Moreover, it will hence result that the savage can hardly gain any clear conception of Death, and especially of death from natural causes. When a tribesman is brought home severely wounded and unconscious, the spectator’s immediate {049}idea must necessarily be that the soul has gone away and deserted the body. For how long it has gone, he cannot tell; but his first attempts are directed towards inducing or compelling it to return again. For this purpose, he often addresses it with prayers and adjurations, or begs it to come back with loud cries and persuasions. And he cannot possibly discriminate between its temporary absence and its final departure. As Mr. Herbert Spencer well says, the consequences of blows or wounds merge into death by imperceptible stages. “Now the injured man shortly ‘returned to himself,’ and did not go away again; and now, returning to himself only after a long absence, he presently deserted his body for an indefinite time. Lastly, instead of these temporary returns, followed by final absence, there sometimes occurred cases in which a violent blow caused continuous absence from the very first; the other self never came back at all.” In point of fact, during these earlier stages, the idea of Death as we know it did not and does not occur in any form. There are still savages who do not seem to recognise the universality and necessity of death--who regard it on the contrary as something strange and unatural, something due to the machination of enemies or of witchcraft. With the earliest men, it is a foregone conclusion, psychologically speaking, that they should so regard it; they could not form any other concept without far more extended knowledge than they have the means of possessing. To them, a Dead Man must always have seemed a man whose soul or breath or other self had left him, but might possibly return again to the body at any time. Each of the three stages of thought above discriminated has its appropriate mode of disposing of its dead. The appropriate mode for this earliest stage is Preservation of the Corpse, which eventuates at last in Mummification.