time when the Indians had come into contact with the white man and his gun and perhaps symbolizes a change of custom or the desire to institute it.

But assuming it fabricated, it was on the basis of similar experiences which marked the savage life. Even fiction is not wholly fiction. The wildest imagination runs along the lines of experience and the only thing that makes its creations grotesque is the exaggeration of its actual experiences in sense, or the combination of exaggerated memories. Hence the most absurd allegations of savages are based on actual experiences and only reflect, when translated, oddities that are made worse by the imperfect translation itself, or the imperfect understanding of his mental operations. The imagination of the savage, however, is untrained and so not subject in any way to critical habits or scientific interest and classification. The remotest analogy has as much significance to him as the most essential resemblances or attributes. Hence what seems to us so grotesque will appear to him perfectly rational.

However, if we take this Ojibwa legend in terms of conceptions at the basis of our ideas of veridical hallucinations and what is involved in the pictographic process of communication between the spiritual and the physical world, we may find that the theory of idealism and of Swedenborg explains very clearly the nature of this savage's experience, and it might even reflect a suggestion from the discarnate to have higher interests, in order to escape the penalties of Sisyphus and Ixion.

With primitive races, the failure to see or appreciate the idealistic point of view forces them to interpret what the civilized man thinks are subjective creations as solid as the objects of normal sense perception. The savage knows nothing of illusions or those subjective creations which men have observed ever since the early Greek philosophers first noted some of them. Since Kant and Leibnitz, who magnified the subjective side

of the mind, it is easy to discredit a transcendental world that claims to be so like sense reality, as appears in savage psychology. What does not stand the test of sense perception is presumably imaginative. Modern psychology, however much it relies upon the phenomena of sense for its data and starting point, regards even these data as having their subjective aspect. This turning of the mind on itself for at least a partial explanation of experience establishes for us a new and more or less independent point of view for determining the nature of things, if we can say anything at all about them apart from the way they appear to us in these data.

The position is anthropocentric as opposed to the point of view of primitive races which is cosmocentric. The savage had and has the most clear sense of dependence; the civilized man the clearest sense of freedom and independence.

Hence the savage sees nature and orders his life most distinctly from the point of view of external reality. He himself came out of it or is the product of the external world. He does not think that he himself has any independent existence. Consciousness is not a factor in what he sees, but merely a dependent spectator. His life is a perpetual struggle with external forces. Hence with so strong a sense of dependence, he will not easily see or adopt the position of the civilized man in which his own free action may count for as much or more in his development than the power of the external world. As the primitive mind does not distinguish one mental state from another and assumes the point of view of external reality, it will not easily discover the subjective factor in any of its life. Hence it is easy for the savage to believe in the supernatural. He discovers a difference between his normal and other life, but that difference is not supposedly due to the difference between normal and abnormal conditions, but

is either placed on the shoulders of differences in capacity between men or is denied altogether. A spiritual world would be just like the material world of sense, whether perceptible by sense or not, and it took later development to draw the distinction.

Veridical hallucinations, which represent a distinction of modern psychic research, are the first step in making clear the difference between purely subjective creations and those experiences which are objectively caused and yet do not represent the nature of the reality in sense terms. They enable us to recognize a transcendental world without necessarily making it like the sense world, any more than we make the cause of ordinary hallucinations like that of normal sensations. In veridical hallucinations we approach or make another step toward the idealistic view, extending it to the nature of a spiritual world and keeping up the non-representative nature of our ideas.

Primitive ideas still linger in those strata of minds which are not educated to the subjective or idealistic psychology. Even when they distinguish or try to distinguish between the internal and the external world, they still employ language that does not imply this distinction. Hence with the differences of culture we find the differences of ideas in modern times, differences that cause much friction because of the importance which the eligious mind attaches to the object of its interest. Se ages were unanimous in their beliefs and had not the distinction between the educated and the uneducated mind. They were all uneducated. This condition guaranteed both a uniform sense of dependence and the identity between the physical and the spiritual world, though the manifestation of the latter was not so constant as the former.

IT

CHAPTER II

THE IDEAS OF CIVILIZED NATIONS

T is perhaps not too much to say that the period of culture was initiated by the discovery of illusions. That discovery certainly marked the rise of skepticism in both philosophy and religion. It indicated the distinction between what we could accept and what we could not accept in sense perception. Primitive psychology did not distinguish between sense perception and the work of the explanatory functions of the mind, the understanding. For it, knowledge was neither sensation nor judgment. The difference between these was not known to them. Whatever state of mind it had was trusted. But the discovery of illusions forced on the human mind a distinction between sensations and judgments, and between what was unreal and what was real.

At first this distinction was not carried very far, but it did not take long for skepticism, when once suggested, to destroy much that had been previously accepted without question. This very quickly carried the primitive religious ideas away. They would not stand the test of knowledge which skepticism placed in the senses, or in the judgment applied to sensation which was a subjective reaction against we knew not what, though it was constant. The religious ideas of the soul and a world beyond death, not subscribing to this standard, had to fall away before the onslaught of this all devouring influence.

But the strength of religious ideas was great enough

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to revive their power, as the Phoenix arose from its own ashes. The passion for another life was strong enough to construct a philosophy on the basis of the supersensible after skepticism had limited knowledge to the sensible. This reconstructive tendency always based itself upon a modification of previous conceptions which the untutored mind had maintained. Hence when the more civilized races emerged from their savagery they carried with them religious ideas tempered by their more primitive times, while they diverged from them. It is a few of those systems which we notice here. This, however, must be very briefly done, since any adequate conception of them would run into a volume. I take up that of the Chinese first.

1. Chinese Religion

The chief characteristic of the Chinese religion is ancestor worship. It is that feature of its ideas that primarily interests the psychic researcher, as it was evidently inherited from the earlier time of which we have no definite history. Perhaps we should not know anything about it were it not for our knowledge of ancestor worship among savages among whom can be found the main incidents of what has remained of it with the Chinese, modified by various forms of progress. Possibly ancestor worship would have totally disappeared among the Chinese but for their conservatism which has preserved it. But it was evidently the early form of belief and shows that it was definitely related to spiritualism. In fact, it was only a form of that belief. It is found, however, most distinctly among the common people, and though the philosophers modified it and often took rationalistic views regarding the doctrine, they never displaced it. Indeed Confucius accepted and conformed to the rites which it imposed.