Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/63

Rh complete cessation of its rich and delightful material activity. We can conceive of the death of some one else as probable and possible, but we consider our own existence as eternal and our own death as some remote and improbable contingency. Only by the aid of the most advanced intellectual culture, by accumulating a vast number of abstractions and analogies, and using them like the rounds of a ladder, do we climb to a height in which our intellectual and our emotional natures are able to realize the fact that the succeeding generations are merely a continuation and development of those that have gone before, and to find a consolation in the permanence and evolution of the human race as a whole, for the perishableness of the individual.

The causes which led to the growth of transcendental ideas in prehistoric man have the same effect upon the civilized man of today, although sometimes they exert their influence in the sphere of the Unconscious. Anthropomorphism has still an influence upon every mind which does not watch over the conception and growth of its ideas with the strictest severity; it is so convenient to clothe abstract thoughts in familiar expressions, and all of us can recall many occasions when we represented to ourselves or to others some spiritual, immaterial idea under the form of some circumstance or appearance that had come under our observation in the animal or vegetable world. And the incapability of realizing any possible non-existence of the Ego, is as marked now as it ever was. The superstition of primitive man, which we have inherited direct, exerts a powerful influence upon us as we enter the realms of the Unconscious. The French philosopher T. Ribot, observes that heredity is to the race what memory is to the individual—that is, heredity is the memory of the species. Every man carries in his mind the ideas of his ancestors, usually unconsciously and