The missionary, like any other practical man, requires to know what
science can teach him about the material on which he has to work. So
far as is possible, he should know what materials are sound and can be
used with safety in his constructive work, and what must be thrown
aside, what must be destroyed, if his work is to escape dry-rot and to
stand as a permanent edifice. He should be able to feel confidence,
for instance, not merely that magic and fetichism are the negation of
religion, but that in teaching that fact he has to support him the
evidence collected by the science of religion; and he should have that
evidence placed at his disposal for effective use, if need be.
It may be also that amongst much unsound material he will find some
that is sound, that may be used, and that he cannot afford to cast
away. He has to work upon our common humanity, upon the humanity
common to him and his hearers. He has to remember that no man and no
community of {35} men ever is or has been or ever can be excluded from
the search after God. And his duty, his chosen duty, is to help them
in that search, and as far as may be to make the way clear for them,
and to guide their feet in the right path. He will find that they have
attempted to make paths for themselves; and it is not impossible that
he will find that some of those paths for some distance do go in the
right direction; that some of their beliefs have in them an element of
truth, or a groping after truth which, rightly understood, may be made
to lead to Christianity. It is with one of those beliefs--the belief
in immortality--that I shall deal in this lecture.
It is a fact worthy of notice that the belief in immortality fills, I
will not say a more important, but a more prominent, place in the
hearts and hopes of uncivilised than of civilised man; and it is also a
fact worthy of notice that among primitive men the belief in
immortality is much less intimately bound up with religion than it
comes to be at a later period of evolution. The two facts are probably
not wholly without relation to one another. So long as the belief in
immortality luxuriates and grows wild, so to speak, untrained and
unrestrained by religion, it {36} developes as the fancy wills, and
lives by flattering the fancy. When, however, the relations of a
future life to morality and religion come to be realised, when the
conception of the next world comes to be moralised, then it becomes the
subject of fear as well as of hope; and the fancy loses much of the
freedom with which it tricked out the pictures that once it drew,
purely according to its own sweet liking, of a future state. On the
one hand, the guilty mind prefers not to dwell upon the day of
reckoning, so long as it can stave off the idea; and it may succeed
more or less in putting it on one side until the proximity of death
makes the idea insistent. Thus the mind more or less deliberately
dismisses the future life from attention. On the other hand, religion
itself insists persistently on the fact that you have your duty here
and now in this world to perform, and that the rest, the future
consequences, you must leave to God. Thus, once more, and this time
not from unworthy motives, attention is directed to this life rather
than to the next; and it is this point that is critical for the fate
both of the belief in immortality and of religion itself. At this
point, religion may, as in the case of Buddhism it actually has done,
formally give up and disavow {37} belief in immortality. And in that
case it sows the seed of its own destruction. Or it may recognise that
the immortality of the soul is postulated by and essential to morality
and religion alike. And in that case, even in that case alone, is
religion in a position to provide a logical basis for morality and to
place the natural desire for a future life on a firmer basis than the
untutored fancy of primitive man could find for it.
It is then with primitive man or with the lower races that we will
begin, and with "the comparative universality of their belief in the
continued existence of the soul after the death of the body" (Tylor,
_Primitive Culture_, II, i). Now, the classical theory of this belief
is that set forth by Professor Tylor in his _Primitive Culture_.
Whence does primitive man get his idea that the soul continues to exist
after the death of the body? the answer given is, in the first place,
from the fact that man dreams. He dreams of distant scenes that he
visits in his sleep; it is clear, from the evidence of those who saw
his sleeping body, that his body certainly did not travel; therefore he
or his soul must be separable from the body and must have travelled
whilst his body lay unmoving and unmoved. But he also dreams of {38}
those who are now dead, and whose bodies he knows, it may be, to have
been incinerated. The explanation then is obvious that they, too, or
their souls, are separable from their bodies; and the fact that they
survive death and the destruction of the body is demonstrated by their
appearance in his dreams. About the reality of their appearance in his
dreams he has no more doubt than he has about the reality of what he
himself does and suffers in his dreams. If, however, the dead appeared
only in his dreams, their existence after death might seem to be
limited to the dream-time. But as a matter of fact they appear to him
in his waking moments also: ghosts are at least as familiar to the
savage as to the civilised man; and thus the evidence of his dreams,
which first suggested his belief, is confirmed by the evidence of his
senses.
Thus the belief in the continued existence of the soul after the death
of the body is traced back to the action of dreams and waking
hallucinations. Now, it is inevitable that the inference should be
drawn that the belief in immortality has thus been tracked to its
basis. And it is inevitable that those who start with an inclination
to regard the belief as palpably absurd should welcome this exhibition
of {39} its evolution as proof conclusive that the belief could only
have originated in and can only impose upon immature minds. To that
doubtless it is a perfectly sound reply to say that the origin of a
belief is one thing and its validity quite another. The way in which
we came to hold the belief is a matter of historical investigation, and
undoubtedly may form a very fascinating enquiry. But the question
whether the belief is true is a question which has to be considered, no
matter how I got it, just as the question whether I am committing a
trespass or not in being on a piece of ground cannot be settled by any
amount of explaining how I got there. Or, to put it in another way,
the very risky path by which I have scrambled up a cliff does not make
the top any the less safe when I have got there.
But though it is perfectly logical to insist on the distinction between
the origin and the validity of any belief, and to refuse to question or
doubt the validity of the belief in immortality merely because of the
origin ascribed to it by authorities on primitive culture,--that is no
reason why we should not examine the origin suggested for it, to see
whether it is a satisfactory origin. And that is what I propose now to
do. I wish to suggest first that belief in the appearance of {40} the
dead, whether to the dreamer or the ghost-seer, is an intellectual
belief as to what occurs as a matter of fact; and next that thereby it
is distinguished from the desire for immortality which manifests itself
with comparative universality amongst the lower races.
Now, that the appearance of the dead, whether to the waking or the
sleeping eye, is sufficient to start the intellectual belief will be
admitted alike by those who do and those who do not hold that it is
sufficient logically to warrant the belief. But to say that it starts
the desire to see him or her whom we have lost, would be ridiculous.
On the contrary, it would be much nearer the truth to say that it is
the longing and the desire to see, once again, the loved one, that sets
the mind a-dreaming, and first gives to the heart hope. The fact that,
were there no desire for the continuance of life after the death of the
body, the belief would never have caught on--that it either would never
have arisen or would have soon ceased to exist--is shown by the simple
consideration that only where the desire for the continuance of life
after death dies down does the belief in immortality tend to wane. If
any further evidence of that is required it may be found in the
teaching of those {41} forms of philosophy and religion which endeavour
to dispense with the belief in immortality, for they all recognise and
indeed proclaim that they are based on the denial of the desire and the
will to live. If, and only if--as, and only as--the desire to live,
here and hereafter, can be suppressed, can the belief in immortality be
eradicated. The basis of the belief is the desire for continued
existence; and that is why the attempt to trace the origin of the
belief in immortality back to the belief in dreams and apparitions is
one which is not perfectly satisfactory; it leaves out of account the
desire without which the belief would not be and is not operative.
But though it leaves out an element which is at least as important as
any element it includes, it would be an error to take no account of
what it does contribute. It would be an error of this kind if we
closed our eyes to the fact that what first arrests the attention of
man, in the lower stages of his evolution, is the survival of others
than himself. That is the belief which first manifests itself in his
heart and mind; and what first reveals it to him is the appearance of
the dead to his sleeping or his waking eye. He does not first hope or
believe that he himself will survive the death of the body and then go
{42} on to infer that therefore others also will similarly survive. On
the contrary, it is the appearance of others in his sleeping or waking
moments that first gives him the idea; and it is only later and on
reflection that it occurs to him that he also will have, or be, a ghost.
But though we must recognise the intellectual element in the belief and
the intellectual processes which are involved in the belief, we must
also take into account the emotional element, the element of desire.
And first we should notice that the desire is not a selfish or
self-regarding desire; it is the longing for one loved and lost, of the
mother for her child, or of the child for its mother. It is desire of
that kind which gives to dreams and apparitions their emotional value,
without which they would have little significance and no spiritual
importance. That is the direction in which we must look for the reason
why, on the one hand, belief in the continuation of existence after
death seems at first to have no connection with religion, while, on the
other hand, the connection is ultimately shown by the evolution of
belief to be so intimate that neither can attain its proper development
without the other.
Dreams are occasions on which the longing for {43} one loved and lost
manifests itself, but they are not the cause or the origin of the
affection and the longing. But dreams are not exclusively, specially,
or even usually the domain in which religion plays a part. Hence the
visions of the night, in which the memory of the departed and the
craving for reunion with them are manifested, bear no necessary
reference to religion; and it is therefore possible, and _prima facie_
plausible, to maintain that the belief in the immortality of the soul
has its origin in a centre quite distinct from the sphere of religion,
and that it is only very slowly, if at all, that the belief in
immortality comes to be incorporated with religion. On the other hand,
the very craving for reunion or continued communion with those who are
felt not to be lost but gone before, is itself the feeling which is,
not the base, but at the base, of religion. In the lowest forms to
which religion can be reduced, or in which it manifests itself,
religion is a bond of community; it manifests itself externally in
joint acts of worship, internally in the feeling that the worshippers
are bound together by it and united with the object of their worship.
This feeling of communion is not a mere article of intellectual belief,
nor is it imposed upon the members; it is what they themselves desire.
{44} Hoeffding states the truth when he says that in its most
rudimentary form we encounter "religion under the guise of desire"; but
in saying so he omits the essence of the truth, that essence without
which the truth that he partially enunciates may become wholly
misleading,--he omits to say, and I think he fails to see, that the
desire which alone can claim to be considered as religious is the
desire of the community, not of the individual as such, and the desire
of the community as united in common worship. The idea of religion as
a bond of spiritual communion is implicit from the first, even though a
long process of evolution be necessary to disentangle it and set it
forth self-consciously. Now, it is precisely this spiritual communion
of which man becomes conscious in his craving after reunion or
continued communion with those who have departed this life. And it is
with the history of his attempts to harmonise this desire with what he
knows and demands of the universe otherwise, that we are here and now
concerned.
So strong is that desire, so inconceivable is the idea that death ends
all, and divorces from us forever those we have loved and lost awhile,
that the lower races of mankind have been pretty generally driven {45}
to the conclusion that death is a mistake or due to a mistake. It is
widely held that there is no such thing as a natural death. Men do of
course die, they may be killed; but it is not an ordinance of nature
that a man must be killed; and, if he is killed, his death is not
natural. So strong is this feeling that when a man dies and his death
is not obviously a case of murder, the inference which the savage
prefers to draw is that the death is really a case of murder, but that
the murder has been worked by witchcraft or magic. Amongst the
Australian black fellows, as we are told by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen,
"no such thing as natural death is realised by the native; a man who
dies has of necessity been killed by some other man or perhaps even by
a woman, and sooner or later that man or woman will be attacked;"
consequently, "in very many cases there takes place what the white man,
not seeing beneath the surface, not unnaturally describes as secret
murder; but in reality ... every case of such secret murder, when one
or more men stealthily stalk their prey with the object of killing him,
is in reality the exacting of a life for a life, the accused person
being indicated by the so-called medicine man as one who has brought
about the death of another man by magic, and whose {46} life must
therefore be forfeited" (_Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 48).
What underlies this idea that by man alone is death brought into the
world is that death is unnatural and is no part of the original design
of things. When the fact comes to be recognised undeniably that deaths
not caused by human agency do take place, then the fact requires
explanation; and the explanation on which primitive races, quite
independently of each other, hit is that as death was no part of the
original design of things, its introduction was due to accident or
mistake. Either men were originally exempt from death, or they were
intended to be exempt. If they were intended to be exempt, then the
inference drawn is that the intention was frustrated by the
carelessness of the agent intrusted with the duty of making men
deathless. If they were originally exempt from death, then the loss of
the exemption has to be accounted for. And in either case the
explanation takes the form of a narrative which relates how the mistake
took place or what event it was that caused the loss of the exemption.
I need not quote examples of either class of narrative. What I wish to
do is to emphasise the fact that by primitive man death is felt to be
inconsistent with the {47} scheme of things. First, therefore, he
denies that it can come in the course of nature, though he admits that
it may be procured by the wicked man in the way of murder or magic.
And it is at this stage that his hope of reunion with those loved and
lost scarcely stretches beyond the prospect of their return to this
world. Evidence of this stage is found partly in tales such as those
told of the mother who returns to revisit her child, or of persons
restored to life. Stories of this latter kind come from Tasmania,
Australia, and Samoa, amongst other places, and are found amongst the
Eskimo and American Indians, as well as amongst the Fjorts (J. A.
MacCullough, _The Childhood of Fiction_, ch. IV). Even more direct
evidence of the emotion which prompts these stories is afforded by the
Ho dirge, quoted by Professor Tylor (_P. C._, II, 32, 33):--
"We never scolded you; never wronged you;
Come to us back!
We ever loved and cherished you; and have lived long together
Under the same roof;
Desert it not now!
The rainy nights and the cold blowing days are coming on;
Do not wander here!
Do not stand by the burnt ashes; come to us again!
You cannot find shelter under the peepul, when the rain comes down.
{48}
The saul will not shield you from the cold bitter wind.
Come to your home!
It is swept for you and clean; and we are there who loved you ever;
And there is rice put for you and water;
Come home, come home, come to us again!"
In these verses it is evident that the death of the body is recognised
as a fact. It is even more manifest that the death of the body is put
aside as weighing for naught against the absolute conviction that the
loved one still exists. But reunion is sought in this world; another
world is not yet thought of. The next world has not yet been called
into existence to redress the sorrows and the sufferings of this life.
Where the discovery of that solution has not been made, the human mind
seeks such consolation as may be found elsewhere. If the aspiration,
"come to us, come to us again," can find no other realisation, it
welcomes the reappearance of the lost one in another form. In
Australia, amongst the Euahlayi tribe, the mother who has lost her baby
or her young child may yet believe that it is restored to her and born
again in the form of another child. In West Africa, according to Miss
Kingsley, "the new babies as they arrived in the family were shown a
selection of small articles belonging to deceased members whose souls
{49} were still absent,--the thing the child caught hold of identified
him. 'Why, he's Uncle John; see! he knows his own pipe;' or 'That's
Cousin Emma; see! she knows her market calabash;' and so on." But it
is not only amongst Australian black fellows or West African negroes
that the attempt is made to extract consolation for death from the
speculation that we die only to be reborn in this world. The theory of
rebirth is put forward by a distinguished student of Hegel--Dr.
McTaggart--in a work entitled _Some Dogmas of Religion_. It is
admitted by Dr. McTaggart to be true that we have no memory whatever of
our previous stages of existence; but he declares, "we may say that, in
spite of the loss of memory, it is the same person who lives in the
successive lives" (p. 130); and he appears to find the same consolation
as his remote forefathers did in looking forward to a future stage of
existence in which he will have no more memory of his present
existence, and no more reason to believe in it, than he now has memory
of, or reason to believe in, his preexistence. "It is certain," he
says, "that in this life we remember no previous lives," and he accepts
the position that it is equally certain we shall have in our next life
absolutely no memory of our {50} present existence. That, of course,
distinguishes Dr. McTaggart from the West African Uncle John who, when
he is reborn, at any rate "knows his own pipe."
The human mind, as I have said, seeks such consolation as it may find
in the doctrine of rebirth. It finds evidence of rebirth either in the
behaviour of the new-born child or in its resemblance to deceased
relations. But it also comes to the conclusion that the reincarnation
may be in animal form. Whether that conclusion is suggested by the
strangely human expression in the eyes of some animals, or whether it
is based upon the belief in the power of transformation, need not be
discussed. It is beyond doubt that transformation is believed in: the
Cherokee Indian sings a verse to the effect that he becomes a real
wolf; and "after stating that he has become a real wolf, the songster
utters a prolonged howl, and paws the ground like a wolf with his feet"
(Frazer, _Kingship_, p. 71). Indeed, identity may be attained or
manifested without any process of transformation; in Australia, amongst
the Dieri tribe, the head man of a totem consisting of a particular
sort of a seed is spoken of by his people as being the plant itself
which yields the seed (_ib._, p. 109). {51} Where such beliefs are
prevalent, the doctrine of the reincarnation of the soul in animal form
will obviously arise at the stage of evolution which we are now
discussing, that is to say when the soul is not yet supposed to depart
to another world, and must therefore manifest itself in this world in
one way or another, if not in human shape, then in animal form. In the
form of what animal the deceased will be reincarnated is a question
which will be answered in different ways. Purely fortuitous
circumstances may lead to particular animals being considered to be the
reincarnation of the deceased. Or the fact that the deceased has a
particular animal for totem may lead the survivors to expect his
reappearance in the form of that particular animal. The one fact of
importance for our present purpose is that at its origin the belief in
animal reincarnation had no necessary connection with the theory of
future punishments and rewards. At the stage of evolution in which the
belief in transmigration arose many animals were the object of genuine
respect because of the virtues of courage, etc., which were manifested
by them; or because of the position they occupied as totems.
Consequently no loss of status was involved when the soul transmigrated
from a {52} human to an animal form. No notion of punishment was
involved in the belief.
The doctrines of reincarnation and transmigration belong to a stage in
the evolution of belief, or to a system of thought, in which the
conviction that the death of the body does not entail the destruction
of the soul is undoubted, but from which the conception, indeed the
very idea, of another world than this is excluded. That conception
begins to manifest itself where ancestor worship establishes itself;
but the manifestation is incomplete. Deceased chieftains and heroes,
who have been benefactors to the tribe, are remembered; and the good
they did is remembered also. They are themselves remembered as the
doers of good; and their spirits are naturally conceived as continuing
to be benevolent, or ready to confer benefits when properly approached.
But thus envisaged, they are seen rather in their relation to the
living than in their relation to each other. It is their assistance in
this world that is sought; their condition in the next world is of less
practical importance and therefore provokes less of speculation, in the
first instance. But when speculation is provoked, it proves ultimately
fatal to ancestor worship.
{53}
First, it may lead to the question of the relation of the spirits of
the deceased benefactors to the god or gods of the community. There
will be a tendency to blur the distinction between the god and his
worshippers, if any of the worshippers come to be regarded as being
after death spirits from whom aid may be invoked and to whom offerings
must be made. And if the distinction ceases after death, it is
difficult and sometimes impossible to maintain it during life; an
emperor who is to be deified after death may find his deification
beginning before his death. Belief in such deification may be accepted
by some members of the community. Others will regard it as proof that
religion is naught; and yet others will be driven to seek for a form of
religion which affords no place for such deifications, but maintains
explicitly that distinction between a god and his worshippers which is
present in the most rudimentary forms of religion.
But though the tendency of ancestor worship is to run this course and
to pass in this way out of the evolution of religion, it may be
arrested at the very outset, if the religious spirit is, as it has been
in one case at least, strong enough to stand against it at the
beginning. Thus, amongst the Jews there {54} was a tendency to
ancestor worship, as is shown by the fact of its prohibition. But it
was stamped out; and it was stamped out so effectually that belief in
the continued existence of the soul after death ceased for long to have
any practical influence. "Generally speaking, the Hebrews regarded the
grave as the final end of all sentient and intelligent existence, 'the
land where all things are forgotten'" (Smith's _Dictionary of the
Bible_, _s.v._ Sheol). "In death," the Psalmist says to the Lord,
"there is no remembrance of thee: in Sheol who shall give thee thanks?"
"Shall they that are deceased arise and praise thee? Shall thy
loving-kindness be declared in the grave?" or "thy righteousness in the
land of forgetfulness?" Thus the Sheol of the Old Testament remains to
testify to the view taken of the state of the dead by a people amongst
whom the worship of ancestors was arrested at the outset. Amongst such
a people the dead are supposed simply to continue in the next world as
they left this: "in Sheol the kings of the nations have their thrones,
and the mighty their weapons of war," just as in Virgil the ghost of
Deiphobus still shows the ghastly wounds by which he perished (Jevons,
_History of Religion_, p. 301).
{55}
This continuation theory, the view that the dead continue in the next
world as they left this, means that, to the people who entertain it,
the dead are merely a memory. It is forbidden to think of them as
doing anything, as affecting the living in any way. They are conceived
as powerless to gratify the wishes of the living, or to thwart them.
Where the Lord God is a jealous God, religion cannot tolerate the idea
that any other spirit should be conceived as usurping His functions,
still less that such spirits should receive the offerings and the
prayers which are the due of Him alone. But though the dead are thus
reduced to a mere memory, the memory itself does not and cannot die.
Accordingly the dead, or rather those whose bodies are dead, continue
to live. But, as they exercise no action in, or control over, the
world of the living, their place of abode comes to be regarded as
another world, to which they are confined. Speculation, therefore,
where speculation is made, as to the case of the inhabitants of this
other world, must take the direction of enquiring as to their fate.
Where speculation is not made, the dead are conceived merely to
continue to be as they are remembered to have been in this life. But,
if there is to be room for any speculation {56} at all, there must be
assumed to be some diversity in their fate, and therefore some reason,
intelligible to man, for that diversity. That is a conclusion to which
tribes attain who have apparently gone through no period of ancestor
worship,--indeed, ancestor worship only impedes or defers the
attainment of that conclusion. The diversity of fate could only
consist in the difference between being where you would be and being
where you would not. But the reasons for that diversity may be very
different amongst different peoples. First, where religion is at its
lowest or is in its least developed form, the gods are not the cause of
the diversity nor do they seem concerned in it. Such diversity as
there is seems in its simplest form merely to be a continuance of the
social distinctions which prevail among the living: the high chieftains
rest in a calm, plenteous, sunny land in the sky; while "all Indians of
low degree go deep down under the earth to the land of Chay-her, with
its poor houses and no salmon and no deer, and blankets so small and
thin, that when the dead are buried the friends often bury blankets
with them" (Tylor, _P. C._, II, 85). Elsewhere, it is not social
distinctions, but moral, that make the difference: "the rude Tupinambas
of Brazil think {57} the souls of such as had lived virtuously, that is
to say who have well avenged themselves and eaten many of their
enemies," (_ib._) rejoin the souls of their fathers in the happy land,
while the cowards go to the other place. Thus, though the distinctions
in the next world do not seem originally to have sprung from or to have
been connected with morality, and still less with religion, they are,
or may be at a very early period, seized upon by the moral
consciousness as containing truth or implying it, when rightly
understood. Truth indeed of the highest import for morality is implied
in the distinctions thus essayed to be drawn. But before the truth
implicit could be made explicit, it was necessary that the distinctions
should be recognised to have their basis in religion. And that was
impossible where religion was at its lowest or in its least developed
form.
From the fact that on the one hand the conception of a future life in
another world, when it arose amongst people in a low stage of religious
development, bore but little moral and no religious fruit; and on the
other, where it did yield fruit, there had been a previous period when
religion closed its eyes as far as possible to the condition of the
dead {58} in Hades or in Sheol,--we may draw the inference that the
conception of the future state formed by such people, as "the rude
Tupinambas of Brazil" had to be sterilised, so to speak,--to be
purified from associations dangerous both to morality and religion. We
may fairly say that as a matter of fact that was the consequence which
actually happened, and that both in Greece and Judaea the prospect of a
future life at one time became practically a _tabula rasa_ on which
might be written a fairer message of hope than had ever been given
before. In Greece the message was written, indeed, and was received
with hope by the thousands who joined in the celebration of the
mysteries. But the characters in which it was written faded soon. The
message was found to reveal nothing. It revealed nothing because it
demanded nothing. It demanded neither a higher life nor a higher
conception of the deity. It did not set forth a new and nobler
morality; and it accommodated itself to the existing polytheism. What
it did do was to familiarise the Hellenic world with the conviction
that there was a life hereafter, better than this life; and that the
condition of its attainment was communion with the true God,
peradventure He could be found. It was by this {59} conviction and
this expectation that the ground was prepared, wherever Hellenism
existed, for the message that was to come from Israel.
From the beginning, or let us say in the lowest forms in which religion
manifests itself, religion is the bond in which the worshippers are
united with one another and with their God. The community which is
thus united is at first the earliest form of society, whatever that
form may have been, in which men dwell together for their common
purposes. It is the fact that its members have common purposes and
common interests which constitute them a community; and amongst the
common interests without which there could be no community is that of
common worship: knowledge of the sacra, being confined to the members
of the community, is the test by which members are known, outsiders
excluded, and the existence of the community as a community secured.
At this stage, in a large number of societies--negro,
Malayo-Polynesian, North American Indians, Eskimo, Australians--the
belief in reincarnation takes a form in which the presence of souls of
the departed is recognised as necessary to the very conception of the
community. Thus in Alaska, among the Unalits of St. Michael's {60}
Bay, a festival of the dead is observed, the equivalent of which
appears to be found amongst all the Eskimo. M. Mauss (_L'Annee
Sociologique_, IX, 99) thus describes it: "It comprises two essential
parts. It begins with praying the souls of the dead graciously to
consent to reincarnate themselves for the moment in the namesake which
each deceased person has; for the custom is that in each station the
child last born always takes the name of the last person who has died.
Then these living representatives of the deceased receive presents, and
having received them the souls are dismissed from the abodes of the
living to return to the land of the dead. Thus at this festival not
only does the group regain its unity, but the rite reconstitutes the
ideal group which consists of all the generations which have succeeded
one another from the earliest times. Mythical and historic ancestors
as well as later ones thus mingle with the living, and communion
between them is conducted by means of the exchange of presents."
Amongst people other than the Eskimo, a new-born child not only takes
the name of the last member of the family or clan who has died, but is
regarded as the reincarnation of the deceased. "Thus the number of
individuals, {61} of names, of souls, of social functions in the clan
is limited; and the life of the clan consists in the death and rebirth
of individuals who are always identically the same" (_l.c._ 267).
The line of evolution thus followed by the belief in reincarnation
results in the total separation of the belief from morality and from
religion, and results in rendering it infertile alike for morality,
religion, and progress in civilisation generally. Where the belief in
reincarnation takes the form of belief in the transmigration of the
soul into some animal form, it may be utilised for moral purposes,
provided that the people amongst whom the belief obtains have otherwise
advanced so far as to see that the punishments and rewards which are
essential to the development of morality are by no means always
realised in this life. When that conviction has established itself,
the reincarnation theory will provide machinery by which the belief in
future punishments and rewards can be conceived as operative: rebirth
in animal form, if the belief in it already exists, may be held out as
a deterrent to wrongdoing. That is, as a matter of fact, the use to
which the belief has been put by Buddhism. The form and station in
which the deceased will be {62} reborn is no longer, as amongst the
peoples just mentioned, conceived to be determined automatically, so to
speak, but is supposed to depend on the moral qualities exhibited
during life. If this view of the future life has struck deeper root
and has spread over a greater surface than the doctrine taught in the
Greek mysteries ever did, the reason may probably be found in the fact
that the Greek mysteries had no higher morality to teach than was
already recognised, whilst the moral teaching of the Buddha was far
more exalted and far more profoundly true than anything that had been
preached in India before. If a moral system by itself, on its own
merits, were capable of affording a sure foundation for religion,
Buddhism would be built upon a rock. To the spiritual community by
which man may be united to his fellow-man and to his God, morality is
essential and indispensable. But the moral life derives its value
solely from the fact that on it depends, and by means of it is
realised, that communion of man with God after which man has from the
beginning striven. If then that communion and the very possibility of
that communion is denied, the denial must prove fatal alike to religion
and to morality. Now, that is the denial which Buddhism {63} makes.
But the fact of the denial is obscured to those who believe, and to
those who would like to believe, in Buddhism, by the way in which it is
made. It is made in such a way that it appears and is believed to be
an affirmation instead of a denial. Communion with God is declared to
be the final end to which the transmigration of souls conducts. But
the communion to which it leads is so intimate that the human soul, the
individual, ceases to be. Obviously, therefore, if it ceases to be,
the communion also must cease; there is no real communion subsisting
between two spirits, the human and the divine, for two spirits do not
exist, but only one. If this way of stating the case be looked upon
with suspicion as possibly not doing justice to the teaching of
Buddhism, or as pressing unduly far the union between the human and the
divine which is the ultimate goal of the transmigration of souls, the
reply is that in truth the case against Buddhism is stronger than
appears from this mode of stating it. To say that from the Buddhist
point of view the human soul, the individual, eventually ceases to be,
is indeed an incorrect way of putting the matter. It implies that the
human soul, the individual, now is; and hereafter ceases to be. But so
far from {64} admitting that the individual now is, the Buddhist
doctrine is that the existence of the soul, now, is mere illusion,
_maya_. It is therefore logical enough, and at any rate
self-consistent, to say that hereafter, when the series of
transmigrations is complete, the individual will not indeed cease to
be, for he never was, but the illusion that he existed will be
dissipated. Logically again, it follows from this that if the
existence of the individual soul is an illusion from the beginning,
then there can strictly speaking be no transmigration of souls, for
there is no soul to transmigrate. But with perfect self-consistency
Buddhism accepts this position: what is transmitted from one being to
the next in the chain of existences is not the individuality or the
soul, but the character. Professor Rhys Davids says (_Hibbert
Lectures_, pp. 91, 92): "I have no hesitation in maintaining that
Gotama did not teach the transmigration of souls. What he did teach
would be better summarized, if we wish to retain the word
transmigration, as the transmigration of character. But it would be
more accurate to drop the word transmigration altogether when speaking
of Buddhism, and to call its doctrine the doctrine of karma. Gotama
held that after the death of any being, {65} whether human or not,
there survived nothing at all but that being's 'karma,' the result,
that is, of its mental and bodily actions." "He discarded the theory
of the presence, within each human body, of a soul which could have a
separate and eternal existence. He therefore established a new
identity between the individuals in the chain of existence, which he,
like his forerunners, acknowledged, by the new assertion that that
which made two beings to be the same being was--not soul, but--karma"
(_ib._, pp. 93, 94). Thus once more it appears that there can be no
eventual communion between the human soul, at the end of its chain of
existence, and the divine, for the reason, not that the human soul
ultimately ceases to be, but that it never is or was, and therefore
neither transmigrates from one body to another, nor is eventually
absorbed in the _atman_.
Logically consistent though this train of argument be, it leaves
unanswered the simple question, How can the result of my actions have
any interest for me--not hereafter, but at the present moment--if I not
only shall not exist hereafter but do not exist at the present moment?
It is not impossible for a man who believes that his existence will
absolutely {66} cease at death to take some interest in and labour for
the good of others who will come after him; but it is impossible for a
man who does not exist now to believe in anything whatever. And it is
on that fundamental absurdity that Buddhism is built: it is directed to
the conversion of those who do not exist to be converted, and it is
directed to the object of relieving from existence those who have no
existence from which to be relieved.
Where then lies the strength of Buddhism, if as a logical structure it
is rent from top to bottom by glaring inconsistency? It lies in its
appeal to the spirit of self-sacrifice. What it denounces, from
beginning to end, is the will to live. The reason why it denounces the
will to live is that that will manifests itself exclusively in the
desires of the individual; and it is to the desires of man that all the
misery in the world are directly due. Destroy those desires by
annihilating the will to live--and in no other way can they be
destroyed--and the misery of the world will cease. The only
termination to the misery of the world which Buddhism can imagine is
the voluntary cessation of life which will ultimately ensue on the
cessation of the will to live. And the means by which that is to be
brought about is {67} the uprooting and destruction of the
self-regarding desires by means of the higher morality of
self-sacrifice. What the Buddhist overlooks is that the uprooting and
destruction of the self-regarding desires results, not in the
annihilation, but in the purification and enhanced vitality, of the
self that uproots them. The outcome of the unselfish and
self-sacrificing life is not the destruction of individuality, but its
highest realisation. Now, it is only in society and by living for
others that this unselfishness and self-sacrifice can be carried out;
man can only exist and unselfishness can only operate in society, and
society means the communion of man with his fellows. It is true that
only in society can selfishness exist; but it is recognized from the
beginning as that which is destructive of society, and it is therefore
condemned alike by the morality and the religion of the society. The
communion of man with his fellows and his God is hindered, impeded, and
blocked wholly and solely by his self-regarding desires; it is
furthered and realised solely by his unselfish desires. But his
unselfish desires involve and imply his existence--I was going to say,
just as much, I mean--far more than his selfish desires, for they
imply, and are only possible on, the assumption of {68} the existence
of his fellow-man, and of his communion with him. Nay! more, by the
testimony of Buddhism itself as well as of the religious experience of
mankind at large, the unselfish desires, the spirit of self-sacrifice,
require both for their logical and their emotional justification, still
more for their practical operation, the faith that by means of them the
will of God is carried out, and that in them man shows likest God. It
is in them and by them that the communion of man with his fellow-man
and with his God is realised. It is the faith that such communion,
though it may be interrupted, can never be entirely broken which
manifests itself in the belief in immortality. That belief may take
shape in the idea that the souls of the departed revisit this earth
temporarily in ghostly form, or more permanently as reincarnated in the
new-born members of the tribe; it may body forth another world of bliss
or woe, and if it is to subserve the purposes of morality, it must so
do; nay! more, if it is to subserve the purposes of morality, it is
into the presence of the Lord that the soul must go. But in any and
whatever shape the belief takes, the soul is conceived or implied to be
in communion with other spirits. There is no other way in which it is
{69} possible to conceive the existence of a soul; just as any particle
of matter, to be comprehended in its full reality, implies not only
every other particle of matter but the universe which comprehends them,
so the existence of any spirit logically implies not only the existence
of every other but also of Him without whom no one of them could be.
It is in this belief in the communion of spirits wherever he may find
it--and where will he not?--that the missionary may obtain a leverage
for his work. It is a sure basis for his operations because the desire
for communion is universal; and Christianity alone, of the religions of
the world, teaches that self-sacrifice is the way to life eternal.
{70}