sruption of constituents,
but the savage imagination appears to have passed lightly over this
point: when a soul is eaten, it is destroyed as the human body is
destroyed when it is eaten; if it is drowned or clubbed, it dies as a
man does under similar treatment. The soul is conceived of as an
independent personality, with a corporeal form and mental powers; the
psychic body, it would seem, is endowed with power of thought.[96]

+50+. This vagueness of conception enables us to understand how savage
logic reaches the conclusion that the soul may be mortal: all the
possibilities of the earthly person are transferred to it. In regard to
the occasion of its death, it is sometimes represented as punishment for
violation of tribal customs (as in Fiji), sometimes as the natural fate
of inferior classes of persons (as among the Tongans, who are said to
believe that only chiefs live after death),[97] sometimes as a simple
destruction by human agency.

+51+. In the popular faith of the Semitic, Egyptian, Chinese, and
Indo-European peoples there is no sign of an extinction of the
personality after earthly death. The Babylonian dead all go to the vast
and gloomy Underworld (Aralu), where their food is dust, and whence
there is no return.[98] The Old-Hebrew 'soul' (_nephesh_) continues to
exist in Sheol. True, its life is a colorless one, without achievement,
without hope, and without religious worship; yet it has the marks of
personality.[99] The fortunes of the spirit (_ru[h.]_), when it denotes
not merely a quality of character but an entity, are identical with
those of the 'soul.'[100] In India, belief in life after death has
always been held by the masses, and philosophic systems conceive of
absorption, not of extinction proper. Zoroastrianism had, and has, a
well-developed doctrine of immortality, and the Egyptian conception of
the future was equally elaborate. In China the cult of ancestors does
not admit belief in annihilation.[101] No theory of annihilation is
found in connection with the Greek and Latin 'soul' and 'spirit'
(_psyche, pneuma; animus, anima, spiritus_); the _thymos_ is not a
separate entity, but only an expression of the 'soul';[102] and the
Greek _daimon_ and the Latin _genius_ are too vague to come into
consideration in this connection.[103]

+52+. Omitting the purely philosophical views of the nature and destiny
of the soul (absorption into the Supreme God, or the Universal Force, is
to be distinguished