In the same way a few genuine wraiths, or ghosts, or ’veridical hallucinations,’ would be enough to start the animistic hypothesis, or to confirm it notably, if it was already started.  As to disturbances and movements of objects unexplained, these, in his own experience, suggested, even to De Morgan, the hypothesis of a conscious, active, and purposeful will, not that of any human being present.  Now such a will is hardly to be defined otherwise than as ‘spiritual’.  This order of phenomena, like those of clairvoyance and wraiths, might either give rise to the savage animistic hypothesis, or, at least, might confirm it greatly.  In fact, if the sets of abnormal phenomena existed, or were held to exist, savage man scarcely needed the normal phenomena for the basis of his spiritual belief.  The normal phenomena lent him such terms as ‘spirit,’ ‘shadow,’ but much of his theory might have been built on the foundation of the abnormal phenomena alone.  A ’veridical hallucination,’ of the dying would give him a ‘wraith’; a recognised hallucination of the dead would give him a ghost:  the often reported and unexplained movements and disturbances would give him a vui, ‘house spirit,’ ‘brownie,’ ‘domovoy,’ follet, lar, or lutin.  Or these occurrences might suggest to the thinking savage that some discontented influence survived from the recently dead.

Four thousand years have passed since houses were haunted in Egypt, and have left some sane, educated, and methodical men to meet the same annoyances as the ancient Egyptians did, by the same measures.  We do not pretend to discover, without examination, the causes of the sounds and sights which baffle trained and not superstitious investigators.  But we do say that similar occurrences, in a kraal or an Eskimo hut, in a wigwam, in a cave, or under a gunyeh, would greatly confirm the animistic hypothesis of savages.  The theory of imposture (in some cases) does undeniably break down, for the people who hold it cannot even suggest a modus operandi within the reach of the human beings concerned, as in the case of the Wesleys.  The theory of contagious hallucination of all the senses is the property of Coleridge alone.  The hypothesis of a nervous force which sets up centres of conscious action is confined to Hartmann, and to certain Highland philosophers, cavalierly dismissed by the Rev. Robert Kirk as ‘men illiterate’.  Instead of making these guesses, the savage thinkers merely applied the animistic hypothesis, which they had found to work very well already, and, as De Morgan says, to colligate the phenomena better than any other theory.  We cannot easily conceive men who know neither sleep nor dreams, but if the normal phenomena of sleep and dreams had not existed, the abnormal phenomena already described, if they occurred, as they are universally said to do, could have given rise, when speculated upon, to the belief in spirits.