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!
VI
Religions Third Postulate: the Ethical Significance of the Unseen World
Our account of the rise and progress of the general belief in an Unseen World is, however, not yet complete. No mention has been made of an element which apparently has always been present in the belief. I mean the ethical element. The savage's primeval ghost-world is always mixed up with his childlike notions of what he ought to do and what he ought not to do. The native of Tierra del Fuego, who foreboded a snowstorm because one of Mr. Darwin's party killed some birds for specimens, furnishes an excellent illustration. In a tribe living always on the brink of starvation, any wanton sacrifice of meat must awaken the wrath of the tutelar ancestral ghost-deities who control the weather. Notions of a similar sort are connected with the direful host of omens that dog the savage's footsteps through the world. Whatever conduct the necessities of clan or tribe have prohibited soon comes to wear the aspect of sacrilege.
Thus inextricably intertwined from the moment of their first dim dawning upon the consciousness of nascent Humanity, have been the notion of Deity, the notion of an Unseen World, and the notions of Right and Wrong. In their beginnings theology and ethics were inseparable; in all the vast historic development of religion they have remained inseparable. The grotesque conceptions of primitive men have given place to conceptions framed after wider and deeper experience, but the union of ethics with theology remains undisturbed even in that most refined religious philosophy which ventures no opinion concerning the happiness or misery of a future life, except that the seed sown here will naturally determine the fruit to be gathered hereafter. All the analogies that modern knowledge can bring to bear upon the theory of a future life point to the opinion that the breach of physical continuity is not accompanied by any breach of ethical continuity. Such an opinion relating to matters beyond experience cannot of course be called scientific, but whether it be justifiable or not, my point is that neither in the crude fancies of primitive men nor in the most refined modern philosophy can theology divorce itself from ethics. Take away the ethical significance from our conceptions of the Unseen World and the quasi-human God, and no element of significance remains. All that was vital in theism is gone.