We touch here another root of religious belief, which produces growths so wide-spreading that some interpreters bring the whole range of objects of worship within their shade. How, after all, does man explain himself to himself? At first he does not think about thinking. Such words as he uses are vague and elastic, like the Polynesian _mana_, which covers a multitude of facts without and within. Only through long dim processes does any idea corresponding to our conception of personality come into his consciousness. He is as confused about the objects round him as he is about himself. { 86} Yet he has some sort of initiative. Whence comes it? Little by little a variety of experiences force on him the belief that beside the body and its limbs he possesses something which he cannot ordinarily see, but which is essential to his activity. He falls asleep, and lies still upon the ground; he wakes, full of remembrance of adventure, the localities which he has visited, the animals that he has hunted, the dead kinsmen whom he has met. The Australians explain their dreams by the supposition that the _yambo_, the mūrup, or the _boolabong_, can quit the body and return. "I asked one of the Kurnai" (of Gippsland), relates Mr. Howitt, "whether he really thought his _yambo_ could go out during sleep." "It must be so," was the answer, "for when I sleep, I go to distant places, I see distant people, I even see and speak with those that are dead." The great apostle of the East in the sixteenth century, the devoted Francis Xavier, wrote home from India to the Society of Jesus in Europe--
"I find that the arguments which are to convince these ignorant people must be by no means subtle, such as those which are found in the books of learned schoolmen, but such as their minds can understand. They asked me again and again how the soul of a dying person goes out of the body, how it was, whether it was as happens to us in dreams, when we seem to be conversing with our { 87} friends and acquaintances. Ah, how often this happens to me, dearest brethren, when I dream of you! Was this because the soul then leaves the body?"
This explanation is found all round the globe.
Many other experiences confirm the impression of some kind of dual existence. The shadow or shade which follows a man repeats his movements, and appears as a sort of double. It is even widely believed in the face of the simplest evidence that a dead body casts no shadow (of course, as it lies upon the ground the shadow may almost disappear). Your reflection in river, pool, or lake, actually reproduces your colour as well as your form: beware lest a crocodile seizes it and drags you in. From ancient times down to Shelley and Walt Whitman, poetry has designated Sleep and Death as "brothers"; in death that which was temporarily absent in sleep has gone away for good. It may have rushed out with the blood from a gaping wound; it may have quietly departed with the last faint breath. So it may be summoned back, as in Chinese custom, on the housetop, in the garden or the field. Ghostly sounds may be heard in the forest, among the rocks, borne along the wind; the clairvoyant may discern dimly strange faces, vanished forms; the dead can sometimes make themselves seen in their old haunts; { 88} the world is full of unexpected indications of presences beyond our sense.