In Egypt a moral life did not suffice to secure immortal reward. There was also required knowledge of the spells that baffle the demons who, in Amenti, as in the Red Indian and Polynesian Hades, lie in wait for souls. That knowledge was contained in copies of the Book of the Dead—the gagne-pain of priests and scribes.
Early Israel, having, as far as we know, a singular lack of interest in the future of the soul, was born to give himself up to developing, undisturbed, the theistic conception, the belief in a righteous Eternal.
Polytheism everywhere—in Greece especially—held of the animistic conception, with its freakish, corruptible deities. Greek philosophy could hardly restore that Eternal for whom the Prophets battled in Israel; whom some of the lowest savages know and fear; whom the animistic theory or cult everywhere obscures with its crowd of hungry, cruel, interested, food-propitiated ghost-gods. In the religion of our Lord and the Apostles the two currents of faith in one righteous God and care for the individual soul were purified and combined. 'God is a Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.' Man also is a spirit, and, as such, is in the hands of a God not to be propitiated by man's sacrifice or monk's ritual. We know how this doctrine was again disturbed by the Animism, in effect, and by the sacrifice and ritual of the Mediaeval Church. Too eager 'to be all things to all men,' the august and beneficent Mother of Christendom readmitted the earlier Animism in new forms of saint-worship, pilgrimage, and popular ceremonial—things apart from, but commonly supposed to be substitutes for, righteousness of life and the selflessness enjoined in savage mysteries. For the softness, no less than for the hardness of men's hearts, these things were ordained: such as masses for the beloved dead.
Modern thought has deanthropomorphised what was left of anthropomorphic in religion, and, in the end, has left us for God, at most, 'a stream of tendency making for righteousness,' or an energy unknown and unknowable—the ghost of a ghost. For the soul, by virtue of his belief in which man raised himself in his own esteem, and, more or less, in ethical standing, is left to us a negation or a wistful doubt.
To this part of modern scientific teaching the earlier position of this essay suggests a demurrer. By aid of the tradition of and belief in supernormal phenomena among the low races, by attested phenomena of the same kinds of experience among the higher races, I have ventured to try to suggest that 'we are not merely brain;' that man has his part, we know not how, in we know not what—has faculties and vision scarcely conditioned by the limits of his normal purview. The evidence of all this deals with matters often trivial, like the electric sparks rubbed from the deer's hide, which yet are cognate with an illimitable, essential potency of the universe. Not being able to explain away these facts, or, in this place, to offer what would necessarily be a premature theory of them, I regard them, though they seem shadowy, as grounds of hope, or, at least, as tokens that men need not yet despair. Not now for the first time have weak things of the earth been chosen to confound things strong. Nor have men of this opinion been always the weakest; not among the feeblest are Socrates, Pascal, Napoleon, Cromwell, Charles Gordon, St. Theresa, and Jeanne d'Arc.
I am perfectly aware that the 'superstitiousness' of the earlier part of this essay must injure any effect which the argument of the latter part might possibly produce on critical opinion. Yet that argument in no way depends on what we think about the phenomena—normal, supernormal, or illusory—on which the theory of ghost, soul, or spirit may have been based. It exhibits religion as probably beginning in a kind of Theism, which is then superseded, in some degree, or even corrupted, by Animism in all its varieties. Finally, the exclusive Theism of Israel receives its complement in a purified Animism, and emerges as Christianity.
Quite apart, too, from any favourable conclusion which may, by some, be drawn from the phenomena, and quite apart from the more general opinion that all modern instances are compact of imposture, malobservation, mythopoeic memory, and superstitious bias, the systematic comparison of civilised and savage beliefs and alleged experiences of this kind cannot wisely be neglected by Anthropology. Humani nihil a se alienum putat.
[Footnote 1: Prim. Cult. ii. 352.]
[Footnote 2: Abridged from Prim. Cult. ii. 119.]
[Footnote 3: Histoire des Religions, ii. 237, note. M. Réville's system, it will be observed, differs from mine in that he finds the first essays of religion in worship of aspects of nature (naturisme) and in 'animism properly so called,' by which he understands the instinctive, perhaps not explicitly formulated, sense that all things whatever are animated and personal. I have not remarked this aspect of belief as much prevalent in the most backward races, and I do not try to look behind what we know historically about early religion. I so far agree with M. Réville as to think the belief in ghosts and spirits (Mr. Tylor's 'Animism') not necessarily postulated in the original indeterminate conception of the Supreme Being, or generally, in 'Original Gods.' But M. Réville says, 'L'objet de la religion humaine est nécessairement un esprit' (Prolégoménes, 107). This does not seem consistent with his own theory.]