The view of the pettiness and insignificance of man.
On the other hand, there are those who take a different view of human nature, and who find in its contemplation a source of humility rather than of pride. They remind us how weak, how ignorant, how short-lived is the individual, how infirm of purpose, how purblind of vision, how subject to pain and suffering, to diseases that torture the body and wreck the mind. They say that if the few short years of his life are not wasted in idleness and vice, they are spent for the most part in a perpetually recurring round of trivialities, in the satisfaction of merely animal wants, in eating, drinking, and slumber. When they survey the history of mankind as a whole, they find the record chequered and stained by folly and crime, by broken faith, insensate ambition, wanton aggression, injustice, cruelty, and lust, and seldom illumined by the mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. And when they turn their eyes from man himself to the place he occupies in the universe, how are they overwhelmed by a sense of his littleness and insignificance! They see the earth which he inhabits dwindle to a speck in the unimaginable infinities of space, and the brief span of his existence shrink into a moment in the inconceivable infinities of time. And they ask, Shall a creature so puny and frail claim to live for ever, to outlast not only the present starry system but every other that, when earth and sun and stars have crumbled into dust, shall be built upon their ruins in the long long hereafter? It is not so, it cannot be. The claim is nothing but the outcome of exaggerated self-esteem, of inflated vanity; it is the claim of a moth, shrivelled in the flame of a candle, to outlive the sun, the claim of a worm to survive the destruction of this terrestrial globe in which it burrows. Those who take this view of the pettiness and transitoriness of man compared with the vastness and permanence of the universe find little in the beliefs of savages to alter their opinion. They see in savage conceptions of the soul and its destiny nothing but a product of childish ignorance, the hallucinations of hysteria, the ravings of insanity, or the concoctions of deliberate fraud and imposture. They dismiss the whole of them as a pack of superstitions and lies, unworthy the serious attention of a rational mind; and they say that if such drivellings do not refute the belief in immortality, as indeed from the nature of things they cannot do, they are at least fitted to invest its high-flown pretensions with an air of ludicrous absurdity.
The conclusion left open.
Such are the two opposite views which I conceive may be taken of the savage testimony to the survival of our conscious personality after death. I do not presume to adopt the one or the other. It is enough for me to have laid a few of the facts before you. I leave you to draw your own conclusion.
Footnote 701:[ (return) ]
Berthold Seeman, Viti, an Account of a Government Mission to the Vitian or Fijian Islands (Cambridge, 1862), pp. 391 sq.
Footnote 702:[ (return) ]
Th. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, i. 216.
Footnote 703:[ (return) ]
Th. Williams, op. cit. i. 216, 218 sq.; Basil Thomson, The Fijians, p. 112.
Footnote 704:[ (return) ]
Hazlewood, quoted by Capt. J. E. Erskine, Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific (London, 1853), pp. 246 sq.
Footnote 705:[ (return) ]
Ch. Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 83 sq.; Th. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, i. 217 sqq.
Footnote 706:[ (return) ]
Ch. Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 49, 86, 351, 352; Th. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, i. 221-223; B. Seeman, Viti, pp. 392-394.