o not pretend to
have discovered more than a small minority of the most conspicuous
threads in the complex texture of the fabric of early human thought.

Another fact that emerges from these elementary psychological
considerations is the vital necessity of guarding against the
misunderstandings necessarily involved in the use of words. In the
course of long ages the originally simple connotation of the words used
to denote many of our ideas has become enormously enriched with a
meaning which in some degree reflects the chequered history of the
expression of human aspirations. Many writers who in discussing ancient
peoples make use of such terms, for example, as "soul," "religion," and
"gods," without stripping them of the accretions of complex symbolism
that have collected around them within more recent times, become
involved in difficulty and misunderstanding.

For example, the use of the terms "soul" or "soul-substance" in much of
the literature relating to early or relatively primitive people is
fruitful of misunderstanding. For it is quite clear from the context
that in many cases such people meant to imply nothing more than "life"
or "vital principle," the absence of which from the body for any
prolonged period means death. But to translate such a word simply as
"life" is inadequate because all of these people had some theoretical
views as to its identity with the "breath" or to its being in the nature
of a material substance or essence. It is naturally impossible to find
any one word or phrase in our own language to express the exact idea,
for among every people there are varying shades of meaning which cannot
adequately express the symbolism distinctive of each place and society.
To meet this insuperable difficulty perhaps the term "vital essence" is
open to least objection.

In my last Rylands lecture[11] I sketched in rough outline a tentative
explanation of the world-wide dispersal of the elements of the
civilization that is now the heritage of the world at large, and
referred to the part played by Ancient Egypt in the development of
certain arts, customs, and beliefs. On the present occasion I propose to
examine certain aspects of this process of development in greater
detail, and to study the far-reaching influence exerted by the Egyptian
practice of mummification, and the ideas that were suggested by it, in
starting new trains of thought, in stimulating the invention of arts
and crafts that were unknown