Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/438

400 abides with the body, and in death departs from it, and which, speaking of it in English, we call the soul, the natives find it very difficult to explain. Like people very much more advanced than themselves, they have not, in the first place, a perfectly clear conception of what it is; and, in the second place, like other people, they use words to represent these conceptions which they acknowledge to be more or less figurative and inexact when the precise meaning of them is sought for." A tone like this is a positive relief after the cut-and-dry assurance with which we are so familiar. And why is the drift of existence, that which makes its force, its meaning, its value, expressed in terms of visible object? Not always, it may be, because savages are even as much wedded to material analogies as we are, but because "thinking" to such minds "is like seeing", and thus must be expressed in visual terms as in one sense higher than the tactual or muscular dialects. And here Mr. Fison is quoted in the same sense. Strange that we should be so ready to credit the savage with the definite when we are so vague ourselves! Again, take "Nunuai", "the abiding or recurrent impression" which, as we say, haunts us. This is reckoned "not a mere fancy; it is real, but it has no form or substance". Thus the primitive thinker is in full accord with modern results; such persistence is a ringing on the strongly excited nerves; it is "actually" still "active", gradually dying away as the "clang" does. On page 269 a pertinent question is asked: "When an English ghost appears in the dead man's habit as he lived, is it thought to be his soul that appears?"

But enough has been quoted to indicate what is meant. It is well to end such a helpful book with the story of Tagaro, who was tired of being asked pointless questions, and in such wise answered his literalist questioner as at last to bring about his untimely end, and so get rid of him and his inquiries. What a suggestive parable of civilised questioning of the primitive mind!

There remains, however, another recent utterance, not, indeed, on primitive theories in the rude or "savage" sense, but on the sources and character of some of the deepest and most subtle of human thinkings—those which we vaguely call Indian, or, even more broadly. Oriental—worthy of the most respectful attention and admiration.