Elements of Folk Psychology: Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of MankindWundt, Wilhelm Max
Science
Elements of Folk Psychology: Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
Wundt, Wilhelm Max
Ethnopsychology
There is ground for the conjecture that the distinction between these
two main forms of the soul, the corporeal and the breath or shadow
soul, is closely bound up with the changed culture of the totemic age.
Primitive man flees from the corpse--indeed, even from those who are
sick, if he sees that death is approaching. The corpse is left where
it lies, and even the mortally ill are abandoned in their helpless
condition. The living avoid the places where death has entered. All
this changes in an age that has become familiar with struggle and
death, and particularly with the sudden death which follows upon the
use of weapons. This is exemplified even by the natives of Australia,
who are armed with spear and shield. The warrior who falls before the
deadly weapon, whose blood flows forth, and who expires in the midst of
his fellow-combatants, arouses an entirely different impression from
the man of the most primitive times who dies in solitude, and from
whose presence the living flee. In addition to the original ideas of a
soul that is harboured in the body, and that after death wanders about
the neighbourhood as an invisible demon, we now have a further set of
ideas. The soul is believed to leave the body in the form of the blood.
But it may take an even more sudden departure, being sometimes supposed
to leave in the last breath. In this case, it is held to be directly
perceptible as a small cloud or a vapour, or as passing over into some
animal that is swift of movement or possesses such characteristics as
arouse an uncanny feeling. This idea of a breath soul readily leads to
the belief that the psyche, after its separation from the body, appears
in the dream image, again temporarily assuming, in shadowy form, the
outlines of its original body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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