II.

Perhaps it may be necessary to glance here at the origin and evolution of the Belief. Death as aunihilation is a notion as little intelligible to a primitive or undeveloped mind as immortality. A child cannot understand death as loss of being, cannot imagine the dead as otherwise than still alive. It thinks of them as existing somewhere, as doing something; and neither the lifeless body, nor the grave, nor the burial, can break their simple faith. Wordsworth's "Little Maid" is a type of the child-mind the world over, and its belief translated into the language of man becomes a sublime "Ode to Immortality." To the instincts of a living man, who has not yet learned to reason either from the facts of experience or the data of consciousness, death cannot suggest annihilation, because annihilation is a thought too abstract and repugnant to these instincts to be either intelligible or credible. In such a man faith is stronger than sight; he can conceive and understand life, but not its utter negation. If he thinks of the dead, he thinks of them as living-the very attempt to represent them in thought is an attempt to represent living, not dead men.

But, while the instincts of primitive mind refuse to conceive the dead as non-existent, a double incapacity prescribes the limits and form of the only conception possible to it, the incapacity to conceive other than

embodied being, and the incapacity to comprehend unlimited duration. In other words, the undeveloped mind cannot conceive the abstract notion of spirit and the abstract notion of immortality, or endless duration of being. Hence the earliest notions of the future represent it as a shadowy copy of the present; and its duration is measured by memory, is not made measureless by hope-i.e., the conception attaches itself to the recollection of the dead rather than to the expectations of the living. But notwithstanding these limitations, the belief is a real belief in immortality, so far as it is possible to a child-mind. The seed is here, as it ought to be; the natural and necessary growth of mind will transform the seed into both flower and fruit.

But, while the belief in the future life springs out of what we must call, for want of a better term, an instinct, its evolution, alike as to the time occupied and the order of thought observed, depends on the development of the mental faculties, as in their turn at once conditioning and conditioned by the history and situation of the people. In general, since the belief attaches itself to the past rather than to the future, it gathers round the persons of the fathers, and fancy, aided by memory, peoples the realm of the dead with the shades of renowned ancestors, whose society and fellowship become before long objects of intense desire to the living. Then, alongside the admiration rendered to the fathers, ethical

ideas are evolved, and the conditions on which a man is granted or denied admittance to the circle of ancestral heroes, contain the germinal notion of a state of reward and retribution. Then, thought, gradually accustomed to conceive the dead as living, to see in nature life emerge uninjured from death, works out an abstract doctrine, a theory of form and life, body and soul, which, while committing the one to death and dissolution, assigns the other to independent and continued life. And these theories become in turn supports of the very belief which evoked them. The hope of a future life turns back for encouragement to the very metaphysic itself had created. And as the metaphysic is often fanciful and absurd, the evidence is as often weaker than the belief. The one is the creation of crude and premature speculation, the other the utterance of a great human instinct.

While the process of evolution is conditioned by the general development of the national mind, the specific form under which immortality is conceived is, on the other hand, conditioned by the idea of God. The idea formed of the divine nature determines that formed of the human. The two ideas develop side by side, constitute, indeed, the two poles or sides of the same thought. While the idea of God remains so inchoate as to admit the limitations and multiplicities of Polytheism, it does not and can not involve as a necessity,

either of reason or faith, any specific form of the belief in immortality.

But as the religion generates a theology, as thought comes to conceive God as the One related to the Many, as the single source of the manifold creation, man is led at the same time and by the same principles to conceive and formulate his faith in his own immortal existence. This does not happen all at once, but is the result of slow and not always conscious movements of mind. Principles, struck out by single intellects or created by general tendencies, rise within every polytheism, lift it out of the physical stage, are made, either by conscious mental action or unconscious mental growth, to become inimical to it, and either abolish the ancient religion, or erect by its side a distinct and supplementary worship, under the form of mysteries, or, while sparing it as a mode of worship, substitute for the mythical creations, which were its original constituents, a body of reflective or speculative doctrines. If the prelusive thought had been tending to grasp a single universal and indestructible principle of the life manifested in nature and man, a pantheistic theory as to God, a theory of transmigration as to man, will emerge. But if its tendency had been to seek a Supreme Will and Authority, then the result will be a personal God, and the personal continuance of man. The first will thus have a metaphysical, but the second a moral, basis. Brahmanism

may stand as an example of the one, Zoroastrism of the

other.

Religious and philosophic thought on such questions as God and Immortality thus so run into each other in their respective beginnings as to be then indistinguishable. Philosophy springs out of religion-is the attempt of a devout reflective man to understand and explain himself and the universe. Hence the roots both of ancient and modern thought on our subject must be sought in the ancient religions.

Immortality is not a doctrine of the schools, but a faith of humanity, not based on the metaphysic or proved by the logic of a given system, but the utterance of an instinct common to the race, which has made itself heard wherever man has advanced from a religion of nature to a religion of faith. And there is no article. of belief he so reluctantly surrenders even to the demands of system. One of the most daring critical and speculative spirits of our century rallied, with caustic irony, his transcendental countrymen on their tenderness for the ego-a tenderness which spared self, while Deity was sacrificed.* And he found the denial of personal immortality the last step of the inexorable logic which completed the cycle of Transcendental Philosophy.

* D. F. Strauss, "Die Christliche Glaubenslehre," ii. pp. 697 ff.