CHAPTER IX.
THE SUBJECTIVE ELEMENT.
When speaking of the fundamental postulates involved in the religious idea, we pointed out that, besides the unknown cause of physical phenomena, "every religion assumes also that there is in human nature something equally hyperphysical with the object which it worships, whether we call this something soul, or mind, or spirit." Let us call it soul. And first let us examine what it is that religion says of the soul, after which we may be in a position to consider what degree of truth, if any, is involved in its assertions.
Now the great fact which presents itself to our notice in this inquiry is the broad line of demarcation which religion has everywhere drawn between the mental and corporeal functions of man, or in other words, between his soul and his body. Generally, it expresses this grand distinction by the assertion that the soul continues to live after the body is dissolved. This doctrine is very ancient and very wide-spread. A few illustrations of its prevalence are all that can be given here.[100]
The rude people of Kamtschatka, who had so little notion of a providence, believed in a subterranean life after death. The soul they thought was immortal, and the body would at some time rejoin it, when the two would live on together, much as they do here but under happier conditions. Their place of abode was to be under the earth, where there was another earth resembling ours. Some of them objected to being baptized, because they would then be compelled to meet their enemies the Russians, instead of living among their own people under ground. Animals too were all of them to live again (Kamtschatka, p. 269-273). The Tartars, when visited by Carpin, had some notion that after death they would enjoy another life where they would perform the same actions as in this (Bergeron, vol. i. art. 3, p. 32). "The most intelligent Greenlanders," writes a traveler among that people, "assert that the soul is a spiritual being quite different from the body and from all matter, that requires no material nourishment, and while the body is decaying in the ground, lives after death and needs a nourishment that is not corporeal, but which they do not know" (H. G., p. 242). The American Indians firmly believed in the immortality of the soul. They thought it would keep the same tendencies after death as the living man had evinced; hence their custom—one that is widely spread—of burying the property of the dead along with the body. The souls were obliged after death to take a long journey, at the end of which they arrived at their appropriate places of suffering and enjoyment. The Paradise of virtuous Indians consisted in the very definite pleasures of good hunting and fishing, eternal spring, abundance of everything with no work, and all the satisfactions of the senses (N. F., tome 3, p. 351-353). The Kafirs, as we have already seen, worship their ancestors, whose "Amadhlozi," or spirits, they believe to continue in existence after death. What they mean by Amadhlozi they explain with tolerable clearness by saying that they are identical with the shadow. These spirits are the true objects of a Kafir's worship, being supposed to possess great power over the affairs of their descendants and relatives for weal or woe. They are believed to reappear in the form of a certain species of harmless snakes, and should a man observe such a snake on the grave of his deceased relation, he will say, "Oh, I have seen him to-day basking on the top of the grave" (R. S. A., pt. 2, p. 142.—K. N., pp. 161,162). Similar reverence for the dead is shown in other parts of Africa. In his lecture on the Ashantees, Mr. Reade says that, "on the death of a member of the household he is sometimes buried under the floor of the hut, in the belief that his spirit may occasionally join in the circle of the living. Food also is placed upon the grave, for they think that as the body of man contains an indwelling spirit, so there exists in the corruptible food an immaterial essence on which the ghost of the departed will feed."
To come to races standing higher in the scale of civilization: the Peruvians had definite notions of a future state, with an upper world in which the good lived a quiet life, free from trouble, and a lower world in which the bad were punished by suffering all the miseries and troubles of this terrestrial condition without intermission (C. R., b. 2, ch. vii). In China the utmost respect is paid to deceased progenitors, who are the objects of a regular cultus. India has had from early ages its highly-developed and subtle notions of the distinction of spirit from body, and the former is held to prolong its existence after its separation from the latter, both as disembodied in heavens or hells, and embodied in animals or other men. Some schools believed in the immortality of the soul; others asserted that its final destination was extinction. Buddhism ranged itself with the latter opinion, while still maintaining the doctrine of metempsychosis, and of rewards and punishments both in this world and in numerous others to which spirits went in the course of their wanderings. Parsee souls hover about the grave a few days; then proceed upon a long journey. At its conclusion they pass over a narrow bridge, which the good traverse in safety to enter Paradise, while the bad fall over it and go into hell. In the Mussulman faith there are likewise but two destinies open to man—eternal happiness and eternal suffering. Among the Jews in the time of Christ two doctrines prevailed. Their ancient religion, while aware of the distinction between the spirit and the body, left the continued life of the former an open question. Hence the Pharisees asserted, while the Sadducees denied, a future state. Christ was in this respect a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He, however, like Mahomet, provided only two abodes for the souls of men; one in heaven with his Father, the other in hell, where the fire was never quenched. It was felt, however, by the general Christian world that this sharp separation of all mankind into black and white, goats and sheep, was quite untenable. Hence the Catholic institution of Purgatory, which, whatever may be said against it, is a wise and liberal modification of the harsh doctrine of Christ, affording a resource for the vast intermediate mass who are neither wholly virtuous nor wholly wicked, and providing an agreeable exercise for that natural piety which prompts us to mingle the names of departed friends in our devotions, whether (as in Africa) to pray to them, or (as in Europe) to pray for them.
From this brief review of the opinions of various races, it will be evident that some conception of a spirit in man as distinguished from his body prevails and always has prevailed throughout the world. The special characteristic of this spiritual essence has always been held to be its immateriality. All religions conceive it as distinct from the body, most of them evincing this view by treating it as capable of independent existence. Many of them no doubt invest the spirit after death with a material form, but this is the clothing of the idea, not the idea itself. The form is received after the spirit has left its terrestrial body, and does not originally belong to it; as in the case of the serpents in South Africa, in which ancestral souls are thought to dwell. This immaterial nature is clearly expressed—so far as such an abstract idea can find clear expression from a rude people—by those Kafirs who compare the soul to a shadow. Nothing in the external world seems to have so purely subjective a character as shadows; things which cannot be felt or handled, and which appear to have no independent substance.
Immateriality then is universally asserted (or attempted to be asserted) of the soul. This is of the very essence of the idea. No race believes that any portion of the body, or the body as a whole, is the same thing as mind or spirit. But immortality is not equally involved in the idea or inseparable from it. Notably the Buddhistic creed—held by a considerable fraction of mankind—teaches its votaries to look forward to utter extinction as the summum bonum. True, the masses of average believers may not dwell upon the hope of Nirvâna, but upon that of heaven.[101] But the authorized dogma of the Church is, that "not enjoyment and not sorrow is our destined end" or goal, but the absolute rest, if so it may be called, of ceasing to exist. And that this dogma was fervently accepted and thoroughly believed in as a genuine "gospel," the early literature of Buddhism amply proves. The Jews, a most religious people, had no settled hope of immortality provided by their creed, though the account of the creation of Adam shows how clearly they distinguished mind from matter. Warburton indeed infers the authenticity of the Hebrew Revelation from the very fact of the absence of the doctrine of immortality; for no author of a popular religion, except God himself, could have afforded to dispense with so important an article. The more defective Judaism was, the more clearly it was divine. Nor were the classical nations of Greece and Rome at all more certain. With them also opinions differed—some, like Plato and his followers, asserting the immortality of the soul; others, like Epicurus and his school, denying it. Cicero discusses it as an open question, though himself holding to the belief in future existence. His two possible alternatives are continued life in a condition of happiness, or utter cessation of life; either of which he accepts with equal calmness. The fear of hell did not torment him: "post mortem quidem sensus aut optandus aut nullus est" (Cato Major, xx. 74). Even if we are not to be immortal, as he hopes, nevertheless it is a happy thing for man to be extinguished at the fitting season (Ibid., xxiii. 86). Less philosophical people, however, were troubled, like Christians, with the notion of a future world of punishment; and Lucretius addresses himself with all the ardor of a man proclaiming a beneficent gospel to the dissipation of this popular delusion:—
"Nil igitur mors est, ad nos neque pertinet hilum,
Quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur."[102]
Like other thinkers of his time, he distinguishes between the animus and anima—spirit and soul, and this threefold division of the nature of man subsisted for a time in the language and ideas of Christians. But the essential point is that, whatever further subdivisions may have been made, all schools, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, agreed in the fundamental distinction between the spiritual principle and the material instruments; between mind and matter, or soul and body.