When man first came to such power of mind as to be able to look on at his own mental operations and take intelligent cognisance of them, his first dream must have been a very funny experience. He did not set out equipped, as we are, with a very perfect system of psychology, a system so perfect that we change it for the better daily with each new book of each new psychologist So this primitive man, waking up one morning from the first dream, the first experience of the kind of which he had an intelligent consciousness, says to his wife: "I have seen my father, whom we saw killed a year ago. He came and talked to me last night."

So this makes a new departure in the ideas of the man and his wife about the nature of man. No doubt he had not formulated his ideas very clearly, but, such as they were, here was a distinct and definite addition. His father, whom he had seen killed, had come and talked to him. His father, therefore, was not dead. And yet he had seen the fathers body, or one of his bodies, die and perish. It was evident therefore that his father was composed of two beings, one of which was dead, and the other still alive, and capable of reappearance. Thence the primitive dreamer would quickly come to the idea of the survival of a part of the man, of one side of his being, so to speak of it, after the death of the other. How long after we do not know, nor when the idea of immortality, of everlasting deathlessness, of the soul came in. This is probably a very much later notion, and we find Socrates, who is not to be regarded altogether as a primeval savage, introducing the idea as a new one, and one so strange as to require some little apology for its introduction, in the last book of The Republic. The life of the man after death, which is perhaps as near as we can get modern words to express the idea of the savage about his dead father s apparition in a dream, is one thing, and the immortality of the soul, the idea that it lives endlessly, quite another thing.

It is the former idea that the dream suggested to the mind of primitive man. The suggestion may have led eventually to the latter idea, but there was a length of mental travelling to be done before arriving there. In the meantime, primitive man, to whom the world was opening like an oyster, had other and more immediate things to occupy him. In one dream he saw his father, whom he had previously seen killed. In the next dream he saw things at a great distance away from the place in which he was sleeping. When he awoke we may suppose him telling his wife that he had been a journey into a far country and never had travelled so quickly before. On which his wife would contradict him and say that he had been here, in this place, asleep, all the time. At first, probably, the man denied this, and the wife would not insist, for the woman's rights, and especially her divine right to contradict her husband, had not yet been in-vented. The instrument of conviction in those days was not the syllogism but a stout stick, so the wife would acquire the art, that modern women have lost, of silence.

But after a while the husband would learn from others besides his wife, others as well equipped as himself with the weapon of primitive conviction, that he had not stirred from beside his fire, even though he appeared to himself to have gone to a far country. So then he would acquire another idea, supplementary to his notion about the life of his father's soul after death. He would argue that while he himself to all appearance was altogether here, asleep by his fire, it was in reality only half of himself that remained here, the other half journeying off to a far country and seeing strange things. The conclusion of that, again, was that man was composed of two parts, of which one would stay asleep by the fire and the other go wandering, and it was likely that this same other part that went wandering when the first part was asleep, also went wandering when the first part was dead, and thus, simply and naturally, the apparition of dead people is accounted for. It is all nice and easy. A singular point to be noticed about it all is that it is only in sleep or in trance or death that the two parts seem able to disconnect themselves sufficiently for the one to go wandering off independently of the other.

And in this we see the beginnings of the idea of the prophetic trances that have pleased the notions of man in all countries at a certain stage of intellectual progress.

Primitive man, being observant, as he had to be if he was to live, did not fail to notice that in those conditions, sleep, trance, death, when the soul (so to speak of his notion, for convenience sake) went wandering, there was a difference in the manner of breathing, from the manner in which the man breathed when awake and when his soul did not wander. In sleep the breathing was slower and more regular, reduced again in trances, whether of the cataleptic or most other natures, finally, quiescent altogether as death came on. The inference was natural and inevitable that there was a close connection and perhaps identity between soul and breath, so that we get the words spiritus, anima, pneuma, and so on, in Latin, Greek, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Turanian, and whatsoever language of mankind you will - in every case the words are more or less interchangeable and synonymous for soul and breath. The breath was the outward and palpable sign of life, that ceased with death as the soul left its tenement.

And yet the soul seldom appeared naked. 1t usually appeared clad with some kind of covering, always of the kind that it had worn during life - or would again wear in life, if it were but the soul of some sleeping, not of some dead person appearing. This is a consideration that leads to another line of the primitive man's thought. The late Professor Chandler, Professor of Moral Philosophy, as it is called (there used not to be much ethics or morality about it), at Oxford, used to say, of those that tried to found any argument on a life after death from the appearance of dead persons' ghosts, that if ghosts proved anything they proved too much; for they not only proved that the man was immortal, but that his hat and coat were immortal too, for whenever you met a ghost you always found it decently dressed. Therefore, he said, ghosts proved if anything too much. It seems a little too much, it is true, for our mental swallow, but it was not at all too much for the savage. I f ever there was a proverb that expresses wisdom garnered by hard experience it is that which tells us that "appearances are deceptive". The primitive man had not the faintest inkling of this solemn truth. He believed all that appeared to him with the simplicity of a new boy in his first term at school.