Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/540

522 men's shadows as their souls; and he also says of the Wanika that they are afraid of their own shadows: possibly thinking, as some other negroes do, that their shadows watch all their actions, and bear witness against them. Among the Greenlanders, according to Crantz, a man's shadow is one of his two souls—the one which goes away from his body at night. Among the Feejeeans, too, the shadow is called "the dark spirit," as distinguished from another which each man possesses. And the community of meaning, hereafter to be noted more fully, which various unallied languages betray between shade and spirit, shows us the same thing.

These illustrations of the truth that a shadow is originally regarded as an appended entity suggest more than I here wish to show. The ideas of the uncivilized, as we now find them, have developed from their first vague forms into forms having more coherence and definiteness. We must neglect the special characters of these ideas, and consider only that most general character with which they began. This proves to be the character we inferred above. Shadows are realities which, always intangible and often invisible, nevertheless severally belong to their visible and tangible correlatives; and the facts they present furnish further materials both for the notion of apparent and unapparent states, and for the notion of a duality in things.

Other phenomena, in some respects allied, yield these notions still more materials. I refer to reflections.

If the rude resemblance in outlines and movements which a shadow bears to the person casting it raises the idea of a second entity, much more must the exact resemblance of a reflection do this. Repeating all the details of form, of light and shade, of color, and mimicking even the grimaces of the original, this image cannot at first be interpreted otherwise than as an existence. Only by experiment is it ascertained that to the visual impressions there are not, in this case, those corresponding tactual impressions yielded by most other things. What results? Simply the notion of an existence which can be seen but not felt. Optical interpretation is impossible. That the image is formed by reflected rays, cannot be conceived while physical knowledge does not exist; and, in the absence of authoritative statement that the reflection is a mere appearance, it is inevitably taken for a reality—a reality in some way belonging to the person whose traits it simulates and whose actions it mocks.

Moreover, these duplicates seen in the water yield to the primitive man obvious verifications of certain other beliefs which surrounding things suggest. Deep down in the clear pool, are there not clouds like those he sees above? The clouds above appear and disappear. Has not the existence of these clouds below something to do with it? At night, again, seeming as though far underneath the surface of the water, are stars as bright as those overhead. Are there, then, two