Chapter V: Religions Second Postulate: the undying Human Soul

That supremely interesting aspect of theism belongs to it as part and parcel of the general belief in an Unseen World, in which human beings have an interest. The belief in the personal continuance of the individual human soul after death is a very ancient one. The savage custom of burying utensils and trinkets for the use of the deceased enables us to trace it back into the Glacial Period. We may safely say that for much more than a hundred thousand years mankind have regarded themselves as personally interested in two worlds, the physical world which daily greets our waking senses, and another world, comparatively dim and vaguely outlined, with which the psychical side of humanity is more closely connected. The belief in the Unseen World seems to be coextensive with theism; the animism of the lowest savages includes both. No race or tribe of men has ever been found destitute of the belief in a ghost-world. Now, a ghost-world implies the personal continuance of human beings after death, and it also implies identity of nature between the ghosts of man and the indwelling spirits of sun, wind, and flood. It is chiefly because these ideas are so closely interwoven in savage thought that it is often so difficult to discriminate between fetishism and animism. These savage ideas are of course extremely crude in their symbolism. With the gradual civilization of human thinking, the refinement in the conception of the Deity is paralleled by the refinement in the conception of the Other World. From Valhalla to Dante's Paradise, what an immeasurable distance the human mind has travelled! In our modern Monotheism the assumption of kinship between God and the Human Soul is the assumption that there is in Man a psychical element identical in nature with that which is eternal. Belief in a quasi-human God and belief in the Soul's immortality thus appear in their origin and development, as in their ultimate significance, to be inseparably connected. They are part and parcel of one and the same efflorescence of the human mind. Mankind has always entertained them in common, and so entertains them now; and were it possible (which it is not) for science to disprove the Soul's immortality, a theism deprived of this element would surely never be accepted as an equivalent for the theism entertained before. The Positivist argument that the only worthy immortality is survival in the grateful remembrance of one's fellow creatures would hardly be regarded as anything but a travesty and trick. If the world's long cherished beliefs are to fall, in God's name let them fall, but save us from the intellectual hypocrisy that goes about pretending we are none the poorer!