We now examine, at greater length, the psychical conditions in which, according to Mr. Tylor, contemporary savages differ from civilised men.  Later we shall ask what may be said as to possible or presumable psychical differences between modern savages and the datelessly distant founders of the belief in souls.  Mr. Tylor attributes to the lower races, and even to races high above their level, ’morbid ecstasy, brought on by meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, or disease.’  Now, we may still ’meditate’—­and how far the result is ‘morbid’ is a matter for psychologists and pathologists to determine.  Fasting we do not practise voluntarily, nor would we easily accept evidence from an Englishman as to the veracity of voluntary fasting visions, like those of Cotton Mather.  The visions of disease we should set aside, as a rule, with those of ‘excitement,’ produced, for instance, by ‘devil-dances.’  Narcotic and alcoholic visions are not in question.[19] For our purpose the induced trances of savages (in whatever way voluntarily brought on) are analogous to the modern induced hypnotic trance.  Any supernormal acquisitions of knowledge in these induced conditions, among savages, would be on a par with similar alleged experiences of persons under hypnotism.

We do not differ from known savages in being able to bring on non-normal psychological conditions, but we produce these, as a rule, by other methods than theirs, and such experiments are not made on all of us, as they were on all Red Indian boys and girls in the ‘medicine-fast,’ at the age of puberty.

Further, in their normal state, known savages, or some of them, are more ‘suggestible’ than educated Europeans at least.[20] They can be more easily hallucinated in their normal waking state by suggestion.  Once more, their intervals of hunger, followed by gorges of food, and their lack of artificial light, combine to make savages more apt to see what is not there than are comfortable educated white men.  But Mr. Tylor goes too far when he says ’where the savage could see phantasms, the civilised man has come to amuse himself with fancies.’[21] The civilised man, beyond all doubt, is capable of being enfantosme.

In all that he says on this point, the point of psychical condition, Mr. Tylor is writing about known savages as they differ from ourselves.  But the savages who ex hypothesi evolved the doctrine of souls lie beyond our ken, far behind the modern savages, among whom we find belief not only in souls and ghosts, but in moral gods.  About the psychical condition of the savages who worked out the theory of souls and founded religion we necessarily know nothing.  If there be such experiences as clairvoyance, telepathy, and so on, these unknown ancestors of ours may (for all that we can tell) have been peculiarly open to them, and therefore peculiarly apt to believe in separable souls.  In fact, when we write about these far-off