The advantage of this is that, so long as the
soul remains unharmed in the place where he has deposited it, the
man himself is immortal; nothing can kill his body, since his life
is not in it.
Evidence of this primitive belief is furnished by a class of
folk-tales of which the Norse story of "The giant who had no heart
in his body" is perhaps the best-known example. Stories of this kind
are widely diffused over the world, and from their number and the
variety of incident and of details in which the leading idea is
embodied, we may infer that the conception of an external soul is
one which has had a powerful hold on the minds of men at an early
stage of history. For folk-tales are a faithful reflection of the
world as it appeared to the primitive mind; and we may be sure that
any idea which commonly occurs in them, however absurd it may seem
to us, must once have been an ordinary article of belief. This
assurance, so far as it concerns the supposed power of disengaging
the soul from the body for a longer or shorter time, is amply
corroborated by a comparison of the folk-tales in question with the
actual beliefs and practices of savages.
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