct interposition of the spirits of the departed; he traces their
invisible hand in many of the misfortunes and in some of the blessings
which befall him; for it is a common feature of the faith in ghosts, at
least among savages, that they are usually spiteful and mischievous, or
at least testy and petulant, more apt to injure than to benefit the
survivors. In that they resemble the personified spirits of nature,
which in the opinion of most savages appear to be generally tricky and
malignant beings, whose anger is dangerous and whose favour is courted
with fear and trembling. Thus even without the additional assurance
afforded by tales of apparitions and spectres, primitive man may come in
time to imagine the world around him to be more or less thickly peopled,
influenced, and even dominated by a countless multitude of spirits,
among whom the shades of past generations of men and women hold a very
prominent, often apparently th