Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/646

628 Spencer, in his "Principles of Sociology," recently published, has carefully traced out this working of the primitive mind, and explained how the early men, by their crude misconceptions of natural things, were gradually led to the belief in a ghost-realm of being appended to the existing order. The idea of a life after death, so universally entertained among races of the lowest grades of intelligence, is accounted for, and is only to be accounted for, in this way. Through experiences of sleep, dreams, and loss and return of consciousness at irregular times as in swoon, catalepsy, trance, and various forms of insensibility, there grew up the idea of a double nature—of a part that goes away leaving the body lifeless, and returns again to revivify it; and thus originated the theory of immaterial ghosts and spirits. At death the ghost departed, but not to return and reanimate the body in the usual way; it went to inhabit another place. Thus arose the conception of a separate and future life, which, at first, could not have been supposed to differ much from that of the present order of things. No doubt what is said of the Fijians, that after death "they plant, live in families, fight, and, in short, do much as people in this world," represents the common beginnings of belief upon this subject. Yet the. hope of better things could not fail to come soon into play, as indicated by the belief of the Creeks, that after death they go where "game is plenty, and goods very cheap; where corn grows all the year round, and the springs of pure water are never dried up." Von Tschudi tells us that in Peru "a small bag with cocoa, maize, quinua, etc., is laid beside the dead that they might have wherewithal to sow the fields in the other world." The condition of the future life, where the ghosts go to dwell, is believed to be so similar to that which they have left that it is almost universal among savages to bury food, weapons, implements, ornaments, clothing, and whatever they may be likely to want, with the bodies of their dead friends. Even dogs and cattle are slain, and women and servants immolated, that they may accompany and minister to the departed.

But this bald conception of a future life, as a kind of literal continuance of present materialities, could not last. As knowledge accumulated the conception grew incongruous, and underwent important modifications, so that similarity gradually passed into contrast. The intimacy of the intercourse supposed to be carried on between the two worlds decreased; the future world was conceived of as more remote, and as having other occupations and gratifications more consonant with developing ideas of the present life. Rude conceptions regarding good and evil could not fail to be early involved with considerations of man's futurity. Good and evil are inextricably mixed up in this world, which seems always to have been regarded as a faulty arrangement, and, as there was little hope of rectifying it here, the future life came to be regarded as compensatory to the present. But the problem was solved, not by the absorption and disappearance of evil, but by supposing good and bad to be mechanically separated; and, as good and bad means good people and bad people, the belief arose that in the future world they would be divided off, the good being all collected in a good place, and the bad ones all turned into a bad place.

This idea of using the next world to redress the imperfections and wrongs of this grew up early and survives still, and it has exerted a prodigious influence in human affairs. As the grosser superstitions were gradually developed into systematic religions, a priestly class arose, and religious beliefs were embodied in definite creeds. Fundamental among these was the belief in heaven as a place of happiness, and of hell as a place of penal torment for the wicked.