tangible bodies in dreams; (3) the difficulty of imagining spirits to live and act except in the likeness of the body (though non-human forms—usually animal—are sometimes substituted); (4) the convenience of such imaginations to the story-teller; (5) the convenience of them to sorcerers and purveyors of mysteries, who rely upon such imaginations in producing illusion by suggestion. For ages a confusion of ghost with corpse may exist in the popular mind along with the more refined notion of soul-stuff in which a ghost becomes manifest, whilst there is no attempt to reconcile these imaginations; and it is only by metaphysical subtilties about “mind” and “matter,” or by mystical aversion to sensuosity, that the notion of pure incorporeal spirit without even spatial limitations is at last freed from these primitive associations, partially and amongst a few people. A tendency to abstract conception of the spirit is set up, indeed, in the ordinary way of “dissociation” by the belief in transmigration. For if a spirit may “possess” all sorts of bodies—men, plants, animals, etc.—it is independent of any particular body; though it may still be thought to need _some_ body. Where the idea of pure spirit has been established amongst educated people, it becomes necessary for those who believe in ghosts and have forgotten their soul-stuff to explain how a spirit can manifest itself to eye, ear, nose, hand, without a physical body, by “materialising” itself, as invisible vapour (say one’s own breath on a frosty morning) condenses into a cloud or into dew; for the power of analogy as an aid to thought, or as a substitute for it, is not yet exhausted. The varieties of belief that occur here and there in the world cannot be explained without a much fuller knowledge of local circumstances than is usually available. The Semang say that souls are red, like blood, and no bigger than a grain of maize;[220] the Malays that they are vapoury, shadowy, filmy essences, about as big as one’s thumb;[221] in both cases shaped like the owner. Elsewhere in the Indian Archipelago, “the animating principle is conceived of, not as a tiny being confined to a single part of the body, but as a sort of fluid or ether diffused through every part.”[222] The less educated classes in Japan consider the soul as a small, round, black thing that can leave the body during sleep.[223] Amongst the Ekoi, the soul is a small thing dwelling in the breast, whilst a man lives; but at death expands into the body’s full stature.[224] The difficulty of finding the soul in the body leads some thinkers to suppose it must be very small, others very attenuated—thin as a shadow and as breath invisible.