It is not easy to determine the idea which the Australian makes of the soul, because it is so obscure and floating; but we should not be surprised at this. If someone asked our own contemporaries, or even those of them who believe most firmly in the existence of the soul, how they represented it, the replies that he would receive would not have much more coherence and precision. This is because we are dealing with a very complex notion, into which a multitude of badly analysed impressions enter, whose elaboration has been carried on for centuries, though men have had no clear consciousness of it. Yet from this come the most essential, though frequently contradictory, characteristics by which it is defined.
In some cases they tell us that it has the external appearance of the body.[743] But sometimes it is also represented as having the size of a grain of sand; its dimensions are so reduced that it can pass through the smallest crevices or the finest tissues.[744] We shall also see that it is represented in the appearance of animals. This shows that its form is essentially inconsistent and undetermined;[745] it varies from one moment to another with the demands of circumstances or according to the exigencies of the myth and the rite. The substance out of which it is made is no less indefinable. It is not without matter, for it has a form, howsoever vague this may be. And in fact, even during this life, it has physical needs: it eats, and inversely, it may be eaten. Sometimes it leaves the body, and in the course of its travels it occasionally nourishes itself on foreign souls.[746] After it has once been completely freed from the organism, it is thought to lead a life absolutely analogous to the one it led in this world; it eats, drinks, hunts, etc.[747] When it flutters among the branches of trees, it causes rustlings and crackings which even profane ears hear.[748] But at the same time, it is believed to be invisible to the vulgar.[749] It is true that magicians or old men have the faculty of seeing souls; but it is in virtue of special powers which they owe either to age or to a special training that they perceive things which escape our senses. According to Dawson, ordinary individuals enjoy the same privilege at only one moment of their existence: when they are on the eve of a premature death. Therefore this quasi-miraculous vision is considered a sinister omen. Now, invisibility is generally considered one of the signs of spirituality. So the soul is conceived as being immaterial to a certain degree, for it does not affect the senses in the way bodies do: it has no bones, as the tribes of the Tully River say.[750] In order to conciliate all these opposed characteristics, they represent it as made of some infinitely rare and subtle matter, like something ethereal,[751] and comparable to a shadow or breath.[752]