en killed. He will tell you, when the earthen cooking pot is
broken, it has lost its spirit. If his weapon fails him, it is because
someone has stolen its spirit or made it weak by means of his influence
on spirits of the same class.... In every action of his life he shows
you how he lives with a great spirit world around him. You see him
before he starts out to fight rubbing stuff into his weapon to
strengthen the spirit that is in it; telling it the while what care he
has taken of it.... You see him leaning over the face of the water
talking to its spirit with proper incantations, asking it when it meets
an enemy of his to upset his canoe and destroy him.... If a man is
knocked on the head with a club, or shot by an arrow or a bullet, the
cause of death is clearly the malignity of persons using these weapons;
and so it is easy to think that a man killed by the falling of a tree,
or by the upsetting of a canoe in the surf, or in a whirlpool in the
river is also a victim of some being using these things as weapons. For
a man holding this view, it seems both natural and easy to regard
disease as a manifestation of the wrath of some invisible being, and to
construct that intricate system which we find among the Africans, and
agree to call Witchcraft, Fetish, or Juju."[15]

Miss Kingsley is here dealing specifically with West Africa, but her
description applies in a general way to uncivilised people all over the
world. There is much closer resemblance between the beliefs of
uncivilised peoples than between civilised ones, because the conditions
are much more alike. And under substantially identical conditions the
human mind has everywhere reached substantially identical conclusions.
The philosophy of the savage is simple, comprehensive, and, given the
data, logical. He does not divide the world into the natural and the
supernatural; it is all one. At most, he has only the seen and the
unseen. The supernatural, as a distinct category, only appears when a
definite knowledge of the natural has arisen to which it can be opposed.
He has no such distinction as that of the material and the immaterial;
so far as he thinks of these things, the invisible is only a finer form
of the visible. Of one thing, however, he is perfectly convinced, and
this is that he is at all times surrounded by a host of invisible
agencies to which all occurrences are due, and with whom he must come to
terms. Even death wears a different aspect to the prim