ized countries, which are unused to
the severe training of science, no stronger evidence can be alleged
than what is called "the evidence of the senses"; for it is only long
familiarity with science which teaches us that the evidence of the
senses is trustworthy only in so far as it is correctly interpreted by
reason. For the truth of his belief in the ghosts of men and beasts,
trees and axes, the savage has undeniably the evidence of his senses
which have so often seen, heard, and handled these other selves.

The funeral ceremonies of uncultured races freshly illustrate this crude
philosophy, and receive fresh illustration from it. On the primitive
belief in the ghostly survival of persons and objects rests the almost
universal custom of sacrificing the wives, servants, horses, and dogs of
the departed chief of the tribe, as well as of presenting at his shrine
sacred offerings of food, ornaments, weapons, and money. Among the
Kayans the slaves who are killed at their master's tomb are enjoined to
take great care of their master's ghost, to wash and shampoo it, and to
nurse it when sick. Other savages think that "all whom they kill in this
world shall attend them as slaves after death," and for this reason the
thrifty Dayaks of Borneo until lately would not allow their young men to
marry until they had acquired some post mortem property by procuring at
least one human head. It is hardly necessary to do more than allude
to the Fiji custom of strangling all the wives of the deceased at his
funeral, or to the equally well-known Hindu rite of suttee. Though, as
Wilson has shown, the latter rite is not supported by any genuine Vedic
authority, but only by a shameless Brahmanic corruption of the sacred
text, Mr. Tylor is nevertheless quite right in arguing that unless the
horrible custom had received the sanction of a public opinion bequeathed
from pre-Vedic times, the Brahmans would have had no motive for
fraudulently reviving it; and this opinion is virtually established
by the fact of the prevalence of widow sacrifice among Gauls,
Scandinavians, Slaves, and other European Aryans. [176] Though under
English rule the rite has been forcibly suppressed, yet the archaic
sentiments which so long maintained it are not yet extinct. Within the
present year there has appeared in the newspapers a not improbable story
of a beautiful and accomplished Hindu lady who, having become the wife
of a wealthy Englishman, and after living severa