usually spiteful and mischievous, or at least testy and petulant, more apt to injure than to benefit the survivors. In that they resemble the personified spirits of nature, which in the opinion of most savages appear to be generally tricky and malignant beings, whose anger is dangerous and whose favour is courted with fear and trembling. Thus even without the additional assurance afforded by tales of apparitions and spectres, primitive man may come in time to imagine the world around him to be more or less thickly peopled, influenced, and even dominated by a countless multitude of spirits, among whom the shades of past generations of men and women hold a very prominent, often apparently the leading place. These spirits, powerful to help or harm, he seeks either simply to avert, when he deems them purely mischievous, or to appease and conciliate, when he supposes them sufficiently good-natured to respond to his advances. In some such way as this, arguing from the real but, as we think, misinterpreted phenomena of dreams, the savage may arrive at a doctrine of human immortality and from that at a worship of the dead.
It has also been suggested by the resemblance of the living to the dead, which is a case of outward experience.
This explanation of the savage faith in immortality is neither novel nor original: on the contrary it is perhaps the commonest and most familiar that has yet been propounded. If it does not account for all the facts, it probably accounts for many of them. At the same time I do not doubt that many other inferences drawn from experiences of different kinds have confirmed, even if they did not originally suggest, man's confident belief in his own immortality. To take a single example of outward experience, the resemblances which children often bear to deceased kinsfolk appear to have prompted in the minds of many savages the notion that the souls of these dead kinsfolk have been born again in their descendants.5 From a few cases of resemblances so explained it would be easy to arrive at a general theory that all living persons are animated by the souls of the dead; in other words, that the human spirit survives death for an indefinite period, if not for eternity, during which it undergoes a series of rebirths or reincarnations. However it has been arrived at, this doctrine of the transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages; and from what we know on the subject we seem to be justified in conjecturing that at certain stages of mental and social evolution the belief in metempsychosis has been far commoner and has exercised a far deeper influence on the life and institutions of primitive man than the actual evidence before us at present allows us positively to affirm.
The aim of these lectures is to collect a number of facts illustrative of the belief in immortality and of the customs based on it among some of the lower races.
Be that as it may—and I have no wish to dogmatise on so obscure a topic—it is certain that a belief in the survival of the human personality after death and the practice of a propitiation or worship of the dead have prevailed very widely among mankind and have played a very important part in the development of natural religion. While many writers have duly recognised the high importance both of the belief and of the worship, no one, so far as I know, has attempted systematically to collect and arrange the facts which illustrate the prevalence of this particular type of religion among the various races of mankind. A large body of evidence lies to hand in the voluminous and rapidly increasing literature of ethnology; but it is dispersed over an enormous number of printed books and papers, to say nothing of the materials which still remain buried either in manuscript or in the minds of men who possess the requisite knowledge but have not yet committed it to writing. To draw all those stores of information together and digest them into a single treatise would be a herculean labour, from which even the most industrious researcher into the dusty annals of the human past might shrink dismayed. Certainly I shall make no attempt to perform such a feat within the narrow compass of these lectures. But it seems to me that I may make a useful, if a humble, contribution to the history of religion by selecting a portion of the evidence and submitting it to my hearers. For that purpose, instead of accumulating a mass of facts from all the various races of mankind and then comparing them together, I prefer to limit myself to a few races and to deal with each of them separately, beginning with the lowest savages, about whom we possess accurate information, and gradually ascending to peoples who stand higher in the scale of culture. In short the method of treatment which I shall adopt will be the descriptive rather than the comparative. I shall not absolutely refrain from instituting comparisons between the customs and beliefs of different races, but for the most part I shall content myself with describing the customs and beliefs of each race separately without reference to those of others. Each of the two methods, the comparative and the descriptive, has its peculiar advantages and disadvantages, and in my published writings I have followed now the one method and now the other. The comparative method is unquestionably the more attractive and stimulating, but it cannot be adopted without a good deal of more or less conscious theorising, since every comparison implicitly involves a theory. If we desire to exclude theories and merely accumulate facts for the use of science, the descriptive method is undoubtedly the better adapted for the arrangement of our materials: it may not stimulate enquiry so powerfully, but it lays a more solid foundation on which future enquirers may build. It is as a collection of facts illustrative of the belief in immortality and of all the momentous consequences which have flowed from that belief, that I desire the following lectures to be regarded. They are intended to serve simply as a document of religious history; they make no pretence to discuss philosophically the truth of the beliefs and the morality of the practices which will be passed under review. If any inferences can indeed be drawn from the facts to the truth or falsehood of the beliefs and to the moral worth or worthlessness of the practices, I prefer to leave it to others more competent than myself to draw them. My sight is not keen enough, my hand is not steady enough to load the scales and hold the balance in so difficult and delicate an enquiry.
Footnote 1: (return)
Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, ch. i., p. 31 (Popular Edition, London, 1893).
Footnote 2: (return)
For a single instance see L. Sternberg, "Die Religion der Giljaken," Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, viii. (1905) pp. 462 sqq., where the writer tells us that the Gilyaks have boundless faith in the supernatural power of their shamans, and that the shamans are nearly always persons who suffer from hysteria in one form or another.
Footnote 3: (return)
As to the widespread belief that flint weapons are thunderbolts see Sir E. B. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind, Third Edition (London, 1878), pp. 223–227; Chr. Blinkenberg, The Thunderweapon in Religion and Folklore (Cambridge, 1911); W. W. Skeat "Snakestones and Thunderbolts," Folk-lore, xxiii. (1912) pp. 60 sqq.; and the references in The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, ii. 374.
Footnote 4: (return)
Wordsworth, who argues strongly, almost passionately, for "the consciousness of a principle of Immortality in the human soul," admits that "the sense of Immortality, if not a coexistent and twin birth with Reason, is among the earliest of her offspring." See his Essay upon Epitaphs, appended to The Excursion (Poetical Works, London, 1832, vol. iv. pp. 336, 338). This somewhat hesitating admission of the inferential nature of the belief in immortality carries all the more weight because it is made by so warm an advocate of human immortality.
Footnote 5: (return)
For instance, the Kagoro of Northern Nigeria believe that "a spirit may transmigrate into the body of a descendant born afterwards, male or female; in fact, this is common, as is proved by the likeness of children to their parents or grand-parents,
