specialism.

Even to Psychical Researchers the earlier division is of scant interest,
because witnesses to _successful_ abnormal or supernormal faculty in
savages cannot be brought into court and cross-examined. But I do not give
anecdotes of such savage successes as evidence to _facts;_ they are only
illustrations, and evidence to _beliefs and methods_ (as of crystal gazing
and automatic utterances of "secondary personality"), which, among the
savages, correspond to the supposed facts examined by Psychical Research
among the civilised. I only point out, as Bastian had already pointed out,
the existence of a field that deserves closer study by anthropologists
who can observe savages in their homes. We need persons trained in
the psychological laboratories of Europe and America, as members of
anthropological expeditions. It may be noted that, in his "Letters from
the South Seas," Mr. Louis Stevenson makes some curious observations,
especially on a singular form of hypnotism applied to himself with
fortunate results. The method, used in native medicine, was novel; and
the results were entirely inexplicable to Mr. Stevenson, who had not been
amenable to European hypnotic practice. But he was not a trained expert.

Anthropology must remain incomplete while it neglects this field, whether
among wild or civilised men. In the course of time this will come to be
acknowledged. It will be seen that we cannot really account for the origin
of the belief in spirits while we neglect the scientific study of those
psychical conditions, as of hallucination and the hypnotic trance, in
which that belief must probably have had some, at least, of its origins.

As to the second part of the book, I have argued that the first dim
surmises as to a Supreme Being need not have arisen (as on the current
anthropological theory) in the notion of spirits at all. (See chapter xi.)
Here I have been said to draw a mere "verbal distinction" but no
distinction can be more essential. If such a Supreme Being as many savages
acknowledge is _not_ envisaged by them as a "spirit," then the theories
and processes by which he is derived from a ghost of a dead man are
invalid, and remote from the point. As to the origin of a belief in a
kind of germinal Supreme Being (say the Australian Baiame), I do not, in
this book, offer any opinion. I again and again decline to offer an
opinion. Critics, none the less, have said that I attribute the belief to
revelation! I s