generalisation; that the underlying idea, the "essential characteristic" of ghosts is that of returning (and therefore of resuscitation), as the French word revenant indicates. And the writer conjecturally connects this with "the endless succession in Nature of Birth, Death, and Revival",[1] by which last he must mean regeneration. Then we come to the early recognition, not merely on a pre-scientific, but, in a sense, a pre-imaginative basis, of that oneness on the one hand of "physical" energies and on the other of the "energies" of what we so little as yet understand, and so vaguely call life, animation, vitality. "To man in his wild state the same life appears to stir in everything, in running water, in a tree, and in a creature; it ends and disappears in everything at times, but it reappears again constantly, in shape, movement, and outward character so similar as to seem identical; conveying the inference that something has gone and come again; there is nothing around a savage to suggest that the animating principle of vitality suffers more than suspension or displacement. The analogy of Nature affords him no presumption that death means extinction, while his imagination supplies him with constant evidence to the contrary."[2] Yes, his "imagination"; not an illusive "fancy", leading him ever further from such facts as the unity of nature, the conservation of energy, the continuity of natural process, the unbroken succession of production and reproduction; but an image-power which, even in its worst failures, is a genuine attempt to render, in pictorial form, impressions stamped upon the very "protist" in which all life alike had started, and constantly reinforced and enriched through the long evolutionary ascent in complexity.
Thus the term "life" itself, it is obvious, cannot indicate in early times so sharp a differentiation as in our highly specialised days, from the stir and movement seen in everything. The presumption is always that which we now call the persistence or conservation of energy; while no bounds are set to its possible transformation. Sir A. Lyall then tells us that his conjecture is "that a great part of what is called animism—the tendency to discover human life and agency in all moving things, whether waving trees or wandering beasts—begins with an ingrained conviction that some new form or habitation must be provided for the
