vival and the student of nature would find only his ethical impulses aided by the laws of nature to determine his beliefs. He would have to choose between a speculative theory of the soul to protect his desires and hopes and the persistence of types in the world which would give rise to the philosophic idea of transmigration or reincarnation.

It is possible that a doctrine of reincarnation might arise from the idea of the soul's transmigration from its physical body, a conception which I have found in some minds to-day whose earlier thinking had been dominated by Cartesian assumptions, where the soul and consciousness were supposed to be spaceless or without the property of extension. They could not conceive consciousness without a ground or subject and knowing that the physical basis of consciousness perished, and wishing or believing the mind imperishable, set up a spiritual body for its ground, an organism ready made for it at death.

I do not know any historical belief of this kind, unless early theories of the resurrection may have expressed it. But even if it did exist, as the suggestion of the philosophers' reincarnation, the latter took away the conditions of personal survival. Their conception of it was expressed in something like, perhaps identical, with our conservation of energy. This doctrine established by physical science maintains that the quantity of energy remains the same in all the transformations of it, so that no particle of matter or energy can be either created or destroyed. Though the ancients did not certify this belief by experiment their observation of the permanence of types and the properties constituting them converted the doctrine of immortality into the transformations of the same substance, and in this they obtained their Pantheistic or Atomistic theories, both looking at organic nature as the result of material causation, one as a change of

mode and the other as the combination of elements. In all cases they were efforts to transcend the primitive ideas of nature, though they left these primitive ideas to develop their own course, or compromised with them in their efforts to preserve the social order.

4. Egyptian Ideas

Polytheistic doctrines were common to the religions of China, India, and Japan, sometimes originating from nature worship and sometimes from hero worship. This Polytheism was still more characteristic of Egyptian religion as far as history can trace it. It, too, was infected with hero worship. But its doctrine of immortality seems to have been the most distinctive in its kind as compared with the nations we have discussed and in this respect it resembles the early beliefs of Greece. There seems to be no indication of what its special doctrines on immortality succeeded. The primitive forms of Animism are not traceable either directly or indirectly in its religious ideas and customs. Whatever modification its earliest ideas on the soul may have gone through, there is no trace of it in an antagonistic philosophy such as marked the developments of the oriental peoples in correcting Animism. We may suppose that the interest which the Egyptians took in their dead and the life of those who have passed the gates of death indicate an earlier ancestor worship, but if this be true it has left no traces of the character which made Taoism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Shintoism a revolt against it. But the funerary rites bestowed upon the dead indicate rather clearly that some form of ancestor worship prevailed in earlier times of which we have no traces.

The Egyptians seem to have had no such philosophic systems as prevailed in India and China. In their place was their Polytheism, in which the gods did service

for creative agencies, and for the basis of religious devotions which seem not to have concentrated on a single deity. They never got beyond the Polytheistic stage to a Monotheistic system. The nearest to this apparently was the god Re, the sun-god. It was probably the failure to reduce their theological system to unity in Monotheism that preserved their belief in a soul and its survival from such a fate as it met in Buddhism. Polytheism preserved such a conception of supernaturalism that it was not difficult to maintain man's survival, especially as some of their gods were deified heroes, a doctrine which probably had the same source as their belief in a future life. It is this last which has importance for us at present.

The best authorities seem agreed that the Egyptian embalming of the dead originated in their belief in a life beyond the grave. Whether it signified a belief in the bodily resurrection, as it might suggest, is not certain and there seems to be no collateral evidence of this. But the extreme care of the body after death is taken to indicate clearly that it had its origin in the belief in another life. Hence their theory of the soul is the interesting part of their doctrine. They seem to have made a twofold distinction in their metaphysical psychology, or a triple division of man into body, the "double" and the soul. The "double" or ka was that part of man which was the object of funerary gifts and services. The soul or bai was of a more tangible nature and was that part of man which hovered around the tomb, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and might assume any shape it pleased.

There are hints in this of the later distinction between the spirit and astral or spiritual body. Assuming this to be the case, the ka would be the spirit and the bai the ethereal organism or spiritual body. Or if the former was the "spiritual body" the latter would

be the "astral shell." The belief that the bai could assume any shape it pleased coincides with what is apparent in certain types of visions and apparitions recorded by psychic research. One wonders whether the Egpytian ideas may not have been derived in this way, just as primitive Animism and its doctrines seem to have been derived from similar phenomena. But whether so or not, the theory of the soul and its survival has more detailed interest than that of oriental peoples and the nature of the life after death was more distinctly mapped out in the funerary rites and cere monies than with the religions of India, China, and Japan, though these latter did not lack in definite ideas.

5. Hebrew Beliefs

The Hebrews are noted for their monotheism both in respect to its firmness and purity. But this general view was superposed upon an earlier period of polytheism of which there are few traces, so thoroughly had the leaders of the montheistic cult eradicated polytheism from the better type of national thought. The literature, however, which makes this evident contains no evidence that the future life was an important part of the Hebrew's religious belief. The Old Testament is almost devoid of evidence that he believed in a future life at all. It was certainly not the key to their religion as it was that of Christianity. There are only a few indications of its existence in the Hebrew mind in the Old Testament, whatever may exist in Talmudic literature. They are the question of Job: “If a man die shall he live again" (Job 14:14), possibly the same author's statement: "And after my skin hath been destroyed, yet from (without) my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold and not another," (Job 19:26), and the whole history

of witchcraft as depicted in the Bible. Take also the ghost of Eliphaz in Job 4 and verses 12-17. The story of the witch of Endor is a clear proof of what went on when it could get any freedom and indicates a survival of the more primitive times when Animism prevailed here as elsewhere.

Saul, the King, who had himself persecuted and suppressed witchcraft, found himself in dire straits with the Philistines and sought the aid of the Witch of Endor. She called up the dead prophet Samuel, complaining that he could not longer get divine aid either by the prophets or dreams. The whole incident makes very clear what the Judaism in power had supplanted, and it only repeats what left better traces of itself in the religions of China and Japan. The dreams of Joseph indicate the same general system. The suppression of human sacrifices points to what existed prior to developed Judaism, and the prophets were the more intellectual and ethical leaders of the people, resembling Buddha and others in their mission, but claiming a relation to the divine that made them more rational teachers of this than witchcraft was or could be.

Probably it was the revolt against the cult of primitive Animism that destroyed, as in India and China, the dominance of that primitive system. At any rate the cult was originally there and kept itself alive against the laws intended to suppress it, while the inferiority of its ethics availed to retire the immortality of the soul into the background of Hebrew interest and left an Idealistic monotheism with strong government in its place.

The doctrine of angels implied a spiritual world whether it included man in it or not. But the idea of Sheol implied the survival of man. The idea is clear in Daniel 12:2, where the doctrine of the resurrection is indicated: "And many of them that sleep