Part 2 (1/2)
IMMORTALITY
The missionary, like any other practical man, requires to know what science can teach him about the material on which he has to work. So far as is possible, he should know what materials are sound and can be used with safety in his constructive work, and what must be thrown aside, what must be destroyed, if his work is to escape dry-rot and to stand as a permanent edifice. He should be able to feel confidence, for instance, not merely that magic and fetichism are the negation of religion, but that in teaching that fact he has to support him the evidence collected by the science of religion; and he should have that evidence placed at his disposal for effective use, if need be.
It may be also that amongst much unsound material he will find some that is sound, that may be used, and that he cannot afford to cast away. He has to work upon our common humanity, upon the humanity common to him and his hearers. He has to remember that no man and no community of {35} men ever is or has been or ever can be excluded from the search after G.o.d. And his duty, his chosen duty, is to help them in that search, and as far as may be to make the way clear for them, and to guide their feet in the right path. He will find that they have attempted to make paths for themselves; and it is not impossible that he will find that some of those paths for some distance do go in the right direction; that some of their beliefs have in them an element of truth, or a groping after truth which, rightly understood, may be made to lead to Christianity. It is with one of those beliefs--the belief in immortality--that I shall deal in this lecture.
It is a fact worthy of notice that the belief in immortality fills, I will not say a more important, but a more prominent, place in the hearts and hopes of uncivilised than of civilised man; and it is also a fact worthy of notice that among primitive men the belief in immortality is much less intimately bound up with religion than it comes to be at a later period of evolution. The two facts are probably not wholly without relation to one another. So long as the belief in immortality luxuriates and grows wild, so to speak, untrained and unrestrained by religion, it {36} developes as the fancy wills, and lives by flattering the fancy. When, however, the relations of a future life to morality and religion come to be realised, when the conception of the next world comes to be moralised, then it becomes the subject of fear as well as of hope; and the fancy loses much of the freedom with which it tricked out the pictures that once it drew, purely according to its own sweet liking, of a future state. On the one hand, the guilty mind prefers not to dwell upon the day of reckoning, so long as it can stave off the idea; and it may succeed more or less in putting it on one side until the proximity of death makes the idea insistent. Thus the mind more or less deliberately dismisses the future life from attention. On the other hand, religion itself insists persistently on the fact that you have your duty here and now in this world to perform, and that the rest, the future consequences, you must leave to G.o.d. Thus, once more, and this time not from unworthy motives, attention is directed to this life rather than to the next; and it is this point that is critical for the fate both of the belief in immortality and of religion itself. At this point, religion may, as in the case of Buddhism it actually has done, formally give up and disavow {37} belief in immortality. And in that case it sows the seed of its own destruction. Or it may recognise that the immortality of the soul is postulated by and essential to morality and religion alike. And in that case, even in that case alone, is religion in a position to provide a logical basis for morality and to place the natural desire for a future life on a firmer basis than the untutored fancy of primitive man could find for it.
It is then with primitive man or with the lower races that we will begin, and with ”the comparative universality of their belief in the continued existence of the soul after the death of the body” (Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, II, i). Now, the cla.s.sical theory of this belief is that set forth by Professor Tylor in his _Primitive Culture_.
Whence does primitive man get his idea that the soul continues to exist after the death of the body? the answer given is, in the first place, from the fact that man dreams. He dreams of distant scenes that he visits in his sleep; it is clear, from the evidence of those who saw his sleeping body, that his body certainly did not travel; therefore he or his soul must be separable from the body and must have travelled whilst his body lay unmoving and unmoved. But he also dreams of {38} those who are now dead, and whose bodies he knows, it may be, to have been incinerated. The explanation then is obvious that they, too, or their souls, are separable from their bodies; and the fact that they survive death and the destruction of the body is demonstrated by their appearance in his dreams. About the reality of their appearance in his dreams he has no more doubt than he has about the reality of what he himself does and suffers in his dreams. If, however, the dead appeared only in his dreams, their existence after death might seem to be limited to the dream-time. But as a matter of fact they appear to him in his waking moments also: ghosts are at least as familiar to the savage as to the civilised man; and thus the evidence of his dreams, which first suggested his belief, is confirmed by the evidence of his senses.
Thus the belief in the continued existence of the soul after the death of the body is traced back to the action of dreams and waking hallucinations. Now, it is inevitable that the inference should be drawn that the belief in immortality has thus been tracked to its basis. And it is inevitable that those who start with an inclination to regard the belief as palpably absurd should welcome this exhibition of {39} its evolution as proof conclusive that the belief could only have originated in and can only impose upon immature minds. To that doubtless it is a perfectly sound reply to say that the origin of a belief is one thing and its validity quite another. The way in which we came to hold the belief is a matter of historical investigation, and undoubtedly may form a very fascinating enquiry. But the question whether the belief is true is a question which has to be considered, no matter how I got it, just as the question whether I am committing a trespa.s.s or not in being on a piece of ground cannot be settled by any amount of explaining how I got there. Or, to put it in another way, the very risky path by which I have scrambled up a cliff does not make the top any the less safe when I have got there.
But though it is perfectly logical to insist on the distinction between the origin and the validity of any belief, and to refuse to question or doubt the validity of the belief in immortality merely because of the origin ascribed to it by authorities on primitive culture,--that is no reason why we should not examine the origin suggested for it, to see whether it is a satisfactory origin. And that is what I propose now to do. I wish to suggest first that belief in the appearance of {40} the dead, whether to the dreamer or the ghost-seer, is an intellectual belief as to what occurs as a matter of fact; and next that thereby it is distinguished from the desire for immortality which manifests itself with comparative universality amongst the lower races.
Now, that the appearance of the dead, whether to the waking or the sleeping eye, is sufficient to start the intellectual belief will be admitted alike by those who do and those who do not hold that it is sufficient logically to warrant the belief. But to say that it starts the desire to see him or her whom we have lost, would be ridiculous.
On the contrary, it would be much nearer the truth to say that it is the longing and the desire to see, once again, the loved one, that sets the mind a-dreaming, and first gives to the heart hope. The fact that, were there no desire for the continuance of life after the death of the body, the belief would never have caught on--that it either would never have arisen or would have soon ceased to exist--is shown by the simple consideration that only where the desire for the continuance of life after death dies down does the belief in immortality tend to wane. If any further evidence of that is required it may be found in the teaching of those {41} forms of philosophy and religion which endeavour to dispense with the belief in immortality, for they all recognise and indeed proclaim that they are based on the denial of the desire and the will to live. If, and only if--as, and only as--the desire to live, here and hereafter, can be suppressed, can the belief in immortality be eradicated. The basis of the belief is the desire for continued existence; and that is why the attempt to trace the origin of the belief in immortality back to the belief in dreams and apparitions is one which is not perfectly satisfactory; it leaves out of account the desire without which the belief would not be and is not operative.
But though it leaves out an element which is at least as important as any element it includes, it would be an error to take no account of what it does contribute. It would be an error of this kind if we closed our eyes to the fact that what first arrests the attention of man, in the lower stages of his evolution, is the survival of others than himself. That is the belief which first manifests itself in his heart and mind; and what first reveals it to him is the appearance of the dead to his sleeping or his waking eye. He does not first hope or believe that he himself will survive the death of the body and then go {42} on to infer that therefore others also will similarly survive. On the contrary, it is the appearance of others in his sleeping or waking moments that first gives him the idea; and it is only later and on reflection that it occurs to him that he also will have, or be, a ghost.
But though we must recognise the intellectual element in the belief and the intellectual processes which are involved in the belief, we must also take into account the emotional element, the element of desire.
And first we should notice that the desire is not a selfish or self-regarding desire; it is the longing for one loved and lost, of the mother for her child, or of the child for its mother. It is desire of that kind which gives to dreams and apparitions their emotional value, without which they would have little significance and no spiritual importance. That is the direction in which we must look for the reason why, on the one hand, belief in the continuation of existence after death seems at first to have no connection with religion, while, on the other hand, the connection is ultimately shown by the evolution of belief to be so intimate that neither can attain its proper development without the other.
Dreams are occasions on which the longing for {43} one loved and lost manifests itself, but they are not the cause or the origin of the affection and the longing. But dreams are not exclusively, specially, or even usually the domain in which religion plays a part. Hence the visions of the night, in which the memory of the departed and the craving for reunion with them are manifested, bear no necessary reference to religion; and it is therefore possible, and _prima facie_ plausible, to maintain that the belief in the immortality of the soul has its origin in a centre quite distinct from the sphere of religion, and that it is only very slowly, if at all, that the belief in immortality comes to be incorporated with religion. On the other hand, the very craving for reunion or continued communion with those who are felt not to be lost but gone before, is itself the feeling which is, not the base, but at the base, of religion. In the lowest forms to which religion can be reduced, or in which it manifests itself, religion is a bond of community; it manifests itself externally in joint acts of wors.h.i.+p, internally in the feeling that the wors.h.i.+ppers are bound together by it and united with the object of their wors.h.i.+p.
This feeling of communion is not a mere article of intellectual belief, nor is it imposed upon the members; it is what they themselves desire.
{44} Hoffding states the truth when he says that in its most rudimentary form we encounter ”religion under the guise of desire”; but in saying so he omits the essence of the truth, that essence without which the truth that he partially enunciates may become wholly misleading,--he omits to say, and I think he fails to see, that the desire which alone can claim to be considered as religious is the desire of the community, not of the individual as such, and the desire of the community as united in common wors.h.i.+p. The idea of religion as a bond of spiritual communion is implicit from the first, even though a long process of evolution be necessary to disentangle it and set it forth self-consciously. Now, it is precisely this spiritual communion of which man becomes conscious in his craving after reunion or continued communion with those who have departed this life. And it is with the history of his attempts to harmonise this desire with what he knows and demands of the universe otherwise, that we are here and now concerned.
So strong is that desire, so inconceivable is the idea that death ends all, and divorces from us forever those we have loved and lost awhile, that the lower races of mankind have been pretty generally driven {45} to the conclusion that death is a mistake or due to a mistake. It is widely held that there is no such thing as a natural death. Men do of course die, they may be killed; but it is not an ordinance of nature that a man must be killed; and, if he is killed, his death is not natural. So strong is this feeling that when a man dies and his death is not obviously a case of murder, the inference which the savage prefers to draw is that the death is really a case of murder, but that the murder has been worked by witchcraft or magic. Amongst the Australian black fellows, as we are told by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, ”no such thing as natural death is realised by the native; a man who dies has of necessity been killed by some other man or perhaps even by a woman, and sooner or later that man or woman will be attacked;”
consequently, ”in very many cases there takes place what the white man, not seeing beneath the surface, not unnaturally describes as secret murder; but in reality ... every case of such secret murder, when one or more men stealthily stalk their prey with the object of killing him, is in reality the exacting of a life for a life, the accused person being indicated by the so-called medicine man as one who has brought about the death of another man by magic, and whose {46} life must therefore be forfeited” (_Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 48).
What underlies this idea that by man alone is death brought into the world is that death is unnatural and is no part of the original design of things. When the fact comes to be recognised undeniably that deaths not caused by human agency do take place, then the fact requires explanation; and the explanation on which primitive races, quite independently of each other, hit is that as death was no part of the original design of things, its introduction was due to accident or mistake. Either men were originally exempt from death, or they were intended to be exempt. If they were intended to be exempt, then the inference drawn is that the intention was frustrated by the carelessness of the agent intrusted with the duty of making men deathless. If they were originally exempt from death, then the loss of the exemption has to be accounted for. And in either case the explanation takes the form of a narrative which relates how the mistake took place or what event it was that caused the loss of the exemption.
I need not quote examples of either cla.s.s of narrative. What I wish to do is to emphasise the fact that by primitive man death is felt to be inconsistent with the {47} scheme of things. First, therefore, he denies that it can come in the course of nature, though he admits that it may be procured by the wicked man in the way of murder or magic.
And it is at this stage that his hope of reunion with those loved and lost scarcely stretches beyond the prospect of their return to this world. Evidence of this stage is found partly in tales such as those told of the mother who returns to revisit her child, or of persons restored to life. Stories of this latter kind come from Tasmania, Australia, and Samoa, amongst other places, and are found amongst the Eskimo and American Indians, as well as amongst the Fjorts (J. A.
MacCullough, _The Childhood of Fiction_, ch. IV). Even more direct evidence of the emotion which prompts these stories is afforded by the Ho dirge, quoted by Professor Tylor (_P. C._, II, 32, 33):--
”We never scolded you; never wronged you; Come to us back!
We ever loved and cherished you; and have lived long together Under the same roof; Desert it not now!
The rainy nights and the cold blowing days are coming on; Do not wander here!
Do not stand by the burnt ashes; come to us again!
You cannot find shelter under the peepul, when the rain comes down.
{48}
The saul will not s.h.i.+eld you from the cold bitter wind.
Come to your home!
It is swept for you and clean; and we are there who loved you ever; And there is rice put for you and water; Come home, come home, come to us again!”
In these verses it is evident that the death of the body is recognised as a fact. It is even more manifest that the death of the body is put aside as weighing for naught against the absolute conviction that the loved one still exists. But reunion is sought in this world; another world is not yet thought of. The next world has not yet been called into existence to redress the sorrows and the sufferings of this life.