igion 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 God. 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 classical 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 b