LIFE AFTER DEATH CHAPTER I PRIMITIVE CONCEPTIONS OF THE SOUL AND A FUTURE LIFE IT 1. The Soul and its Discovery T is impossible in the compass of a chapter to present the various conceptions of an after life which have existed in the history of the human race. This would require several volumes by itself and hence I can but refer to them in the most general way. Even then I shall have in mind only the relation of these beliefs to their unity in psychic phenomena. It is probable that the differences of all the world religions can be unified in psychic phenomena. If that be true we are on the track of their origin, in spite of an evolution that has taken some of them so far away from the original as to have destroyed the traces of it, at least for any superficial observation. It is also true that the traces might actually be there, were we in possession of the knowledge that would enable us to see them. I do not know any better proof of this last remark than Herbert Spencer's discussion of Ghosts and another life. One who is familiar with the phenomena that have come under the observation of psychic re searchers will discover in the facts reported from savages of all types, widely separated in the world and without any connection either racially or geographically, distinct indications of characteristics that are quite intelligible to us but were not so to Mr. Spencer. He had supposed that it was so necessary to conceive the statements of savages in purely sensory forms that he made no allowance for their idealization and as he repudiated psychic research he was without a standard for estimating the possibilities in the reported ideas of savages. The traces of the real experiences of savages are actually present, but neither he nor any one else, who was not familiar with actual human experience to-day, could see those traces. Mr. Spencer's thesis is that religion originated in the phenomena of dreams and ghosts, but as he treated dreams and ghosts as hallucinations, he invalidated religion with them. Many critics do not accept his view of its origin and it is probable that other facts went with them among savages to originate the full content of what is meant by religion. But it is more than probable that the idea of immortality arose from dreams and ghosts in which the dead purported to appear. This is no place to examine his views, however, at any length. I wish only to call attention to his chapters for readers who may be interested in seeing for themselves the relation which he never saw nor admitted, if he did see it. There is no doubt that the highly developed ideas of religion in the present day have no identity of a definite kind with this remote origin, but that would make no difference for the evolutionist who knew his problem. The method of thinking which is involved in setting up a transcendental world from ghost experiences and dreams, even supposing they were purely subjective phenomena, is the same as that which endeavors to etherealize nature by the methods of modern science, and all that religion has ever done, when setting up the spiritual, has been to suppose some sort of "double" necessary to explain things. It may be wrong, if you like, but the method of wrong thinking is the same as right thinking, and it will only be a question of evidence to distinguish the one from the other. But I am not concerned especially with the views of Mr. Spencer. They are wholly secondary to the ideas recorded of savages which he quotes. The facts are that dreams and ghosts, whether subjective hallucinations or veridical ones, seem to have been a source, among primitive peoples, of their ideas of another life, and with savages it would be natural to conceive it in purely materialistic terms, made so, perhaps, by the absence in our own language of the abstract and spiritualized meaning of the terms by which savage ideas have been translated. It is a psychological problem to determine exactly what savages thought. The limitations of their language were probably greater than their ideas, as is the case in all language whatsoever, and no doubt the limitations of their ideas were greater than those of highly civilized people. Translations of savage ideas into the language of civilized people must inevitably be exposed to illusions. This is true even in the translations of civilized ideas. The ideas of two separate nations, however identical their habits and knowledge generally, are not coterminous so to speak, so that translations may carry less or more than the original. It is this that has led to so many misunderstandings of foreign philosophies. Hence, to return to the conceptions of primitive people, we might easily mistake their real ideas by the extremely simple nature of their language. They do not develop manifest evidences of abstract thinking as in the more cultured races. Hence when translated into their literal equivalents in civilized languages, they |