ble to establish a veritable unity, either individual or collective. On one side, the intelligence makes us conceive outside of us a power sufficiently superior to demand the constant subordination of our existence. On the other side, it is equally indispensable that one should be animated with a sentiment capable of coördinating all the others. These two fundamental conditions have a natural tendency to combine, since external submission necessarily seconds interior discipline-which, in turn, spontaneously disposes to external submission." Again: "The religious sentiment reposes on the permanent combination of two equally fundamental conditions, loving and believing, which, though profoundly distinct, must naturally concur. Each of these, besides its proper necessity, adds to the other a complement indispensable for its full efficacy.""

Religion is always the expression of an idea. Man conceives the notion of a great cause; guided by his feelings by a process of selection he conceives an ideal, and this ideal becomes to him an object of passionate devotion.

If reason and affection be not coördinated, religion resolves itself into philosophy or mysticism.

A religion which is purely speculative is no religion at all; it is a philosophy. A religion which consists of emotion only is nothing but sentimentalism, and is often gross superstition. Religious sentiment is sometimes extravagant mysticism or abject terrorism. Either form is injurious, as it is an exaggeration of one side of religion at the expense of the other. The aspirations of the heart must be controlled by the reason, and the intelligence must be humanized by the affections.

The search after a supreme cause has taken two main forms, monotheism and polytheism. The Semitic races

1 Système de Politique Positive, ii., 11; Paris, 1852.

? Ib., p. 17.

seized on the idea of one force, the cause of every effect. The Aryan deified secondary forces manifest in nature. The Turanian cowered before force, and inquired not whence it came and where it was seated. And the Chinese proclaimed that the inquiry was futile, and of no practical importance.

The great water-sheds of language have been the great water-sheds of thought. In the search after the ideal these great races have taken different directions. The Turanian race, impressed with a vague and childlike sense of the mysterious, has not advanced into the idealizing stage. God, to the nomads of Northern Asia, is awful, undefined. They feel His presence about them, above them, and with dazzled and bewildered mind seek to know nothing more. ideal of the Chinese is a perfectly-organized government.

The

The Shemite grasped the notion of an ideal of power, and his god is the force of Nature personified, the Mighty One riding on the whirlwind, touching the mountains, and lo, they smoke, uttering His voice in the thunder, shaking the cedar-trees, dividing the seas with his breath.

The Aryan, with a rich poetic fancy, beheld everywhere an ideal of goodness; he saw beautiful Iris in the sky bearing the rain-goblet, zoned with color; foam-forms rising out of the sea radiant with beauty, lovely gliding shapes in the streams, and dreams of grace haunting the groves.

The philosophic study of the ideals of the human race, and the theories of causation it has formed, will show us what the religion of humanity must become to coördinate all its faculties; and thus we shall see in Comte's expressive words, that religion was "first spontaneous, then inspired, and is finally demonstrated;" and, also what Comte did not see, that it is always the same.

CHAPTER IV.

THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY.

Prevalence of the idea of immortality.-Difficulty of forming negative ideas.-Want of discrimination between objective and ideal existence.-The instinct of selfconservation.-Reasons inducing man to believe in immortality: 1. Fear of death; 2. Mode of accounting for anomalies of life.-Retribution.-Forms assumed by the belief in immortality: 1. Degeneration; 2. Continuous existence similar to that in life; 3. Metempsychosis; 4. Cyclical life; 5. Development. -Conjectures on mode of life after death.-Evil effects produced by the belief. -Demonology and witchcraft.

THE

HE idea of the immortality of the soul is far more widely spread than the idea of the existence of one or more Gods. Barbarous people, standing on the lowest rung of the scale of civilization, incapable of the smallest mental advance, unable to draw inferences which are self-suggestive, and to argue from palpable analogies-and this is all that is required for conceiving the idea of God-are nevertheless found to believe explicitly or implicitly in the perpetuation of life after death. The aborigines of California, when first visited, were as near beasts as men ever become. The missionaries likened them to "herds of swine, who neither worshipped the true and only God, nor adored false deities; yet they must have had some vague notion of an after-life, for the writer who paints the darkest picture of their condition remarks, "I saw them frequently putting shoes on the feet of the dead, which seems to indicate that they entertain the idea of a journey after death."1 The natives of Australia, who have no idea of God, believe that

1 Brinton: Myths of the New World, p. 234; New York, 1868.

after death their souls mount to the clouds, or cross the ocean to a distant land.1

The existence of funeral rites is a proof that those who practise them have some idea, indistinct enough perhaps, that the dead are not annihilated.

The prevalence of a belief in the continued vitality of the soul after death is evidence that the idea must rest on an exceedingly simple basis.

The conception of a deity requires some mental exertion; the conception of immortality requires none. Given the consciousness of personality, of a self the seat of the will, the thoughts, and the feelings, and the belief in the perpetuity of its life follows at once.

For the supposition that death annihilates the conscious principle could not be entertained by an' unphilosophic mind. A high degree of education must be attained before the notion of annihilation can be apprehended. The mind receives positive impressions only, and intelligently conceives negatives by eliminating positive impressions. Night is regarded as the absence of day, death as the absence of life. In order to form an idea of the destruction of the conscious self, an amount of exhaustion of impressions is required wholly beyond the powers of an uncultivated mind. Man's personality is so distinctly projected on the surface of his consciousness, that the idea of its obliteration is inconceivable without doing violence to his primary convictions.

Let any one try to imagine himself extinguished-his powers of thought, his feelings, his volitions, his perceptions broken short off-and he will see how extremely difficult is the task, and how incomplete is his success.

The phenomenon of death is the cessation of the action of the will in such a manner as to be cognizable. But to

1 D'Urville: Voyages, i., 399.

argue from such premises that the existence of the will is at an end is illogical. It has ceased to act in one way; that is all that can be said. The savage A has a rooted conviction that B's actions are determined by an inner force. B dies. A observes that B no longer eats and walks, hunts and fights. Unless A be a metaphysician, his conviction in the persistence in the life of the soul of B is not disturbed; he simply concludes that the soul of B is operating in a way hitherto unusual. To suppose that the soul-force is extinct is to infer that, because one set of modes of operation has ceased, the force is incapacitated from operating according to another set of modes. It is far easier for A to allow his conception of the positive existence of B to remain undisturbed, than to distress his mind by thinking of B as an aggregation of negative ideas.

The popular belief in apparitions illustrates this truth. In most cases of ghost-seeing, the dead are beheld dressed in the clothes they wore during life, and are engaged in a customary pursuit. These supposed apparitions, of which one hears well-authenticated stories every day, prove that minds continue to represent the dead as existing in the same way as in past times. Most persons experience a difficulty in realizing a startling event, such as the death of a relative. To realize is to see a fact in all its bearings, and these, in the case of death, are of a negative description; such as "A, who has hitherto sat in this chair, will occupy it no more. He will not take a walk after breakfast, nor read his newspaper, nor smoke his pipe," and so on. When spectres are said to have been seen, it is evident that the seer is of sluggish intellect; and, as a matter of fact, it will be found on examination that ghost-seers are not imaginative, but prosaic personages. The more imaginative a person is, the more able he is to perceive the bearings of a fact, and the less likely he is to be deluded by fancy.