To be clear about Animism, it is necessary to bear in mind several modes of belief: (1) Hyperphysical Animism, that certain things have, or are possessed by a conscious spirit, and that this spirit is a separable entity; (2) that things are themselves conscious (or semi-conscious), but their consciousness is not a separable entity; (3) that things are not conscious, but are informed by a separable essence, usually called soul (better, soul-stuff), which may be eaten by spirits, or may go to ghost-land with them; (4) the extension or limitation of these beliefs to more or fewer classes of things. Unless these distinctions are recognised, any report upon savage beliefs can hardly be clear and adequate; but generally we may take it that when a traveller tells us that such and such things are not believed to have souls, and says nothing of any belief as to their consciousness, he means (except with regard to animals) to deny that anything like human consciousness is attributed to them. And when Mr. Torday writes that, according to the Bahuana of the Upper Congo, there are two incorporeal parts—_doshi_, common to man, animals and fetiches, and _bun_, peculiar to man—he seems to leave it as a matter of course that plants and inanimate things have neither of these, and are not conscious beings; though probably some of them have soul-stuff, since clothes, weapons and food are buried with a corpse.[167] The Rev. J. H. Weeks says that the Bakongo of the Lower Congo attribute a spirit only to the _nkasa_ tree (from whose bark the ordeal poison is derived) amongst plants;[168] and, similarly, the Baloki, further up the river, attribute a spirit only to the _nka_ tree.[169] Since many things are buried by these people in a grave, or broken above it, the things may be supposed to have soul-stuff; but from the denying of spirits to plants, and from silence as to psychological Animism, it may be inferred that neither plants nor inanimate things are regarded as conscious beings. Sir E. F. im Thurn tells us that material things of all sorts are believed by the natives of Guiana to have each a body and a spirit—evidently a conscious and malicious spirit; “and that not all inanimate objects have this dual nature avowedly attributed to them, is probably only due to the chance that ... the spirit has not yet been noticed in some cases.”[170] Even with these Guiana Indians, then, whose Animism, in every sense, is unusually active and extensive, their attitude is an acquired, specialised way of imagining and dealing with things that draw their attention and excite their suspicions, not a primitive, necessary illusion; else there could be no exceptions.