The incorporeal Vuis, ’with nothing like a human life, have a much higher place than Qat and his brothers in the religious system.’  They have neither names, nor shapes, nor legends, they receive sacrifice, and are in some uncertain way connected with stones; these stones usually bear a fanciful resemblance to fruits or animals (p. 275).  The only sacrifice, in Banks Islands, is that of shell-money.  The mischievous spirits are Tamate, ghosts of men.  There is a belief in mana (magical rapport).  Dr. Codrington cannot determine the connection of this belief with that in spirits.  Mana is the uncanny, is X, the unknown.  A revived impression of sense is nunuai, as when a tired fisher, half asleep at night, feels the ‘draw’ of a salmon, and automatically strikes.[15] The common ghost is a bag of nunuai, as living man, in the opinion of some philosophers, is a bag of ‘sensations.’  Ghosts are only seen as spiritual lights, which so commonly attend hallucinations among the civilised.  Except in the prayers to Qat and Marawa, prayer only invokes the dead (p. 285).  ’In the western islands the offerings are made to ghosts, and consumed by fire; in the eastern (Banks) isles they are made to spirits (beings, Vui), and there is no sacrificial fire.’  Now, the worship of ghosts goes, in these isles, with the 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.