I have said that the secondary form of sacrifice, which for brevity’s sake I shall henceforth designate as the mystic, is found in most parts of the world and in both hemispheres. This naturally raises the question whether it has a single common origin, and antedates the dispersal of mankind through the hemispheres; or whether it has been independently evolved several times over in many lands by many races. For myself, I have no cut-and-dried answer to this abstruse question, nor do I regard it, indeed, as a really important one. On the one hand, there are many reasons for supposing that certain relatively high traits of thought or art were common property among mankind before the dispersion from the primitive centre, if a primitive centre ever existed. On the other hand, psychologists know well that the human mind acts with extraordinary similarity in given circumstances all the world over, and that identical stages of evolution seem to have been passed through independently by many races, in Egypt and Mexico, in China and Peru; so that we can find nothing inherently improbable in the idea that even these complex conceptions of mystic sacrifice have distinct origins in remote countries. What is certain is the fact that among the Aztecs, as among the Phrygians, the priest who sacrificed, the victim he slew, and the image or great god to {321}whom he slew him, were all identified; the killer, the killed, and the being in whose honor the killing took place were all one single indivisible deity. Even such details as that the priest clothed himself in the skin of the victim are common to many lands; they may very well be either a heritage from remote ancestral humanity, or the separate product of the human mind, working along like grooves under identical conditions. In one word they may perhaps be necessary and inevitable corollaries from antecedent conceptions.