LXVI. The External Soul in Folk-Tales
IN A FORMER part of this work we saw that, in the opinion of
primitive people, the soul may temporarily absent itself from the
body without causing death. Such temporary absences of the soul are
often believed to involve considerable risk, since the wandering
soul is liable to a variety of mishaps at the hands of enemies, and
so forth. But there is another aspect to this power of disengaging
the soul from the body. If only the safety of the soul can be
ensured during its absence, there is no reason why the soul should
not continue absent for an indefinite time; indeed a man may, on a
pure calculation of personal safety, desire that his soul should
never return to his body. Unable to conceive of life abstractly as a
"permanent possibility of sensation" or a "continuous adjustment of
internal arrangements to external relations," the savage thinks of
it as a concrete material thing of a definite bulk, capable of being
seen and handled, kept in a box or jar, and liable to be bruised,
fractured, or smashed in pieces.
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