Whilst many savages believe, like ourselves, that the body entertains one soul and gives up one ghost, the Ekoi believe in two, one animating a man’s body, the other possessing, or changing into, some animal in the bush. Three souls, the vegetative, sensitive and rational, are well known to European philosophy. The Mandans thought that a man has one black, one brown, and one light-coloured soul; but that only the last returned to the Lord of Life.[225] The observer who tells us this also reports (p. 484) that some of the Dakotas assign to each man four spirits: one that dies with the body; one that remains with, or near, it; one that accounts for its deeds and at death goes to the spirit-world; and one that lingers with the small bundle of the deceased’s hair, which is kept by relatives until they can throw it into an enemy’s country to become a roving, hostile demon. In West Africa, too, Miss Kingsley found four souls: one that survives the body; one that lives with some animal in the bush; one, the body’s shadow, that lies down every night in the shadow of the great god, and there recovers its strength; and, finally, the dream-soul. Some natives hold that the three last are functions of the first or true soul; but the witch-doctor treats all four separately.[226] The shadow of a man, his reflection, his name, his totem, his breath, his dream-wraith, his blood, his corpse, supply natural starting-points for such speculations. Some Chinese philosophers held that “each of the five viscera has its own separate male soul.”[227] I have found no belief in six souls; but in Siberia the Altaians distinguish six parts or (rather) conditions or stages of the soul; and this probably is only another attempt to convey the same meaning.[228] Mr. Skeat reports that, probably, in the old Animism of the Malays, each man had seven souls; though now they talk of only one; except in using spells, when the souls are addressed separately.[229] In the religion of Osiris there seems to have been a still greater number of souls: as of the name, the shape, the strength, the shadow, etc.: all reuniting with the immortal counterpart of a man’s mummy, if justified at the last judgment. Prof. Wiedemann suggests that these beliefs may have been collected from different local sources, and preserved for fear of losing anything that might be true.[230] Whereas, then, the prescientific mind is often accused of confusing things that are separate, we see here the opposite tendency to reify abstract aspects, and to separate things that are in nature united; and one probable cause of this is the practical interest of treating, and therefore of attending to and addressing, separately, certain aspects of a man in rites of exorcism, lustration, summoning, reinforcing, propitiation.