not see that you required evidence that a complex organism which was independent of the body perished at the same time as the body did. However they held that view and it remained for another system to dispute it and to perfect a philosophy to which Epicurean maxims did not apply. It was the Christian doctrine of the resurrection that laid the foundations for a different view.

3. The Roman Period

There is little in this period that excites interest. The Romans were a practical and not a philosophic people. Conquest and politics were their chief occupation and interest. They were not, as were the Greeks, a nature loving people. Life with them was more somber and serious, at least for those whose ideas and character have been brought down to us by history. It might have been different with the common citizens of whom history so often says little. But it is probable that the ruling classes did not constitute an exception in temperament to the majority of the population. Hence we are probably safe in supposing that, as they are represented in history, the Romans were lacking in the love of nature which might prompt an interest in the continuity of life with any such enthusiasm as marked their other interests.

Roman beliefs also had their two periods, the earlier and the philosophic. The earlier belief seems to have begun in Fetishism and Animism. The relics of them. are found in the Lares and Penates or household gods of common life. They indicate a period when men believed in the gods and the human soul with the power to communicate with the dead. When the philosophic period arrived these household gods retired into mere customs and had no special significance for the educated classes. They were mere evidence of ideas that had

passed away with a higher civilization. Skepticism, which arose with philosophic reflection, displaced them except as artistic expression, and though the interest in a future life may have remained intact, as indicated by some of the writings of Cicero and others, the evidence that would appeal to the intellectuals was not such as to obtain their assent any more than it does with the same class to-day.

Cicero believed in immortality, but some of his arguments for it are childish, as were most arguments in antiquity. Some of his arguments are the regulation philosophic ones and are based upon the worth of intelligence, which is a purely aristocratic conception and does not meet the question. His Tusculan Disputations, in which he discusses the subject, deal mostly in literary quotations and shallow arguments, though appealing to natural human sentiments. There is no clear conception of what he thinks the after life is or may be, and he would probably have confessed entire ignorance of that, though believing that we survive. But there is no well defined view of the subject. The school of thought to which he belonged was not accustomed to assurance on such things.

Seneca was more explicit. He held to a happy existence after death and conceived this life as one of probation and death as marking the day of judgment. He evidently refined and rationalized the mythical view of Plato and made it similar to that which Christianity adopted. There seems to be no trace of primitive Animism in his doctrine, and little argument to prove it. His Stoical ethics made it unimportant to insist upon immortality as an ethical stimulus.

It was the same with Marcus Aurelius. His calm and Stoical life and reflections have no apparent interest in a future existence. The rational life in the present sufficed and indeed this marked the whole Stoical school, so that the interest in immortality

marked a different type of mind, perhaps one that had less self-sufficiency and grit of character to take things as they are. But whether so or not, the immortality of the soul was not so essential a feature of Roman thought as of the centuries which followed the decline and marked the success of Christian civilization. The reaction against the primitive Animism of the earlier periods in both Greece and Rome, like the philosophic movements in India, China, Japan, and Persia against savage Spiritualism, had carried with it much antagonism to the belief because of its associations with much inhumanity and more superstitions.

Christian belief need not be examined here. Suffice to say that it was rather a direct answer by alleged facts to the Epicurean Materialism than any adoption of Platonic and other views. The Epicurean, by admitting the existence of a soul, an ethereal organism different from the grosser physical body, prepared the way for attaching importance to apparitions and coincidental dreams, and it is probable that the story of the resurrection grew out of such an experience, distorted by time and legend into the physical resurrection. The existence of a well worked out theory of the resurrection among the Pharisees prior to the origin of any story about Christ, rather suggests what the sequel to Epicurean Materialism would be if the human mind attached any interest to apparitions, and this too without deciding whether they were hallucinations or realities. To meet this position materialism had to revise its doctrine and it did so by abandoning the ethereal body and claiming that consciousness was a function of the body.*

*For fuller discussion of the relation between Epicureanism and Christianity see the following works by the present author: Problems of Philosophy, pp. 435-445; Psychic Research and the Resurrection, Chap. XII.

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CHAPTER IV

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHIC RESEARCH

HRISTIANITY has always been represented by its followers, at least until recent times, as a unique religion. It was contrasted with all the others, Buddhism, Brahmanism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Zoroastrianism and all other systems. The resemblances between them were slurred over or disregarded and the points of difference emphasized to prove that Christianity was the only true religion. There are differences and great ones. The oriental systems were largely ethical and spiritual teaching, mixed up with philosophy, and unaccompanied by the miraculous as illustrated in Christianity. There may have been some incidents in the lives of their founders that would give rise to remarkable stories, but these were not the essential conditions of these religions. The miraculous more distinctly characterized Christianity, though its ethical and spiritual teaching was quite as prominent and essential. The miraculous was appealed to as evidence, not as its object. But in the course of its evolution the interest of its conquests led it to make itself unique as a religion. It took eighteen centuries to make it look with a tolerant eye on oriental systems and to discover certain affinities in ethical and spiritual ideas. They may not be great, but they are there, and further investigation will find connections not now suspected except by students of anthropology.

Now it was not the ethical and spiritual teaching that gave Christianity its unique character. Its own

founder taught that he came only to restore the ideas of the prophets, but his credentials, whether presented by himself or invented by his followers, were in the doctrine of "miracles." They were supposed to guarantee the divinity of his character and teaching. We may therefore represent Christianity as based upon four connected types of alleged fact. (1) The Virgin birth; (2) "Miracles"; (3) The incidents of the Resurrection, and (4) Its ethical and spiritual teaching. The first and last type have no interest for psychic research as a scientific investigation of unusual mental phenomena, and hence will not come up for special consideration here. The relation of psychic research to Christianity is determined by the second and third types of alleged fact. The second, that of "Miracles," may be divided into three aspects: (a) Physical "miracles," (b) Spiritual healing, and (c) Mediumistic phenomena and sensory automatisms, or clairvoyance and clairaudience. While the resurrection is given a place by itself it probably belongs to the type of sensory automatisms, but I have isolated it because of its relation to the doctrine of survival after death. Regarded as an apparition after Christ's death, with attendant misinterpretations of its physical character, it makes a unique incident in the origin of a religion emphasizing immortality as its chief feature, or one of them.

For a similar reason I have isolated the story of the Virgin birth from "Miracles," though it is in reality one of that class. But it is so unique in character that it cannot be reduced to the type of psychic phenomena with which we are familiar and I desire here to bring out the alliances of Christianity rather than its uniqueness. The fundamental object of "miracles" was to establish the spiritual claims of Christ. "The Jews seek a sign," said St. Paul, and they did this in order to have ethical and spiritual