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 externa