3. But the general consensus of opinion is that the world of spirits is peopled by the souls of dead human beings. This presupposes a belief in a future life, the existence of which in the native mind some travellers have doubted. I have never met that doubt from the native himself. While I do not impute to the travellers referred to any desire, in their efforts at describing the low grade of intelligence or religious belief of certain tribes, to misrepresent, I fully believe they were mistaken, their mistake arising from misunderstanding. It is not probable that they met, in the course of their few years, what I have not met with in a lifetime. It is probable that natives had expressed to them a doubt, or even ignorance, of a general resurrection, and may have said to them, as a few have said to me, "No, we do not live again; we are like goats and dogs and chickens,--when we die that is the end of us." Such a statement is indeed a denial of the resurrection of the body, but it is not a denial of a continued existence of the soul in another life. The very people who made the above declaration to me preserved their family fetich, made sacrifices to the spirits of their ancestors, and appealed to them for aid in their family undertakings. The few who have expressed a belief in transmigration did not consider that the residence of a human spirit in the body of a beast was a permanent state; it was a temporary condition, assumed by the spirit voluntarily for its own pleasure or convenience, and terminable at its own will, precisely as human spirits during their mortal life are, everywhere and by all, believed capable of temporarily deserting their own human body and controlling the actions of a beast. This belief in transmigration, though not general, has been found among individuals in almost all tribes.
It being thus generally accepted that all departed human souls become spirits of that future that is all around us, there is still a difference in the testimony of intelligent witnesses as to who and what, or even how many, of these souls are in one human being. (1) Ordinarily, the native will say in effect, "I am one, and my soul is also myself. When I die, it goes out somewhere else." (2) Others will say, "I have two things,--one is the thing that becomes a spirit when I die, the other is the spirit of the body and dies with it." (This "other" may be only a personification of what we specify as the animal life.) But it has frequently occurred that even intelligent natives, standing by me at the side of a dying person, have said to me, "He is dead." The patient was indeed unconscious, lying stiff, not seeing, speaking, eating, or apparently feeling; yet there was a slight heart-beat. I would point out to the relatives these evidences of life. But they said: "No, he is dead. His spirit is gone, he does not see nor hear nor feel; that slight movement is only the spirit of the body shaking itself. It is not a person, it is not our relative; _he_ is dead." And they began to prepare the body for burial. A man actually came to me on Corisco Island, in 1863, asking me for medicine with which to kill or quiet the body-spirit of his mother, whose motions were troubling him by preventing the funeral arrangements. I was shocked at what I thought his attempt at matricide, but subsequently found that he really did believe that his mother was dead and her real soul gone.