The Making of Religion | Page 9

cosmic

pomp and splendour shone to welcome the loyal Derwentwater into heaven, when he had
given his life for his exiled king.
Now, my purpose in the earlier portion of this essay is to suggest that certain phenomena
of human nature, apparently as trivial as the sparks rubbed out of a deer's hide in a dark
night, may indicate, and may be allied to a force or forces, which, like the Aurora
Borealis, may shine from one end of the heavens to the other, strangely illumining the
darkness of our destiny. Such phenomena science has ignored, as it so long ignored the
sparks from the stroked deer-skin, and the attractive power of rubbed amber. These trivial
things were not known to be allied to the lightning, or to indicate a force which man
could tame and use. But just as the Indians, by a rapid careless inference, attributed the
Aurora Borealis to electric influences, so (as anthropology assures us) savages
Everywhere have inferred the existence of soul or spirit, intelligence that
'Does not know the bond of Time, Nor wear the manacles of Space,'
in part from certain apparently trivial phenomena of human faculty. These phenomena, as
Mr. Tylor says, 'the great intellectual movement of the last two centuries has simply
thrown aside as worthless.'[1] I refer to alleged experiences, merely odd, sporadic, and,
for commercial purposes, useless, such as the transference of thought from one mind to
another by no known channel of sense, the occurrence of hallucinations which, _prima
facie_, correspond coincidentally with unknown events at a distance, all that is called
'second sight,' or 'clairvoyance,' and other things even more obscure. Reasoning on these
real or alleged phenomena, and on other quite normal and accepted facts of dream,
shadow, sleep, trance, and death, savages have inferred the existence of spirit or soul,
exactly as the Indians arrived at the notion of electricity (not so called by them, of course)
as the cause of the Aurora Borealis. But, just as the Indians thought that the cosmic lights
were caused by the rubbing together of crowded deer in the heavens (a theory quite
childishly absurd), so the savage has expressed, in rude fantastic ways, his conclusion as
to the existence of spirit. He believes in wandering separable souls of men, surviving
death, and he has peopled with his dreams the whole inanimate universe.
My suggestion is that, in spite of his fantasies, the savage had possibly drawn from his
premises an inference not wholly, or not demonstrably erroneous. As the sparks of the
deer-skin indicated electricity, so the strange lights in the night of human nature may
indicate faculties which science, till of late and in a few instances, has laughed at, ignored,
'thrown aside as worthless.'
It should be observed that I am not speaking of 'spiritualism,' a word of the worst
associations, inextricably entangled with fraud, bad logic, and the blindest credulity.
Some of the phenomena alluded to have, however, been claimed as their own province by
'spiritists,' and need to be rescued from them. Mr. Tylor writes:
'The issue raised by the comparison of savage, barbaric, and civilised spiritualism is this:
Do the Red Indian medicine-man, the Tatar necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer, and
the Boston medium, share the possession of belief and knowledge of the highest truth and
import, which, nevertheless, the great intellectual movement of the last two centuries has

simply thrown aside as worthless?'
_Distinguo!_ That does not seem to me to be the issue. In my opinion the issue is: 'Have
the Red Indian, the Tatar, the Highland seer, and the Boston medium (the least reputable
of the menagerie) observed, and reasoned wildly from, and counterfeited, and darkened
with imposture, certain genuine by-products of human faculty, which do not prima facie
deserve to be thrown aside?'
That, I venture to think, is the real issue. That science may toss aside as worthless some
valuable observations of savages is now universally admitted by people who know the
facts. Among these observations is the whole topic of Hypnotism, with the use of
suggestion for healing purposes, and the phenomena, no longer denied, of 'alternating
personalities.' For the truth of this statement we may appeal to one of the greatest of
Continental anthropologists, Adolf Bastian.[2] The missionaries, like Livingstone,
usually supposed that the savage seer's declared ignorance-- after his so-called fit of
inspiration--of what occurred in that state, was an imposture. But nobody now doubts the
similar oblivion of what has passed that sometimes follows the analogous hypnotic sleep.
Of a remarkable cure, which the school of the Salpêtrière or Nancy would ascribe, with
probable justice, to 'suggestion,' a savage example will be given later.
Savage hypnotism and 'suggestion,' among the Sioux and Arapahoe, has been thought
worthy of a whole volume in the Reports of the Ethnological