Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/187

Rh prevalent in the world of to-day is the collective result of generations who have gathered its elements from almost every phase of human life. The precise origin of primitive religion is, however, a controverted problem, and whether its first germs emanated from a belief in magic, or in the existence of gods and demons, or from a conception of the dual nature of man as body and soul, are questions which lie outside the scope of archæology. The most reasonable hypothesis on the subject is the animistic theory, advocated by E. B. Tylor, which represents man as having attained to the idea of spirit by reflecting on various physical and psychological experiences familiar to him as ordinary occurrences of daily life, such as dreams, trances, shadows, hallucinations, breath, sleep, death, etc. The idea that man possessed a material body and a spiritual soul was gradually extended till it applied not only to animals, but to material objects. Certain archæological remains discovered on the primitive homes and haunts of mankind, and now available as evidence of their past career on the globe, are more in harmony with Dr. Tylor's animistic theory than with any other; for, as soon as the dualism of man's nature became a stereotyped belief, the idea that the soul, after somatic death, passed on to the world of spirits, became an inevitable corollary. Hence, both the body and soul of a departed friend had to be attended to by the surviving relatives, the natural sequence to which was