ayers which are the due of Him alone. But though the dead are thus
reduced to a mere memory, the memory itself does not and cannot die.
Accordingly the dead, or rather those whose bodies are dead, continue
to live. But, as they exercise no action in, or control over, the
world of the living, their place of abode comes to be regarded as
another world, to which they are confined. Speculation, therefore,
where speculation is made, as to the case of the inhabitants of this
other world, must take the direction of enquiring as to their fate.
Where speculation is not made, the dead are conceived merely to
continue to be as they are remembered to have been in this life. But,
if there is to be room for any speculation {56} at all, there must be
assumed to be some diversity in their fate, and therefore some reason,
intelligible to man, for that diversity. That is a conclusion to which
tribes attain who have apparently gone through no period of ancestor
worship,--indeed, ancestor worship only impedes or defers the
attainment of that conclusion. The diversity of fate could only
consist in the difference between being where you would be and being
where you would not. But the reasons for that diversity may be very
different amongst different peoples. First, where religion is at its
lowest or is in its least developed form, the gods are not the cause of
the diversity nor do they seem concerned in it. Such diversity as
there is seems in its simplest form merely to be a continuance of the
social distinctions which prevail among the living: the high chieftains
rest in a calm, plenteous, sunny land in the sky; while "all Indians of
low degree go deep down under the earth to the land of Chay-her, with
its poor houses and no salmon and no deer, and blankets so small and
thin, that when the dead are buried the friends often bury blankets
with them" (Tylor, _P. C._, II, 85). Elsewhere, it is not social
distinctions, but moral, that make the difference: "the rude Tupinambas
of Brazil think {57} the souls of such as had lived virtuously, that is
to say who have well avenged themselves and eaten many of their
enemies," (_ib._) rejoin the souls of their fathers in the happy land,
while the cowards go to the other place. Thus, though the distinctions
in the next world do not seem originally to have sprung from or to have
been connected with morality, and still less with religion, they are,
or may be at a very early period, seized upon by