ATORY SURVEY OF THE FIELD AND ITS MYTHS.

SURVEYING the thought of mankind upon the subject of a future
life, as thus far examined, one can hardly fail to be struck by
the multitudinous variety of opinions and pictures it presents.
Whence and how arose this heterogeneous mass of notions?

In consequence of the endowments with which God has created man,
the doctrine of a future life arises as a normal fact in the
development of his experience. But the forms and accompaniments of
the doctrine, the immense diversity of dress and colors it appears
in, are subject to all the laws and accidents that mould and
clothe the products within any other department of thought and
literature. We must refer the ethnic conceptions of a future state
to the same sources to which other portions of poetry and
philosophy are referred, namely, to the action of sentiment,
fancy, and reason, first; then to the further action, reaction,
and interaction of the pictures, dogmas, and reasonings of
authoritative poets, priests, and philosophers on one side, and of
the feeling, faith, and thought of credulous multitudes and docile
pupils on the other. In the light of these great centres of
intellectual activity, parents of intellectual products, there is
nothing pertaining to the subject before us, however curious,
which may not be intelligibly explained, seen naturally to spring
out of certain conditions of man's mind and experience as related
with the life of society and the phenomena of the world.

So far as the views of the future life set forth in the religions
of the ancient nations constitute systematically developed and
arranged schemes of doctrine and symbol, the origin of them
therefore needs no further explanation than is furnished by a
contemplation of the regulated exercise of the speculative and
imaginative faculties. But so far as those representations contain
unique, grotesque, isolated particulars, their production is
accounted for by this general law: In the early stages of human
culture, when the natural sensibilities are intensely preponderant
in power, and the critical judgment is in abeyance, whatever
strongly moves the soul causes a poetical secretion on the part of
the imagination.1 Thus the rainbow is personified; a waterfall is
supposed to be haunted by spiritual beings; a volcano with fiery
crater is seen as a Cyclops with one flaming eye in the centre of
his forehead. This law holds not only in relation to impressive
o