We have shown too, that the Australians take an essential distinction between waking hallucinations (ghosts seen by a man when awake) and the common hallucinations of slumber.  Anybody can have these; the man who sees ghosts when awake is marked out for a wizard.

At the same time the vividness of dreams among certain savages, as recorded in Mr. Im Thurn’s ‘Indians of Guiana,’ and the consequent confusion of dreaming and waking experiences, are certain facts.  Wilson says the same of some negroes, and Mr. Spencer illustrates from the confusion of mind in dreamy children.  They, we know, are much more addicted to somnambulism than grown-up people.  I am unaware that spontaneous somnambulism among savages has been studied as it ought to be.  I have demonstrated, however, that very low savages can and do draw an essential distinction between sleeping and waking hallucinations.

Again, the crystal-gazer, whose apparently telepathic crystal pictures are discussed later (chap. v.), was introduced to a crystal just because she had previously been known to be susceptible to waking and occasionally veracious hallucinations.

It was not only on the dreams of sleep, so easily forgotten as they are, that the savage pondered, in his early speculations about the life and the soul.  He included in his materials the much more striking and memorable experiences of waking hours, as we and Mr. Tylor agree in holding.

Reflecting on these things, the earliest savage reasoners would decide:  (1) that man has a ‘life’ (which leaves him temporarily in sleep, finally in death); (2) that man also possesses a ‘phantom’ (which appears to other people in their visions and dreams).  The savage philosopher would then ‘combine his information,’ like a celebrated writer on Chinese metaphysics.  He would merely ‘combine the life and the phantom,’ as ‘manifestations of one and the same soul.’  The result would be ’an apparitional soul,’ or ‘ghost-soul.’

This ghost-soul would be a highly accomplished creature, ’a vapour, film, or shadow,’ yet conscious, capable of leaving the body, mostly invisible and impalpable, ‘yet also manifesting physical power,’ existing and appearing after the death of the body, able to act on the bodies of other men, beasts, and things.[14]

When the earliest reasoners, in an age and in mental conditions of which we know nothing historically, had evolved the hypothesis of this conscious, powerful, separable soul, capable of surviving the death of the body, it was not difficult for them to develop the rest of Religion, as Mr. Tylor thinks.  A powerful ghost of a dead man might thrive till, its original owner being long forgotten, it became a God.  Again (souls once given) it would not be a very difficult logical leap, perhaps, to conceive of souls, or spirits, that had never been human at all.  It is, we may say, only le premier pas qui coute, the step to the belief in a surviving separable soul.