s 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.

[Sidenote: 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: Berthold Seeman, _Viti, an Account of a Government
Mission to the Vitian or Fijian Islands_ (Cambridge, 1862), pp. 391
_sq._]

[Footnote 702: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 216.]

[Footnote 703: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 216, 218 _sq._; Basil
Thomson, _The Fijians_, p. 112.]

[Footnote 704: 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: Ch. Wilkes, _Narr