inquiry follows, where does it dwell? Like the trolls of Norse myth, who
burst at sunrise, the flitting spirit vanishes in the light and comes with
the darkness; but what places does it haunt when the quiet of the night is
unbroken by its intrusion, and where are they?
The answers to these are as varied as the vagaries of rude imagination
permit. We must not expect to find any theories of the soul’s prolonged
after-existence among races who have but a dim remembrance of yesterday,
and but a hazy conception of a to-morrow. Neither, among such, any
theories of the soul abiding in a place of reward or punishment, as the
result of things done in the body. Speaking of the heaven of the Red man,
Dr. Brinton remarks that “nowhere was any well-defined doctrine that moral
turpitude was judged and punished in the next world. No contrast is
discoverable between a place of torment and a realm of joy; at the worst
but a negative castigation awaited the liar, the coward, or the niggard.”
Ideas of a devil and a hell are altogether absent from the barbaric mind,
since it is obvious that any theory of retribution could arise only when
man’s moral nature had so developed as to awaken questions about the
government of the universe, and to call another world into existence to
redress the wrongs and balance the injustices of this. His earliest
queries were concerned with the whereabouts of the soul more than with its
destiny, and it was, and still is, among the lower races, thought of as
haunting its old abode or the burial-place of its body, and as acting very
much as it had acted when in the flesh. The shade of the Algonquin hunter
chases the spirits of the beaver and the elk with the spirits of his bow
and arrow, and stalks on the spirits of his snow-shoes over the spirit of
the snow. Among the Costa Ricans the spirits of the dead are supposed to
remain near their bodies for a year, and the explorer Swan relates that
when he was with the North-Western Indians he was not allowed to attend a
funeral, lest he offended the spirits hovering round; whilst the Indians
of North America often destroy or abandon the dwellings of the dead, the
object being to prevent the ghost from returning, or to leave it free so
to do. But it is needless to multiply illustrations of a belief which has
been persistent in the human mind from the dawn of speculation about the
future of the soul to the present day. The barbarians who think that the
spirits of the dead move and have their being near the living, join them
on their journeys, and sit down, unseen visitants, at their feasts (to be
driven off, as among the Eskimos, by blowing the breath), are one with the
multitudes of folks in Europe and America who, sorrowing over their dead,
think of them as ministering with unfelt hands, and as keenly interested
in their concerns.
“We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.”
The Ojibway, who detects their tiny voices in the insect’s hum, and thinks
of them as sheltering themselves from the rain by thousands in a flower,
as sporting by myriads on a sunbeam, is one with the Schoolmen who
speculated on the number of angels that could dance on a needle’s point,
and with Milton in his poetic rendering of the belief of his time, that
“Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.”
The Hottentot who avoids a dead man’s hut lest the ghost be within, is one
with the believers in haunted houses, in banshees, wraiths, and spectres.
Such as he should not be excluded as “corresponding members” of the
Society for Psychical Research in the invitations[93] which its committee
issues to folks who have seen apparitions, and slept, or tried to sleep,
in the dreaded chamber of some moated hall of mystery.
If we look in vain for any consistency of idea or logical relation in
barbaric notions, our wonder ceases at the absence of these when we note
the conflicting conceptions entertained among intelligent people. But the
underlying thought is identical. The examples given in a foregoing section
on the belief in the passage of the soul into other human bodies, into
animals and stones, strengthened as this is by the likeness in mind and
body between children and dead relatives, by the human expression noted on
many a brute, by the human shape of many a stone, show how the theory of
the soul as nigh at hand finds many-sided support. In this belief, too,
lie the germs of theories of successive transmigrations elaborated in the
faiths of advanced races, when the defects of body and character were
explained as the effects of sin committed in a former existence.
Next in order of conception appears to be that of the soul as living an
independent existence, an improved edition of the present, in an under or
upper world, into which the dead pass without distinction of caste or
worth.
The things dreamed about respecting the land of spirits and their
occupations are woven of the materials of daily life. Whether to the
sleeping barbarian in his wigwam, or to the seer banished in Patmos;
whether to the Indian travelling in his dreams to the happy
hunting-ground, or to the apostle caught up in trance into paradise;
earth, and earth alone, supplies the materials out of which man everywhere
has shaped his heaven. Her dinted and furrowed surface; valleys and
mountain-tops; islands sleeping in summer seas, or fretted by winter
storms; cities walled and battlemented; glories of sunrise and sunset;
gave variety enough for play of the cherished hopes and imaginings of men.
If we collect any group of barbaric fancies, we find, speaking broadly,
that a large proportion have pictured the home of souls as in the west,
towards the land of the setting sun. Seen from many a standpoint to sink
beneath river, lake, or ocean, which for untutored man enclosed his world,
it led to the myth of waters of death dividing earth from heaven, which
the soul, often at perilous risk, must cross. Such was the Ginnunga-gap of
the Vikings; the nine seas and a half across which travellers to Manala,
the under-world of the Finns, must voyage; the great water of the Red
Indians; the Vaitarani of the Brahmans; the Stygian stream of the Greeks;
and the Jordan of the Christians, that flows between us and the Celestial
City, “where the surges cease to roll.” The sinking of the sun below the
horizon obviously led to belief in an under-world, whither the ghosts
went. Barbaric notions are full of this, and the lower culture out of
which their beliefs arose is evidenced in the Orcus of the Romans, the
Hades of the Greeks, the Helheim of the Norsemen, the Sheol of the
Hebrews, and the Amenti of the Egyptians, the solar features of which last
are clearly traceable in their doctrine. Among the Hebrews, Sheol
(translated, curiously enough, thirty-one times as “grave,” and thirty-one
times as “hell,” in our Authorised Version) was a vast cavernous space in
which the shades of good and bad alike wandered--“the small and great are
there, and the servant is free from his master.” It is akin in character
to the Greek Hades, where they “wander mid shadows and shade, and wail by
impassable streams.” As ideas of a Divine rule of the world grew, its
manifestations in justice were looked for, and the mystery of iniquity,
the wicked “flourishing like a green bay tree,” led to the conception of a
future state, in which Lazarus and Dives would change places. Sheol thus
became, on the one hand, a land of delight and repose for the faithful,
and, on the other hand, one of punishment for the wicked.
Persian, and still older, influences had largely leavened Hebrew
conceptions, and local conditions in Judea added pungent elements. The
Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, “the place where lie the corpses of those
who have sinned against Jehovah, where their worm shall not die, neither
their fire be quenched;” the dreary volcanic region around the Dead Sea,
with its legend of doomed cities, supplied their imagery of hell with its
lake of fire and brimstone. And, as the belief travelled westward, it fell
into congenial soil. The sulphurous stench around Lacus Avernus, the smoke
of Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna, wreathed themselves round the hell of
Christianity and the under-world of barbaric myth; and from Talmudic
writer to classic poet, to Dante and to Milton, the imagination exhausted
the material of the horrible to describe the several tortures of the
damned. The hell of our northern forefathers remained below the flat
earth, but the cold, misty Niflheim melted away before the fiery perdition
of Christian dogma. And, in the region bordering thereon, the _limbus
patrum_, the _limbus infantum_, etc., we have the survival of belief in
separate hells characteristic of the Oriental religions, and of the
sub-divisions of the lower world in more rudimentary religions.
Beyond the narrow horizon which bounded the world of the ancients, lay the
imaginary land of the immortals, the Blessed, the Happy, the Fortunate
Isles. But as that horizon enlarged, the Elysian Fields and Banquet Halls
were transferred to an upper sphere. In the wonder aroused by the
firmament above, with its solid-looking vault across which sun, stars,
and clouds traversed; in the place it plays in dreams of barbarian and
patriarch, when the sleeper is carried thither; in its brightness of
noonday glory as contrasted with the dark sun-set under-world, we may find
some of the materials of which the theory of an upper world, a heaven
(“the heaved”) is made up. There the barbarian places his paradise to
which the rainbow and the Milky Way are roads; there he meets his kindred,
and lives where cold, disease, and age are not, but everlasting summer and
summer fruits. There, too, for the conceptions of advanced races are drawn
from the same sources, the civilised peoples of Europe and America have
placed their heaven. And, save in refinement of detail incident to
intellectual growth, there is nothing to choose between the earlier and
the later; the same gross delights, the same earth-born ideas are there,
whether we enter the Norseman’s Valhalla, the Moslem’s Paradise, or the
Christian’s New Jerusalem.
§ XII.
CONCLUSIONS FROM THE FOREGOING.
It would exceed the limits and purport of this book to follow the
extension of the belief in spirits to its extreme range; in other words,
to belief in controlling spirits in inanimate objects, which were advanced
_pari passu_ with man’s advancing conceptions to place and rank as the
higher gods of polytheism. Such belief, as already indicated, is the
outcome of that primitive philosophy which invests the elements above and
the earth beneath with departmental deities, until, through successive
stages of dualism, the idea of a Supreme Deity is reached, and the
approach is thus made towards a conception of the unity and unvarying
order of nature. Deferring reference to the part played by dreams as media
of communication between heaven and earth, and as warnings of coming
events, let us summarise the evidence which has been gathered, and ask
whether it warrants the conclusions drawn from it in the present work.
It has been shown that races have existed, and exist still, at so low a
level that their scanty stock of words has to be supplemented by gestures,
rendering converse in the dark next to impossible. Such people are
bewildered by any effort to count beyond their fingers; they have no idea
of the relation of things, or of their differences; they have no power of
generalisation by which to merge the accidental in the essential. They
believe that their names and likenesses are integral parts of themselves,
and that they can be bewitched or harmed through them at the hands of any
one who knows the one or has obtained the other. As an important result of
their confusion between the objective and the subjective, we find a vivid
and remarkable belief in the reality of their dreams. The events which
make up these are explained only on the theory that if the body did not
move from its sleeping place, something related to it did, and that the
people, both living and dead, who appeared in dream and vision, did in
very presence come. The puzzle is solved by the theory of a second self
which can leave the body and return to it. For the savage knows nothing of
_mind_. The belief in this other self is strengthened (possibly more or
less created) by its appearance in shadow or reflection, in mocking echo,
in various diseases, especially fits, when the sufferer is torn by an
indwelling foe, and writhes as if in his merciless grasp. The belief in
such a ghost-soul, as to the form and ethereal nature of which all kinds
of theories are started, is extended to animals and lifeless things, since
like evidence of its existence is supplied by them. The fire that destroys
his hut, the wind that blows it down, the lightning that darts from the
clouds and strikes his fellow-man dead beside him, the rain-storm that
floods his fields, the swollen river that sweeps away his store of
food--these and every other force manifest in nature add their weight to
the inferences which rude man has drawn. The phenomena which have
accounted for the vigour of life and the prostration of disease account
for the motion of things in heaven above and the earth beneath, and the
barbaric mind thus enlarges its belief in a twofold existence in man to a
far-reaching doctrine of spirits everywhere. Step by step, from ghost-soul
flitting round the wigwam to the great spirits indwelling in the powers of
nature, the belief in supernatural beings with physical qualities arises,
until the moral element comes in, and they appear as good and evil gods
contending for the mastery of the universe. Passing by details as to the
whereabouts of the other self and its doings and destiny in the other
world which the dream involves, and following the order of ideas on
scientific lines, two queries arise:--
1. Does the evidence before us suffice to warrant the conclusions drawn
from it as to the serious and permanent part which dreams have played in
the origin and growth of primitive belief in spirits; in short, of belief
in supernatural agencies from past to present times? In this place the
answer is brief. Of course the antecedent conditions of man’s developed
emotional nature, and of the universe of great and small, which is the
field of its exercise, are taken for granted.
The general animistic interpretation which man gives to phenomena at the
outset expressed itself in the particular conceptions of souls everywhere,
of which dreams and such-like things supplied the raw material. If they
did not, what did? Denying this, we must fall back on a theory of
intuition or on revelation. As to the former, it begs the whole question;
as to the latter, can that which is itself the subject of periodical
revision be an infallible authority on anything?
If dreams, apparitions, shadows, and the like, are sufficing causes, then,
in obedience to the Law of Parsimony (as it is termed in logic), we need
not invoke the play of higher causes when lower ones are found competent
to account for the effects. If it seems to some that the base is too
narrow, the foundation too weak for the superstructure, and that our
metaphysics and our beliefs regarding the invisible rest upon something
wider and stronger than the illusions of a remote savage ancestry, the
facts of man’s history may be adduced as witness to his continuous passage
into truth through illusions; to the vast revolutions and readjustments
made in his correction of the first impressions of the senses. There is
not a belief of the past, from the notions of savages about their dreams
and ghost-world to those of more advanced races about their spirit-realms
and its occupants, to which this does not apply. In the more delicate
observations of the astronomer he must, when estimating the position of
any celestial body, take into account its apparent displacement through
the refractive properties of the atmosphere, and must also allow for
defects of perception in himself due to what is called “personal
equation.” And in ascertaining our place in the scale of being, as well as
in seeking for the grounds of belief concerning our own nature, we have to
take into account the refracting media of dense ignorance and prejudice
through which these beliefs have come, and to allow for the confirming
error due to personal equation--fond desire. The result will be the
vanishing of illusions involving momentous changes in psychology, ethics,
and theology. Instead of groping among mental phenomena for explanations
of themselves, they will be analysed by the methods already indicated.
Instead of resting the authority for moral injunctions on innate ideas of
right and wrong, and on inspired statutes and standards, it will rest on
the accredited, because verifiable, experience of man. Instead of finding
incentives to, or restraints on, conduct by operating on men’s hope of
future reward, or fear of hell as “hangman’s whip to keep the wretch in
order,” they will be supplied by an ever-widening sense of duty, quickened
by love and loyalty to a supreme order, in obedience to which the ultimate
happiness of humanity in the life that is will be secured.
In this, and not in theories of an hereafter whose origin and persistence
are explained, will man find his satisfaction, and the springs of motive
to whatever is ennobling, lovely, and of good report. With the poet, who,
laying bare the sources of the unrest of his time, has led us to the
secret of its peace, he will ask--
“Is it so small a thing
To have enjoyed the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done,
To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes--
That we should feign a bliss
Of doubtful future date,
And while we dream on this,
Lose all our present state,
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?”[94]
2. Does the theory of evolution in its application to the development of
the spiritual nature of man, and to the origin and growth of ideas, find
any breach of continuity? In its inclusion of him as a part of nature, in
accounting for his derivation from pre-human ancestry by a process of
natural selection, and in its proofs of his unbroken development from the
embryo to adult life, it embraces the growth and development of mind and
all that mind connotes. In the words of Professor Huxley, “As there is an
anatomy of the body, so there is an anatomy of the mind; the psychologist
dissects mental phenomena into elementary states of consciousness, as the
anatomist resolves limbs into tissues, and tissues into cells. The one
traces the development of complex organs from simple rudiments; the other
follows the building up of complex conceptions out of simpler constituents
of thought. As the physiologist inquires into the way in which the
so-called ‘functions’ of the body are performed, so the psychologist
studies the so-called ‘faculties’ of the mind. Even a cursory attention to
the ways and works of the lower animals suggests a comparative anatomy and
physiology of the mind; and the doctrine of evolution presses for
application as much in the one field as in the other.”[95]
Any coherent explanation of the operations of nature was impossible while
man had no conception or knowledge of the interplay of its several parts.
Now, by the doctrine of continuity, not only are present changes referred
to unvarying causes, but the past is interpreted by the processes going on
under our eyes. We can as easily calculate eclipses backward as forward;
we can learn in present formations of the earth’s crust the history of the
deposition of the most ancient strata; we read in a rounded granite pebble
the story of epochs, the fire that fused its organic or inorganic
particles, the water that rubbed and rolled it; we reconstruct from a few
bones the ancestry of obscure forms, and find in the fragments the missing
links that connect species now so varied. And the like method is applied
to man in his _tout ensemble_. His development is not arbitrary; what he
is is the expansion of germs of what he was.
Till these latter days he has, on the warrant of legends now of worth only
as witnesses to his crude ideas, presumed on an isolated place in
creation, and excepted his race from an inquiry made concerning every
creature beneath him. The pride of birth has hindered his admission of
lineal connection between the beliefs of cultured races and the beliefs of
savages, and pseudo-scientific writers still confuse issues by assuming
distinctions between races to whom spiritual truths have been revealed and
races from whom these truths have been withheld. But the only tenable
distinction to be drawn nowadays is between the scientific and
pre-scientific age in the history of any given race.
In these times, when many run to and fro, and knowledge is increased, we
forget how recent are the tremendous changes wrought by the science that--
“Reaches forth her arms
To feel from world to world, and charms
Her secret from the latest moon.”
Dulled by familiarity, we forget how operative these changes are upon
opinions which have been--save now and again by voices speedily
silenced--unquestioned during centuries. It is, in truth, another world to
that in which our forefathers lived. Even in science itself the revolution
wrought by discoveries within the last fifty years is enormous. Our old
standard authorities, especially in astronomy and geology, are now of
value only as historical indices to the progress of those sciences, while
in the domain of life itself the distinctions between plant and animal,
assumed under the terms Botany and Zoology, are effaced and made one under
the term Biology. Sir James Paget, in a profoundly interesting address on
_Science and Theology_, has pointed out that it was once thought profane
to speak of life as in any kind of relation or alliance with chemical
affinities manifest in lifeless matter; now, the correlation of all the
forces of matter is a doctrine which investigation more and more confirms.
It was believed--many believe it still--that an impassable chasm separates
the inorganic from the organic, the latter being attained only through
operations of a “vital force” external to matter. That chasm is imaginary.
Even the supposed difference between plants and animals in the existence
in the latter of a stomach by which to digest and change nutritive
substances, vanishes before the experiments on carnivorous plants. And not
only do the observations of Mr. Darwin go far to show the existence of a
nervous system in plants, but examination of crystals shows that a “truly
elemental pathology must be studied in them after mechanical injuries or
other disturbing forces.” And is man, “the roof and crown of things,” to
witness to diversity amidst this unity?
If we hesitate to believe that our metaphysics have been evolved from
savage philosophy, that our accepted opinions concerning man’s nature and
destiny are but the improved and purified speculations of the past, we
must remember what long years had elapsed before the spirit of science
arose and breathed its air of freedom on the human mind. The Christian
religion wrought no change in the attitude of man towards the natural
world; it remained as full of mystery and miracle to the pagan after his
conversion as before it. When that religion was planted in foreign soil it
had, as the condition of its thriving, to be nourished by the alien
juices. It had to take into itself what it found there, and it found very
much in common. Although it displaced and degraded the _Dii majores_ of
other faiths, it had its own elaborated order of principalities and
powers; it had as real a belief in demons and goblins as any pagan; and it
was, therefore, simply a question of baptizing and rechristening the
ghost-world of heathendom, substituting angels for swan-maidens and elves,
devils for demons, and retaining unchanged the army of evil agencies, who
as witches and wraiths swarmed in the night and wrought havoc on soul and
body.