Darwin and Modern Science [346]
Was it his breath? or he is bleeding; is it his blood? This life-power IS something; does it live in his heart or his lungs or his midriff? He did not see it go; perhaps it is like wind, an anima, a Geist, a ghost. But again it comes back in a dream, only looking shadowy; it is not the man's life, it is a thin copy of the man; it is an "image" (eidolon). It is like that shifting distorted thing that dogs the living man's footsteps in the sunshine; it is a "shade" (skia). (The two conceptions of the soul, as a life-essence, inseparable from the body, and as a separable phantom seem to occur in most primitive systems. They are distinct conceptions but are inextricably blended in savage thought. The two notions Korperseele and Psyche have been very fully discussed in Wundt's "Volkerpsychologie" II. pages 1-142, Leipzig, 1900.)
Ghosts and sprites, ancestor worship, the soul, oracles, prophecy; all these elements of the primitive supersensuous world we willingly admit to be the proper material of religion; but other elements are more surprising; such are class-names, abstract ideas, numbers, geometrical figures. We do not nowadays think of these as of religious content, but to primitive men they were all part of the furniture of his supernatural world.
With respect to class-names, Dr Tylor ("Primitive Culture", Vol. II. page 245 (4th edition), 1903.) has shown how instructive are the first attempts of the savage to get at the idea of a class. Things in which similarity is observed, things indeed which can be related at all are to the savage KINDRED. A species is a family or a number of individuals with a common god to look after them. Such for example is the Finn doctrine of the haltia. Every object has its haltia, but the haltiat were not tied to the individual, they interested themselves in every member of the species. Each stone had its haltia, but that haltia was interested in other stones; the individuals disappeared, the haltia remained.
Nor was it only class-names that belonged to the supersensuous world. A man's own proper-name is a sort of spiritual essence of him, a kind of soul to be carefully concealed. By pronouncing a name you bring the thing itself into being. When Elohim would create Day "he called out to the Light 'Day,' and to the Darkness he called out 'Night'"; the great magician pronounced the magic Names and the Things came into being. "In the beginning was the Word" is literally true, and this reflects the fact that our CONCEPTUAL world comes into being by the mental process of naming. (For a full discussion of this point see Beck, "Nachahmung" page 41, "Die Sprache".) In old times people went further; they thought that by naming events they could bring them to be, and custom even to-day keeps up the inveterate magical habit of wishing people "Good Morning" and a "Happy Christmas."
Number, too, is part of the supersensuous world that is thoroughly religious. We can see and touch seven apples, but seven itself, that wonderful thing that shifts from object to object, giving it its SEVENness, that living thing, for it begets itself anew in multiplication--surely seven is a fit denizen of the upper-world. Originally all numbers dwelt there, and a certain supersensuous sanctity still clings to seven and three. We still say "Holy, Holy, Holy," and in some mystic way feel the holier.
The soul and the supersensuous world get thinner and thinner, rarer and more rarified, but they always trail behind them clouds of smoke and vapour from the world of sense and space whence they have come. It is difficult for us even nowadays to use the word "soul" without lapsing into a sensuous mythology. The Cartesians' sharp distinction between res extensa non cogitans and res cogitans non extansa is remote.
So far then man, through the processes of his thinking, has provided himself with a supersensuous world, the world of sense-delusion, of smoke and cloud, of dream and phantom, of imagination, of name and number and image. The natural course would now seem to be that this supersensuous
Ghosts and sprites, ancestor worship, the soul, oracles, prophecy; all these elements of the primitive supersensuous world we willingly admit to be the proper material of religion; but other elements are more surprising; such are class-names, abstract ideas, numbers, geometrical figures. We do not nowadays think of these as of religious content, but to primitive men they were all part of the furniture of his supernatural world.
With respect to class-names, Dr Tylor ("Primitive Culture", Vol. II. page 245 (4th edition), 1903.) has shown how instructive are the first attempts of the savage to get at the idea of a class. Things in which similarity is observed, things indeed which can be related at all are to the savage KINDRED. A species is a family or a number of individuals with a common god to look after them. Such for example is the Finn doctrine of the haltia. Every object has its haltia, but the haltiat were not tied to the individual, they interested themselves in every member of the species. Each stone had its haltia, but that haltia was interested in other stones; the individuals disappeared, the haltia remained.
Nor was it only class-names that belonged to the supersensuous world. A man's own proper-name is a sort of spiritual essence of him, a kind of soul to be carefully concealed. By pronouncing a name you bring the thing itself into being. When Elohim would create Day "he called out to the Light 'Day,' and to the Darkness he called out 'Night'"; the great magician pronounced the magic Names and the Things came into being. "In the beginning was the Word" is literally true, and this reflects the fact that our CONCEPTUAL world comes into being by the mental process of naming. (For a full discussion of this point see Beck, "Nachahmung" page 41, "Die Sprache".) In old times people went further; they thought that by naming events they could bring them to be, and custom even to-day keeps up the inveterate magical habit of wishing people "Good Morning" and a "Happy Christmas."
Number, too, is part of the supersensuous world that is thoroughly religious. We can see and touch seven apples, but seven itself, that wonderful thing that shifts from object to object, giving it its SEVENness, that living thing, for it begets itself anew in multiplication--surely seven is a fit denizen of the upper-world. Originally all numbers dwelt there, and a certain supersensuous sanctity still clings to seven and three. We still say "Holy, Holy, Holy," and in some mystic way feel the holier.
The soul and the supersensuous world get thinner and thinner, rarer and more rarified, but they always trail behind them clouds of smoke and vapour from the world of sense and space whence they have come. It is difficult for us even nowadays to use the word "soul" without lapsing into a sensuous mythology. The Cartesians' sharp distinction between res extensa non cogitans and res cogitans non extansa is remote.
So far then man, through the processes of his thinking, has provided himself with a supersensuous world, the world of sense-delusion, of smoke and cloud, of dream and phantom, of imagination, of name and number and image. The natural course would now seem to be that this supersensuous