every individual, there is an instinct for God that tells upon behaviour; or, to use another metaphor, an upward urge that makes for betterment and is due to the unwearied play of the spirit of God upon the souls of men. This is a working hypothesis that has never failed me; and if it is true, then it follows that people who want to understand the higher religions may learn from ancestor-worship, as physiologists do from embryos and lower forms of animal life.

Something must be said, too, about the Bantu mind, since that is the vehicle of expression for Bantu religion. Soul-soothing functions have lately passed from 'that blessed word Mesopotamia' to ‘mentality', 'complex', 'reaction', 'moron' and other vogue-words that would not leave the world desolate if they died before attaining their majority. People feel better, nowadays, when they have been delivered of a psychological phrase; and those who have a nodding acquaintance with the tribesman's ways are proud parents of astonishing aphorisms about Bantu mentality. They give out to the world that the Bantu are devoid of intellectual curiosity, know nothing of cause and effect, never trouble to examine the conditions that bring about a phenomenon, are impervious to experience, ignore the difference between certainty and probability, are content with a chain of reasoning that is made up mostly of missing links, and much more of the same kind. To affix a psychological label is not quite the same thing as to solve a metaphysical riddle; but Alice discovered that in Wonderland, where we have 'summer homes', if you say a thing three times it becomes true. I hate to put a curb on imagination, for it cuts very pretty capers when allowed to have its fling; the prosaic truth, however, is that the Bantu mind is very much like our own, but fitted out in the plastic period of youth with furniture of more primitive pattern than ours. We spend the formative years of life among people who habitually assume (most of them without thinking) that phenomena are subject to uniform laws and free from the interference of capricious spirits, that contradictory propositions cannot both be true, that a person cannot be present in more than one place at the same time, that there is a conspicuous difference between the substantial facts of objective experience and the flummery of a dream, and other assumptions of a like nature. What the neighbours designedly taught was often con

veniently forgotten; but this was the faith that they lived by; and that is always catching. These fundamental beliefs are more stubborn than arguments. We seldom mention them, because it would cast a slur upon our interlocutor's intelligence if we gave utterance to commonplace truths that children take to heart before they know it; and we safely suppose that people bred in our civilization are silently building their conclusions upon the same unspoken postulates. The Bantu act in precisely the same manner. They are bred in a civilization that is soaked with magic, swarming with formidable spirits, and entangled in an antiquated and effete science that lacked reliable rules for testing the soundness of its conclusions. Their fundamental faith is consequently so antagonistic to ours that we cannot grasp it without effort; and yet it is as relentless and as silent in its play upon ultimate judgements. Bantu mental processes, however untrimmed, are so much like our own that we should often fall in with their verdict if we had imagination and intellectual sympathy enough to discard our own view of the world for a moment and take theirs instead; and the whole apparent difference between their habit of mind and ours may be accounted for by this contrariety in unuttered assumptions. In brief, the structure of the Bantu mind is the same as that of the European, but there is a great difference between the fundamental beliefs upon which they respectively rely.

The Bantu are very sure that there is in man a subtle but indispensable something that enables him to be what he is and to do what he does. Every noun in their vernaculars was built to meet the needs of the senses, and terms whose primary meaning is 'breath', 'wind', 'vapour', 'shadow', or some other volatile or impalpable object of perception, have to be used figuratively to denote this essential part of man. Since this is just what we have done with our words 'soul', 'spirit', 'ghost', we cannot be far wrong in using these words to translate theirs. To say that the Bantu do not mean just what we mean by these terms is mere quibbling. It is inconceivable that any noun in the vernacular of a people whose thought is dominated by a magical conception of life should have an exact equivalent in English. Even such commonplace words as 'lion' or 'tree' carry implications to their minds that are foreign to ours. To insist upon exact

equivalents and refuse to make shift with approximations, is to preclude all attempts to translate Bantu utterances into English. The point is that our words 'soul', 'spirit', 'ghost', come nearer than any other words in our tongue to what the Bantu have in mind. Notes and Queries on Anthropology, a valuable hand-book for field-workers that is issued by the Royal Anthropological Institute, while admitting that our words 'soul', 'spirit', and 'ghost' are identical in meaning, adds that 'it is convenient to limit soul to the separable personality of the living man or other being; ghost to the same thing after death; spirit to a soul-like being which has never been associated with a human or animal body." The fact remains, however, in spite of its inconvenience, that these terms have no such limitation in English literature; that 'ghost' has come to suggest an apparition (except in one or two surviving phrases, like 'giving up the ghost'); and that it is impracticable to decide without intensive study of each separate case (and often without more evidence than is obtainable) whether the spirit that is placated, say, in a tree or in a river, was ever associated with a human or animal body. Many spirits that now haunt trees and rivers appear to have once dwelt in man, and may do so again, while others are of doubtful origin. The mutual relation of the Bantu terms that we have to do with are not so delicately adjusted, but the respective terms for 'embodied soul' and 'disembodied soul' are distinct in most, perhaps all, vernaculars, though the former is often used indiscriminately for the soul of a thing or of a person.

How did the Bantu come by this conviction of an indwelling soul? Not, we may be sure, by following a chain of reasoning till it led them to an inescapable conclusion. That is not their way. Their way is to trust experience, and to save that of one generation for the use of the next. They are not exempt from the human propensity for relating parts of experience to the whole of it: feeling and thought grow together in their experience, as in ours; but in rank soil feeling is prolific and thought tends to rot at the roots. The Bantu are often lost in amazement, and yet slow to enter the grotto of wonder from which the stream of philosophy flows. Belief in an indwelling soul in man is much older than the Bantu race, and was probably included in the 14th edition, p. 261.

social heritage that that race derived from its progenitors. It is a belief that comes naturally to unsophisticated people who confuse subjective and objective impressions and cannot doubt the evidence of their own senses, waking or sleeping. While the body lies unconscious in sleep, or in trance-most Bantu are directly or indirectly acquainted with trance-its owner wanders freely in old haunts and strange places, flies like a bird over the ground, performs feats of strength or agility that are unachievable when he is trammelled with flesh, holds converse with the absent and the dead, and even goes to and fro between the upper and the nether world. The body that he leaves upon the mat is visible, and perceptible to other senses, but no sense is sensitive enough to perceive him as he slips out of it for a night of adventure or slips back into it after his jaunt. And there is another conspicuous difference between him and it: when he is free from it there is hardly a limit to what he can do, but it, poor thing, is so helpless without him that it begins to decay if he stays away too long. The Bantu are no more likely to talk of 'the theory of an indwelling soul' than of 'the theory that fire burns'; they say it is an experience, not a theory—a fact that every one knows-and they are far from impervious to it. They use this experience to explain the activity and resistance of other creatures and things: each of these also must have a soul, else it could not be what it is nor do what it does. But that lane leads to magic, and we must keep the high road to ancestor-worship.

Homer pictured sleep and death as twin brothers—a metaphor that meant more to Greeks of that period than it does to us. If the Bantu have not used this particular metaphor, they have built their eschatology upon the idea behind it. Their experience is that the soul of the sleeper, even when wandering in far-off places, maintains mysterious connexion with the body, and flies back to it at a word or a touch; and their use of relics in the worship of the dead shows that they posit a similar relationship between the discarnate spirit and the remains of its earthly tabernacle.

Two questions here leap to the lips of a European inquirer:

1. Do they think that the soul is born with the body? and 2. Is it

1 See The Cult of the Heavenly Twins and Boanerges, both by Dr. J. Rendel Harris (Cambridge University Press).

imperishable? It is useless to look to the Bantu, who are not much given to excogitation, for an explicit reply to either question, though most of them are affable enough to gratify a questioner with whatever speculative information he seems to need for his own satisfaction. Our better plan is to elicit their belief from their customs; for husks have a tale to tell even when worms have eaten the kernel.

1. Some sort of magico-religious rite is usually performed when a new-born babe is 'brought out' or formally introduced to the community; and still-born babes and those who die before this ceremony are denied mortuary rites. Europeans have inferred, therefore, that these little waifs of humanity are supposed to have no souls, or at any rate to have only animal souls that die with the body. But there are other facts to be taken into account. When a woman of some tribes passes the spot where a still-born babe was buried, or a babe who died before its mother emerged from her puerperium, she throws a few blades of grass upon the little mound to prevent the spirit from entering into her womb and being born again; and West Coast parents have other ways of showing these 'wanderer souls', as Miss Kingsley calls them, that they are not wanted back in their families. There is also a widespread belief that ancestor-spirits are reborn in their descendants. Smith and Dale have again and again heard Ila-speaking people say: 'I am my grandfather, I entered my mother's womb to be born'; but they state that 'there is some difference of opinion as to the precise time when the ancestral spirit becomes the child'. My Bantu studies tempt me to believe that the soul is thought to enter the foetus at the moment of quickening; but there is room for doubt on that point. Furthermore, the assumption that the souls of animals die with their bodies smacks of European rather than African speculation. African hunters propitiate the vengeful spirits of elephants, hippos, rhinos, and some other animals that they have slain in the chase; Baganda butchers are careful to stun a sheep with a blow from behind when it is not looking, lest its ghost should afflict them with fatal illness; and no picture of the Bantu underworld would be complete without beautiful flocks, herds, and fowls.

2. Custom throws some light also upon the question of the imperishability of the soul. Ordinary people sacrifice to their three