higher culture, 'a more considerable advance in the arts
of life;' the worship of non-ghosts, _Vui_, goes with the lower material
culture.[16] This is rather the reverse of what we should expect, in
accordance with the anthropological theory. According, however, to our
theory, Animism and ghost-worship may be of later development, and belong
to a higher level of culture, than worship of a being, or beings, that
never were ghosts. In Leper's Isle, 'ghosts do not appear to have prayers
or sacrifices offered to them,' but cause disease, and work magic.[17]

The belief in the soul, in Melanesia, does _not_ appear to proceed 'from
their dreams or visions in which deceased or absent persons are presented
to them, for they do not appear to believe that the soul goes out from the
dreamer, or presents itself as an object in his dreams,' nor does belief
in other spirits seem to be founded on 'the appearance of life or motion
in inanimate things.'[18]

To myself it rather looks as if all impressions had their _nunuai_, real,
bodiless, persistent, after-images; that the soul is the complex of all of
these _nunuai_; that there is in the universe a kind of magical other,
called _mana_, possessed, in different proportions, by different men,
_Vui_, _tamate_, and material objects, and that the _atai_ or _ataro_ of a
man dead, his ghost, retains its old, and acquires new _mana_.[19] It is an
odd kind of metaphysic to find among very backward and isolated savages.
But the lesson of Melanesia teaches us how very little we really know of
the religion of low races, how complex it is, how hardly it can be forced
into our theories, if we take it as given in our knowledge, allow for our
ignorance, and are not content to select facts which suit our hypothesis,
while ignoring the rest. On a higher level of material culture than the
Melanesians are the Fijians.

Fijian religion, as far as we understand, resembles the others in drawing
an impassable line between ghosts and eternal gods. The word _Kalou_ is
applied to all supernal beings, and mystic or magical things alike. It
seems to answer to _mana_ in New Zealand and Melanesia, to _wakan_ in
North America, and to _fee_ in old French, as when Perrault says, about
Bluebeard's key, 'now the key was _fee_.' All Gods are _Kalou_, but all
things that are _Kalou_ are not Gods. Gods are _Kalou vu_; deified ghosts
are _Kalou yalo_. The former are eternal, without beginning of days or end
of years; the