ABSTRACT
The earliest foundation of all our natural scientific knowledge is to be sought in the observations of nature collected in the course of thousands of years by prehistoric peoples who had reached a primitive stage of civilization. This empirical folk-knowledge, which the student of folk-lore in our own day investigates from a historical and national-psychological point of view, has not only been the starting-point for all scientific thought, but has also, right up to the most recent times, to a certain extent influenced scientific research itself; increased its store of facts with material for observation and even now and then given rise to problems which science has debated. Primitive man's speculations upon life have naturally been influenced by his mode of life in various climates and under varying conditions. Common to them all, however, would appear to have been the fact that the first thing that has induced man to reflect upon life has been its cessation: death. And to the aborigines what we call a natural death is actually the most wonderful; that a man should fall in a fight against wild animals or his enemies is all part of the order of the day, but that the powers of a sound and healthy man should suddenly and without reason begin to fail and life to cease with or without the accompaniment of pain — that is a thing one finds it hard to acquiesce in. And the thing becomes all the more remarkable for the fact that again and again at night the departed one appears in dreams to those who have survived him. These dreams have given rise to a belief in ghosts, spectres, and spiritual powers of various kinds, both friendly and evil, and this belief has in its turn called forth measures with a view to deriving advantage from the well-disposed and avoiding the snares of the wicked. Thus measures of many and various kinds were adopted in regard to the bodies of the dead, which were either cremated or otherwise destroyed in order to render it impossible for them to return amongst the living, or else, on the other hand, they were elaborately cared for by the preservation of the skeleton or by embalming, which was intended to make the dead well-disposed towards their survivors. From these manipulations arose the first knowledge of the anatomy of the human body, while observations of the actual course of death created certain physiological ideas. Men learnt 4to observe the heart-beat and to connect life with its continuance or cessation, and thus the heart itself was regarded as the organ of life. Breathing was also observed to be an essential condition of life, and in particular the deep expiration which indeed so often attends the actual moment of death gave rise to the idea of life as having something of the nature of air, being dependent upon the respiratory organs and leaving the body through them. In mediaeval church paintings this belief reappears in a particularly naive manner: the soul of the dying is seen to leave the body in the form of a little child creeping out through the mouth. Likewise the words of the biblical story of the creation to the effect that God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life testifies to the same kind of idea. And so there arose, as a further development of these ideas, the belief that the breath or spirit lives when the body dies. The contrast between body and spirit which is an outcome of the ideas described above is included in the speculations of the earliest natural philosophers as a fundamental principle.
