ated man of
to-day, dreams are subjective experiences, that is, experiences which
do not contain information about what is happening in the external
world. In the jargon of psychology, they are centrally aroused ideas
playing about some organic stimulus or some repressed wish. But the
savage knew nothing about such distinctions. The dead appeared to the
living and talked with them. Patroclus stands before Achilles and
chides him. Do not the dead, then, have some sort of life? Many
psychological motives combined to convince primitive man of at least a
shadowy existence after death. But there was another side to the
dream-life. The living went on long journeys, doing strange things,
while their bodies rested in the tent. Added to these suggestions, so
naturally lending themselves to a spiritistic interpretation, were
still others. Certain kinds of sickness are explained by means of the
idea of possession. Invisible agents are at work in the world. What
can a trance be if not the temporary absence of just such an agent?
"Among the Kayans of Borneo, for example, it is the custom for an
elderly person learned in such matters to sit beside the corpse, where
the soul is {144} supposed to hover for some days after death, and to
impart to the latter minute directions for its journey to the land of
the dead." We are in the presence, here, of natural illusions, of
hypotheses which inevitably arose. Man's first guesses were mistakes.
The whole history of science drives this fact home.

The various opinions men have built up around the idea of a soul are
instructive. How gravely men have written about such hidden things!
Only very slowly have they learned to separate an experience from its
interpretation, and to seek a wide range of facts before erecting even
an hypothesis. To explain by means of _agents_, visible and invisible,
is the plausible method to which man always resorts first. It is only
when he becomes more sophisticated that he thinks in terms of
_processes_. The following examples of divergent opinion upon the
soul, gathered by an able French author, show the vagueness of the idea:

Origen, the Alexandrian theologian: "The soul is material and has a
definite shape."

St. Augustine: "The soul is incorporeal and immortal."

A Polynesian: "The soul is a breath, and when I saw that I was on the
point of expiring, I pinched my nose in order to retain my soul in my
body. But I did not grasp it tightly e