Nevertheless, when we remember that Mr. Tylor is theorising about savages in the dim background of human evolution, savages whom we know nothing of by experience, savages far behind Australians and Bushmen (who possess Gods), we must admit that he credits them with great ingenuity, and strong powers of abstract reasoning.  He may be right in his opinion.  In the same way, just as primitive men were keen reasoners, so early bees, more clever than modern bees, may have evolved the system of hexagonal cells, and only an early fish of genius could first have hit on the plan, now hereditary of killing a fly by blowing water at it.

To this theory of metaphysical genius in very low savages I have no objection to offer.  We shall find, later, astonishing examples of savage abstract speculation, certainly not derived from missionary sources, because wholly out of the missionary’s line of duty and reflection.

As early beasts had genius, so the earliest reasoners appear to have been as logically gifted as the lowest savages now known to us, or even as some Biblical critics.  By Mr. Tylor’s hypothesis, they first conceived the extremely abstract idea of Life, ’that which makes the difference between a living body and a dead one.’[15] This highly abstract conception must have been, however, the more difficult to early man, as, to him, all things, universally, are ’animated.’[16] Mr. Tylor illustrates this theory of early man by the little child’s idea that ’chairs, sticks, and wooden horses are actuated by the same sort of personal will as nurses and children and kittens....  In such matters the savage mind well represents the childish stage.’[17]

Now, nothing can be more certain than that, if children think sticks are animated, they don’t think so because they have heard, or discovered, that they possess souls, and then transfer souls to sticks.  We may doubt, then, if primitive man came, in this way, by reasoning on souls, to suppose that all things, universally, were animated.  But if he did think all things animated—­a corpse, to his mind, was just as much animated as anything else.  Did he reason:  ’All things are animated.  A corpse is not animated.  Therefore a corpse is not a thing (within the meaning of my General Law)’?

How, again, did early man conceive of Life, before he identified Life (1) with ’that which makes the difference between a living body and a dead one’ (a difference which, ex hypothesi, he did not draw, all things being animated to his mind) and (2) with ’those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions’?  ’The ancient savage philosophers probably reached the obvious inference that every man had two things belonging to him, a life and a phantom.’  But everything was supposed to have ‘a life,’ as far as one makes out, before the idea of separable soul was developed, at least if savages arrived at the theory of universal animation as children are said to do.

We are dealing here quite conjecturally with facts beyond our experience.