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.

If early men were ever in a condition in which telepathy and clairvoyance
(granting their possibility) were prevalent, one might expect that
faculties so useful would be de