s
to the so-called 'psychical phenomena' now under discussion in England,
America, Germany, Italy, and France, have escaped critical analysis and
comparison with their civilised counterparts.

An exception among anthropologists is Mr. Tylor. He has not suppressed the
existence of these barbaric parallels to our modern problems of this kind.
But his interest in them practically ends when he has shown that the
phenomena helped to originate the savage belief in 'spirits,' and when he
has displayed the 'survival' of that belief in later culture. He does not
ask 'Are the phenomena real?' he is concerned only with the savage
philosophy of the phenomena and with its relics in modern spiritism and
religion. My purpose is to do, by way only of _ebauche_, what neither
anthropology nor psychical research nor psychology has done: to put the
savage and modern phenomena side by side. Such evidence as we can give for
the actuality of the modern experiences will, so far as it goes, raise a
presumption that the savage beliefs, however erroneous, however darkened
by fraud and fancy, repose on a basis of real observation of actual
phenomena.

Anthropology is concerned with man and what is in man--_humani nihil
a se alienum putat_. These researches, therefore, are within the
anthropological province, especially as they bear on the prevalent
anthropological theory of the Origin of Religion. By 'religion' we mean,
for the purpose of this argument, the belief in the existence of an
Intelligence, or Intelligences not human, and not dependent on a material
mechanism of brain and nerves, which may, or may not, powerfully control
men's fortunes and the nature of things. We also mean the additional
belief that there is, in man, an element so far kindred to these
Intelligences that it can transcend the knowledge obtained through the
known bodily senses, and may possibly survive the death of the body. These
two beliefs at present (though not necessarily in their origin) appear
chiefly as the faith in God and in the Immortality of the Soul.

It is important, then, to trace, if possible, the origin of these two
beliefs. If they arose in actual communion with Deity (as the first at
least did, in the theory of the Hebrew Scriptures), or if they could be
proved to arise in an unanalysable _sensus numinis_, or even in 'a
perception of the Infinite' (Max Mueller), religion would have a divine, or
at least a necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevit