49 Lamartine, History of Turkey, book i. ch. 10.
50 Kidd, China, sect. 3.
51 Crantz, History of Greenland, book iii. ch. 6, sect. 47.
disappearance of the forms in whose relationship they consist were but the ghosts of departed quantities! It may be added here that, according to the teachings of physiological psychology, all memories or recollected ideas are literally the ghosts of departed sensations.
We have thus seen that the conjuring force of fear, with its dread apparitions, the surmising, half articulate struggles of affection, the dreams of memory, the lights and groups of poetry, the crude germs of metaphysical speculation, the deposits of the inter action of human experience and phenomenal nature, now in isolated fragments, again, huddled indiscriminately together conspire to compose the barbarian notions of a future life.
CHAPTER II.
DRUIDIC DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
THAT strange body of men, commonly known as the Druids, who constituted what may, with some correctness, be called the Celtic priesthood, were the recognised religious teachers throughout Gaul, Armorica, a small part of Germany on the southern border, all Great Britain, and some neighboring islands. The notions in regard to a future life put forth by them are stated only in a very imperfect manner by the Greek and Roman authors in whose surviving works we find allusions to the Druids or accounts of the Celts. Several modern writers especially Borlase, in his Antiquities of Cornwall1 have collected all these references from Diodorus, Strabo, Procopius, Tacitus, Casar, Mela, Valerius Maximus, and Marcellinus. It is therefore needless to cite the passages here, the more so as, even with the aid of all the analytic and constructive comments which can be fairly made upon them, they afford us only a few general views, leaving all the details in profound obscurity. The substance of what we learn from these sources is this. First, that the Druids possessed a body of science and speculation comprising the doctrine of immortality, which they taught with clearness and authority. Secondly, that they inculcated the belief in a future life in inseparable connection with the great dogma of metempsychosis. Thirdly, that the people held such cheerful and attractive views of the future state, and held them with such earnestness, that they wept around the newborn infant and smiled around the corpse; that they encountered death without fear or reluctance. This reversal of natural sentiments shows the tampering of a priesthood who had motives.
A somewhat more minute conception of the Druidic view of the future life is furnished us by an old mythologic tale of Celtic origin.2 Omitting the story, as irrelevant to our purpose, we derive from it the following ideas. The soul, on being divested of its earthly envelop, is borne aloft. The clouds are composed of the souls of lately deceased men. They fly over the heads of armies, inspiring courage or striking terror. Not yet freed from terrestrial affections, they mingle in the passions and affairs of men. Vainly they strive to soar above the atmosphere; an impassable wall of sapphire resists their wings. In the moon, millions of souls traverse tremendous plains of ice, losing all perception but that of simple existence, forgetting the adventures they have passed through and are about to recommence. During eclipses, on long tubes of darkness they return to the earth, and, revived by a beam of light from the all quickening sun, enter newly formed bodies, and begin again the career of life. The disk of the sun consists of an assemblage of pure souls swimming in an ocean of bliss. Souls sullied with earthly impurities are to be purged by repeated births and probations till the last stain is removed, and they are all finally fitted to ascend to a succession of spheres still higher than the sun, whence they can never sink again to reside in the circle of the lower globes and grosser atmosphere.
1 Book ii. ch. 14.