founders of religion, we guess in the dark, or by the flickering light of analogy.  The lower animals have faculties (as in their power of finding their way home through new unknown regions, and in the ants’ modes of acquiring and communicating knowledge to each other) which are mysteries to us.  The terror of dogs in ‘haunted houses’ and of horses in passing ‘haunted’ scenes has often been reported, and is alluded to briefly by Mr. Tylor.  Balaam’s ass, and the dogs which crouched and whined before Athene, whom Eumaeus could not see, are ‘classical’ instances.

The weakness of the anthropological argument here is, we must repeat, that we know little more about the mental condition and experiences of the early thinkers who developed the doctrine of Souls than we know about the mental condition and experiences of the lower animals.  And the more firmly a philosopher believes in the Darwinian hypothesis, the less, he must admit, can he suppose himself to know about the twilight ages, between the lower animal and the fully evolved man.  What kind of creature was man when he first conceived the germs, or received the light, of Religion?  All is guess-work here!  We may just allude to Hegel’s theory that clairvoyance and hypnotic phenomena are produced in a kind of temporary atavism, or ‘throwing hack’ to a remotely ancient condition of the ‘sensitive soul’ (fueklende Seele).  The ‘sensitive’ [unconditioned, clairvoyant] faculty or ‘soul’ is ’a disease when it becomes a state of the self-conscious, educated, self-possessed human being of civilisation.’[22] ‘Second sight,’ Hegel thinks, was a product of an earlier day and earlier mental condition than ours.

Approaching this almost untouched subject—­the early psychical condition of man—­not from the side of metaphysical speculations like Hegel, but with the instruments of modern psychology and physiology, Dr. Max Dessoir, of Berlin, following, indeed, M. Taine, has arrived, as we saw, at somewhat similar conclusions.  ‘This fully conscious life of the spirit,’ in which we moderns now live, ’seems to rest upon a substratum of reflex action of a hallucinatory type.’  Our actual modern condition is not ‘fundamental,’ and ’hallucination represents, at least in its nascent condition, the main trunk of our psychical existence.’[23]

Now, suppose that the remote and unknown ancestors of ours who first developed the doctrine of souls had not yet spread far from ’the main trunk of our psychical existence,’ far from constant hallucination.  In that case (at least, according to Dr. Dessoir’s theory) their psychical experiences would be such as we cannot estimate, yet cannot leave, as a possibility influencing religion, out of our calculations.