e leading place. These spirits, powerful
to help or harm, he seeks either simply to avert, when he deems them
purely mischievous, or to appease and conciliate, when he supposes them
sufficiently good-natured to respond to his advances. In some such way
as this, arguing from the real but, as we think, misinterpreted
phenomena of dreams, the savage may arrive at a doctrine of human
immortality and from that at a worship of the dead.

[Sidenote: It has also been suggested by the resemblance of the living
to the dead, which is a case of outward experience.]

This explanation of the savage faith in immortality is neither novel nor
original: on the contrary it is perhaps the commonest and most familiar
that has yet been propounded. If it does not account for all the facts,
it probably accounts for many of them. At the same time I do not doubt
that many other inferences drawn from experiences of different kinds
have confirmed, even if they did not originally suggest, man's confident
belief in his own immortality. To take a single example of outward
experience, the resemblances which children often bear to deceased
kinsfolk appear to have prompted in the minds of many savages the notion
that the souls of these dead kinsfolk have been born again in their
descendants.[5] From a few cases of resemblances so explained it would
be easy to arrive at a general theory that all living persons are
animated by the souls of the dead; in other words, that the human spirit
survives death for an indefinite period, if not for eternity, during
which it undergoes a series of rebirths or reincarnations. However it
has been arrived at, this doctrine of the transmigration or
reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages; and
from what we know on the subject we seem to be justified in conjecturing
that at certain stages of mental and social evolution the belief in
metempsychosis has been far commoner and has exercised a far deeper
influence on the life and institutions of primitive man than the actual
evidence before us at present allows us positively to affirm.

[Sidenote: The aim of these lectures is to collect a number of facts
illustrative of the belief in immortality and of the customs based on it
among some of the lower races.]

Be that as it may--and I have no wish to dogmatise on so obscure a
topic--it is certain that a belief in the survival of the human
personality after death and the practice of a propitiation or wors