as been
seeking[249] for an elixir of life, to give added "vitality" to the dead
(whose existence was not consciously regarded as ended), to prolong the
days of active life to the living, to restore youth, and to protect his
own life from all assaults, not merely of time, but also of
circumstance. In other words, the elixir he sought was something that
would bring "good luck" in all the events of his life and its
continuation. Most of the amulets, even of modern times, the lucky
trinkets, the averters of the "Evil Eye," the practices and devices for
securing good luck in love and sport, in curing bodily ills or mental
distress, in attaining material prosperity, or a continuation of
existence after death, are survivals of this ancient and persistent
striving after those objects which our earliest forefathers called
collectively the "givers of life".

From statements in the earliest literature[250] that has come down to us
from antiquity, no less than from the views that still prevail among
the relatively more primitive peoples of the present day, it is clear
that originally man did not consciously formulate a belief in
immortality.

It was rather the result of a defect of thinking, or as the modern
psychologist would express it, an instinctive repression of the
unpleasant idea that death would come to him personally, that primitive
man refused to contemplate or to entertain the possibility of life
coming to an end. So intense was his instinctive love of life and dread
of such physical damage as would destroy his body that man unconsciously
avoided thinking of the chance of his own death: hence his belief in the
continuance of life cannot be regarded as the outcome of an active
process of constructive thought.

This may seem altogether paradoxical and incredible.

How, it may be asked, can man be said to repress the idea of death, if
he instinctively refused to admit its possibility? How did he escape the
inevitable process of applying to himself the analogy he might have been
supposed to make from other men's experience and recognize that he
must die?

Man appreciated the fact that he could kill an animal or another man by
inflicting certain physical injuries on him. But at first he seems to
have believed that if he could avoid such direct assaults upon himself,
his life would flow on unchecked. When death does occur and the
onlookers recognize the reality, it is still the practice among certain
relatively primiti