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mythological personalities more distinctly than ir. Christian ideas and save as Satan and similar agents are supposed to figure in the process.

According to some writers the Pelasgi had a pure monothesitic type of religion and it was followed by the polytheistic system of the Greeks. This is quite possible, since the Hellenes succeeded the Pelasgi, driving them out of existence, as the Spanish did the Aztecs in Peru and almost destroying all traces of their customs. As already remarked the polytheism of the Greeks was a mixture of hero worship and the personification of the forces of nature. It is probable that the hero worship followed upon that of personifying physical forces and represents the humanizing of things through the belief in immortality and the substitution of customs founded on communication with a spiritual world for attempts to pacify the forces of nature, but this substitution was made in entire harmony with nature worship. This hero worship was the form which spiritualism took in Greco-Roman life as distinct from the ancestor worship of the orient. No doubt it had the same general source. The oracles and the "mantic" art are evidence of this. The Homeric conception of the after life and ghosts is a gloomy one and it is reflected in the story of Achilles that he would prefer being a day laborer among the living to the life after death. A man of Achilles' character might well suggest the comparison, but the object of Homer was to depreciate the after life in comparison with the present which was a tendency in the whole of Greek civilization with its love of nature.

The mantic art shows what the primitive ideas were and it survived far into the period of higher civilization. Curtius speaks of it as follows: "The mantic art is an institution totally different from the priesthood. It is based on the belief that the gods are in constant proximity to men, and in their government of

the world, which comprehends everything both great and small, will not disdain to manifest their will to the shortsighted children of men who need their counsel." Speaking of the worship of Apollo the same author continues: "The god himself chooses the organs of his communications; and as a sign that it is no human wisdom and art that reveals the divine will, Apollo speaks through the mouth of feeble girls and women. The state of inspiration is by no means one of especially heightened powers, but the human being's own powers-nay, own consciousness-are as it were extinguished, in order that the divine voice may be heard all the louder; the secret communicated by the god resembles a load oppressing the breast it visits; it is a clairvoyance from which no satisfaction accrues to the mind of the seer."

A better description of mediumship could hardly be given and the oracles were undoubtedly this type of phenomena, good and bad, genuine and fraudulent. The philosophic period which sought to get different types of evidence for immortality and the future life did much to destroy the evidence of what the earlier ideas and methods of religion were, though saying enough about them to enable us to conjecture them. Literature and historical records preserved what the intellectual classes thought and said, but was not as careful to preserve an exact account of the common religious ideas, and the higher civilization so generally supplanted the lower that the latter did not survive in the customs of the common people, especially after the decline of both Greek and Roman civilizations. The common ideas of a future life were very simple and probably represented a clear duplication of the present life in many details, as indeed the mythical account given by Plato indicates, though even this had been refined by philosophic reflection. The more primitive ideas were represented in the sacrifices and supersti

tions associated with the worship of the gods and the expectation of a happier life beyond the grave.

2. The Philosophic Period

This period is divided into two general schools. (1) There were those who believed in a future life but did not venture to say what it was like. (2) There were the materialists who, in the later period, denied it. Both represented the arrival at that stage of thought which accepted the judgment of sense perception as assigning limits to what could be asserted or believed about the future life. The skeptics and materialists denied that any such life existed, while the idealists still clung to a transcendental world but did not undertake to describe it in scientific terms.

It is usually supposed that the idea of a "soul" and its survival was late appearing in Greek reflection. This is not correct. It saturated the thought of some of the earliest philosophers but was concealed partly by their abandonment of fetishism and partly by the pantheistic conception of many of them and partly by their primary interest in material causes; that is, in the elements or "stuff" out of which the world was made. They early disregarded the primitive religions which were based upon fetishistic spiritualism, and though they often clung to the animation of matter they were careful not to allow any identification of their views with the naive Animism and Spiritualism of the times, or if some of them, as they did, recognized the spiritualistic view, they were not primarily interested in it. This view had no explanation of nature or the cosmos and it was the cosmos that they were chiefly trying to explain.

Even the earlier Ionian physicists, though they talk of nothing but "water," "air," "fire" the "indefinite," etc., betray clearly that some of their ideas of causes,

especially when they needed efficient causes, were borrowed from the Spiritualist's doctrine of activity. Some of these physicists actually believed in a soul, but not being specially interested in it, the problem of survival had no importance for them. They were spoken of as materialists, but only because they maintained that matter was the primary substance in the world and "soul" was to them but a fine form of this matter, when they admitted its existence. The Eleatics were too absorbed in Pantheism or Monism to think or say much about the individual soul and its destiny.

But Heraclitus, who opposed the Eleatics, was more definite on this matter and admitted a soul and its survival. He said that "men are mortal gods and the gods immortal men; our life is the death of the gods and our death their life. So long as man lives the divine part of his nature is bound up with baser substances, from which in death he again becomes free. Souls traverse the way upwards and the way downwards; they enter into bodies because they require change." He attributed a further existence to souls escaped from their bodies, and said that there awaits man after his death that which he now neither hopes nor believes. He makes mention of demons and heroes and assigns the demons as guardians, not only to the living, but to the dead. This is pure and unadulterated Spiritualism, even of the modern type, and was probably derived in the same way.

The close affinity of early Greek thought, extending throughout its later history, to modern Spiritualism and Theosophy is evident in the following facts, even though the philosophy was establishing systems evading or denying the ideas of religion. When philosophy arose it faced two questions: (1) Monotheism as against polytheism that had its affinities, on one side, with nature worship and, on the other, with animism. or Spiritualism, and (2) A Future Life. Religion

tended to polytheism and philosophy to monotheism. In the first period the Mysteries prevailed which were connected with some form of Spiritualism. The Orphic Mysteries believed in transmigration and in it we have the ancestral idea of Plato's doctrine, though he eliminated the elements which made it interesting to the religious mind. Some held that transmigration was for punishment. This view may have been a distorted form of what is apparent in obsession or "earthbound" conditions where temporary possession may be a method of clearing away the hallucinations that constitute "earthbound" conditions. Pindar, however, regarded transmigration as a privilege accorded to the best spirits to earn higher happiness. This is merely a modified form of the previous view and is reflected in mediumistic phenomena where spirits claim that their service to the living is a part of their own salvation and spiritual development.

The Ionian school of philosophers are known as physicists and were the first to exalt "natural" or physical causes. They were Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines. There is little preserved regarding their opinion of spirit or soul. According to Plutarch, Thales admitted that there was a soul which he defined as "Physis aeikinetos ê autokinetos," or "matter always in motion or capable of self-motion." Here was the rising distinction between inertia and spontaneity, culminating in the distinction between mechanism and teleological action. With Anaximander the soul was of the nature of Air. It was Air in the philosophy of Anaximines which constituted the fundamental substance from which all other things were formed. But Anaximander did not conceive the air as we do. He thought of it much more as scientific men think of the ether. It was not regarded as gross matter until the time of Lucretius who had to prove that it was the same kind of substance as is constantly revealed

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