The African Is Usually Great At Dreams, And Has Them Very Noisily;
But He Does Not Seem To Me To Attach Immense Importance To Them,
Certainly Not So Much As The Red Indian Does.
I doubt whether there
is much real ground for supposing that from dreams came man's first
conception of the spirit world, and I think the origin of man's
religious belief lies in man's misfortunes.
There can be little doubt that the very earliest human beings found,
as their descendants still find, their plans frustrated, let them
plan ever so wisely and carefully; they must have seen their
companions overtaken by death and disaster, arising both from things
they could see and from things they could not see. The distinction
between these two classes of phenomena is not so definitely
recognised by savages or animals as it is by the more cultured races
of humanity. I doubt whether a savage depends on his five senses
alone to teach him what the world is made of, any more than a Fellow
of the Royal Society does. From this method of viewing nature I
feel sure that the general idea arose - which you find in all early
cultures - that death was always the consequence of the action of
some malignant spirit, and that there is no accidental or natural
death, as we call it; and death is, after all, the most impressive
attribute of life.
If a man were knocked on the head with a club, or shot with an
arrow, the cause of death is clearly the malignancy of the person
using these weapons; and so it is easy to think that a man killed by
a fallen tree, or by the upsetting of a canoe in the surf, or in an
eddy in the river, is also the victim of some being using these
things as weapons.
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