or ‘breath,’ but that these terms were known to be material word-counters for the conception of life.[1] Whether the earliest thinkers identified heart, breath, shadow, with life, or whether they consciously used words of material origin to denote an immaterial conception, of course we do not know.  But the word in the latter case would react on the thought, till the Roman inhaled (as his life?) the last breath of his dying kinsman, he well knowing that the Manes of the said kinsman were elsewhere, and not to be inhaled.

Subdivisions and distinctions were then recognised, as of the Egyptian Ka, the ‘double,’ the Karen kelah, or ‘personal life-phantom’ (wraith), on one side, and the Karen thah, ’the responsible moral soul,’ on the other.  The Roman umbra hovers about the grave, the manes go to Orcus, the spiritus seeks the stars.

We are next presented with a crowd of cases in which sickness or lethargy is ascribed by savages to the absence of the patient’s spirit, or of one of his spirits.  This idea of migratory spirit is next used by savages to explain certain proceedings of the sorcerer, priest, or seer.  His soul, or one of his souls is thought to go forth to distant places in quest of information, while the seer, perhaps, remains lethargic.  Probably, in the struggle for existence, he lost more by being lethargic than he gained by being clairvoyant!

Now, here we touch the first point in Mr. Tylor’s theory, where a critic may ask, Was this belief in the wandering abroad of the seer’s spirit a theory not only false in its form (as probably it is), but also wholly unbased on experiences which might raise a presumption in favour of the existence of phenomena really supernormal?  By ‘supernormal’ experiences I here mean such as the acquisition by a human mind of knowledge which could not be obtained by it through the recognised channels of sensation.  Say, for the sake of argument, that a person, savage or civilised, obtains in trance information about distant places or events, to him unknown, and, through channels of sense, unknowable.  The savage will explain this by saying that the seer’s soul, shadow, or spirit, wandered out of the body to the distant scene.  This is, at present, an unverified theory.  But still, for the sake of argument, suppose that the seer did honestly obtain this information in trance, lethargy, or hypnotic sleep, or any other condition.  If so, the modern savage (or his more gifted ancestors) would have other grounds for his theory of the wandering soul than any ground presented by normal occurrences, ordinary dreams, shadows, and so forth.  Again, in human nature there would be (if such things occur) a potentiality of experiences other and stranger than materialism will admit as possible.  It will (granting the facts) be impossible to aver that there is nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu.  The soul will be not ce qu’un vain peuple pense under the new popular tradition, and the savage’s theory of the spirit will be, at least in part, based on other than normal and every-day facts.  That condition in which the seer acquires information, not otherwise accessible, about events remote in space, is what the mesmerists of the mid-century called ‘travelling clairvoyance.’