ily reanimate it. It could enter into and
dwell within the stone representation of the deceased. Sometimes this
so-called "soul" was identified[76] with the breath of life, which
could enter into the statue as the result of the ceremony of "opening
the mouth".

It has been commonly assumed by Sir Edward Tyler and those who accept
his theory of animism that the idea of the "soul" was based upon the
attempts to interpret the phenomena of dreams and shadows, to which
Burnet has referred in the passage quoted above. The fact that when a
person is sleeping he may dream of seeing absent people and of having a
variety of adventures is explained by many peoples by the hypothesis
that these are real experiences which befell the "soul" when it wandered
abroad during its owner's sleep. A man's shadow or his reflection in
water or a mirror has been interpreted as his double. But what these
speculations leave out of account is the fact that these dream- and
shadow-phenomena were probably merely the predisposing circumstances
which helped in the development of (or the corroborative details which
were added to and, by rationalization, incorporated in) the
"soul-theory," which other circumstances were responsible for
creating.[77]

I have already called attention (p. 5) to the fact that in many of the
psychological speculations in ethnology too little account is taken of
the enormous complexity of the factors which determine even the simplest
and apparently most obvious and rational actions of men. I must again
remind the reader that a vast multitude of influences, many of them of a
subconscious and emotional nature, affect men's decisions and opinions.
But once some definite state of feeling inclines a man to a certain
conclusion, he will call up a host of other circumstances to buttress
his decision, and weave them into a complex net of rationalization. Some
such process undoubtedly took place in the development of "animism"; and
though it is not possible yet to reconstruct the whole history of the
growth of the idea, there can be no question that these early strivings
after an understanding of the nature of life and death, and the attempts
to put the theories into practice to reanimate the dead, provided the
foundations upon which has been built up during the last fifty centuries
a vast and complex theory of the soul. In the creation of this edifice
the thoughts and the aspirations of countless millions of peoples have
played a pa