In many ways he was very like that boy, just beginning, in the lowest form, in a strange school. We must go back to have another look at that dreaming man with his wife by his side taking notes, to be used with much caution subsequently, by reason of the instrument of conviction.

He would go to sleep, and there would appear to him, in his dream, the vision of his dog, which he had buried, or eaten, a week ago, when a wild beast had killed it. Naturally, therefore, he says to his wife when he awakes: "Ponto" - to translate the dog's name - "is like my father, he too has a soul that is alive, for he has been to see me". So that was quickly settled - animals also have a soul that does not die when their bodies die. But there is yet more than this. A week ago this primitive man lost his axe of stone, fathoms deep in the river, as he swam across. He could not find it by diving: it was completely dead to him, lost for ever. Yet he went to sleep, and in his dream it appeared to him. He did not see it down in the depths of the river, or else there would have been nothing strange. It would merely have meant that his soul, his second self, went wandering and saw it there, being a better diver than his body. But he saw the axe hanging up on the tree bough where he always used to hang it. It was there.

So this proved that, like his father, and his dog, his axe too had a soul, a second self, that could move about - it seemed a constant attribute of these souls to have much greater freedom of movement than the bodies to which they belonged - it was proved by the simple fact that he had seen it; for if primitive man had not assimilated the proverb that appearances were deceptive he had a most perfect faith in that rather contradictory one of our coining that says "seeing's believing ". He believed because he saw. That was all. And from this belief several rather singular results followed. He saw that his father had a life after death - And in that life after death he had no reason to doubt that his father required the things that had been necessary for his existence in this life. The primitive man had no idea of an after life in which there was no eating and drinking. Had such a life suggested itself to his mind, he would have figured it as a life hardly worth the living, seeing that his principal joys in the life that was familiar to him were just these eatings and drinkings. His father, he would assume, would have need for the things that were essential to his subsistence here; such, for instance, as his axe and his fire stick.

And since these things too had a life after death (as was apparent by the vision in dreams of the axe that he had seen drowned and the firestick that he had seen burned) there was the less difficulty in conceiving his father using them in the life after death. And in order that they should be ready at his hand in that future life, the custom grew of burying the material axes and firesticks and so on with people when they died, so that the souls of the dead should take the souls of these things with them to the spirit world. The burying of the axes and so on probably did not mean that the primitive people thought the man's soul took away the actual material axes into the spirit world - there was indeed constant disproof of this in the undoubted fact that the axes remained in the grave - but the notion was that the spirit man used the spirit axes, and that these were the handier for his use if the material part of them could be laid beside his material part Of course it is rather hard work trying to explain mental processes in the language of quite a different psychology from that of the person who thought by the medium of these processes. One can but do one's best, and ask the reader's good and intelligent help in trying to get the thing intelligible.

In this notion of the souls of the material things there does not seem to be any immediate foreshadowing of the Platonic notion of ideal, though this too implied the existence of a spirit kind of axe, in a supernatural world. But the Platonic idea seems to have been that there existed somewhere, in some supernatural world, a single and very perfect axe, that was the type or model of all the imperfect and terrestrial axes - giving the mind of man who invented the axe his first suggestion. It is quite a different notion from that of the primitive man who conceives a supernatural existence of each axe and material thing of present use - an existence suggested to him by the appearance of these things in his dreams. The notions are quite distinct. It needed another theory to be the connecting link between the two. If no very close relationship is to be traced between the primitive man's ideas of the object souls and the ideas that Plato recorded from the mouth of Socrates, it is far otherwise with another set of classical ideas less famous than those advanced by Socrates, but which have had much more influence on modern thought They are the ideas that we associate with the name of Democritus. The relationship of these ideas to Plato's ideas, as those which Socrates is supposed to have enunicated are generally termed, is not very difficult to trace, but it is not much to the present purpose.

What is more interesting is that those ideas of Democritus are a most important link between primitive and modern thought, and make the historical chain complete. We have seen the primitive man speculating about the apparitions that came to him in dreams, and inferring from them the souls of men, beasts, plants and inanimate objects. It had not yet, however, happened to him to look on at himself thinking, so to say, to wonder how the machinery of thought went on. As soon as man began to look at himself from that point of view, metaphysics commenced; and they commenced with the ideas of Democritus. The question that Democritus asked himself (and it was a question that it had not occurred to man to ask before) was how his soul (as we should say, his mind) got the perceptions of external objects. Hitherto man had taken all this for granted. Such and such an external object existed. It was there, before his eyes. Naturally he saw it, he was conscious of it. To Democritus, and to the school of which his name is typical, it occurred that it was not so natural, in the sense of "inevitable" and "explicable"; and the more they began to consider the question, the more difficult it appeared to be to answer it.