At the present day the Batak in the north-west of Sumatra interpret the world about them in terms of a soul-stuff or life-power called _tondi_. A vast reservoir of this exists in the world above, and flows down upon men and animals and plants. The biggest animal, like the tiger, the most important of plants, like rice (chief source of food), have most {85} _tondi_, but it is not confined to living things; the smith attributes it to his iron, the fisherman to his boat, the tiller of the ground to his hoe, the householder to his hearth and home. But a further analysis is beginning. What is the relation of a man's _tondi_ to himself? When he dies, it passes into some fresh organism. But the rest of him, his shadow, his double, or his self, becomes a _begu_. In life, it is the body that thinks and feels, that fears and hopes and wills, though the presence of the _tondi_ supplies the needful energy. But the _tondi_ also has the functions of consciousness, for it can go away in dreams and meet the _begus_ of parents and ancestors. And the apprehension that it may depart begets reverence and even offerings to the _tondi_, rather than to distant gods for whom man can feel neither fear nor love. We touch here another root of religious belief, which produces growths so wide-spreading that some interpreters bring the whole range of objects of worship within their shade. How, after all, does man explain himself to himself? At first he does not think about thinking. Such words as he uses are vague and elastic, like the Polynesian _mana_, which covers a multitude of facts without and within. Only through long dim processes does any idea corresponding to our conception of personality come into his consciousness. He is as confused about the objects round him as he is about himself. {86} Yet he has some sort of initiative. Whence comes it? Little by little a variety of experiences force on him the belief that beside the body and its limbs he possesses something which he cannot ordinarily see, but which is essential to his activity. He falls asleep, and lies still upon the ground; he wakes, full of remembrance of adventure, the localities which he has visited, the animals that he has hunted, the dead kinsmen whom he has met. The Australians explain their dreams by the supposition that the _yambo_, the mūrup, or the _boolabong_, can quit the body and return. "I asked one of the Kurnai" (of Gippsland), relates Mr. Howitt, "whether he really thought his _yambo_ could go out during sleep." "It must be so," was the answer, "for when I sleep, I go to distant places, I see distant people, I even see and speak with those that are dead." The great apostle of the East in the sixteenth century, the devoted Francis Xavier, wrote home from India to the Society of Jesus in Europe--