III.

The history of a great human belief ought to have some significance for modern thought. It exhibits mind in action, believing in obedience to its own necessary laws. What man has done by nature nature can justify. Certain beliefs are regarded as the results of art or accident or custom, and the source determines the quality and value of the stream. But the belief that can be proved to be native to mind has its right to exist vindicated, is a child of nature, not of art. What

intellect can best conceive it can best believe; the universal faith but articulates the universal thought.

To believe in immortality is not only more congenial to the heart, but more conformable to the reason than to believe in annihilation. Destruction is indemonstrable. It can never be proved that what makes the man a reasonable and moral being ceases to be when the pulse ceases to beat and the tongue to speak. The most that can be proved is, that certain signs interpretative of the man, expressive of his thoughts, emotions, and volitions, have ceased to be perceived. There is stillness, silence, the organ thrills no more with its living music, but there is nothing to show that the silence is due to the loss of the noble mind that touched its keys into harmony rather than to the failure of its pipes and breath. The senses are not the man. His eminence is

not due to his organism, but to his moral and spiritual faculties. The savage is as a sensuous being often much

The dog and the

The eagle excels

more highly developed than the sage. deer are keener in smell than man. him in strength and distance of vision; the game of the forest or jungle are quicker in hearing. The man is man by virtue of the mind that uses the senses, not by virtue of the senses used. Their loss is not the loss of him. Did he cease to be when they cease to act, then the accident were the essence, the sign the thing signified. The thinker who resolves thought into transfigured sensations may get rid of immortality, but he does so getting rid of mind. And he does it by a suicidal process. He denies too much to be able to affirm anything, and where nothing can be affirmed nothing can be denied.

But if it is impossible, on the one hand, to prove that the dead have ceased to be real and living persons, it is as impossible, on the other, to conceive a state of absolute non-existence. Nonentity is a contradiction in terms. Its two parts annihilate each other. Nothing cannot be thought-must be by the very attempt to conceive it translated into something. If, then, death is imagined or defined, it is realized, becomes a state of real or positive being. What ceases to be ceases to be an object of thought; to think of the dead is to predicate existence in fact even where it is in form denied. And Being con

tinued for ever is no harder to conceive than Being continued for a year or a century. Eternal is, indeed, more conceivable than temporal existence, the latter being only explicable through the former. Where spirit is concerned duration means growth, not decay. Mind does not count its being by seasons or suns, but by thought and action. Organized being has had a past, has a present, will have a future; but spiritual being simply exists, enjoys an everlasting Now. Thought is the life of the intellect. To think is to be. And thought creates time and space, is not created by them. To conceive personal being rightly is to conceive it as immortal.

Mind, then, has ever found it more easy to believe in its continued than in its interrupted and destroyed being. And it has done so by a necessity of its own nature, which we may name either an inability or an ability— the first, in so far as mind cannot conceive nonentity, the negation of reality, the second in so far as the conceived is the realized. Now, to trace the development of the Belief in India and Greece will be to show how mind, under the most dissimilar conditions and with the most opposed views of nature and man, has acted in relation to it; how the mental laws and necessities that create the Belief victoriously assert themselves under the most unfavourable circumstances, and in results whose differences are more significant than agreement had been.

ᏢᎪᎡᎢ II.

THE BELIEF IN INDIA.

THE limits of the discussion exclude any attempt,

even were such possible, to discover by the analysis of words or legends, whether there are any traces of the belief before the Indo-European family divided into its several oriental and occidental branches. Our present inquiry has to do only with the Hindus and Greeks, and so must start, as regards both, with their earliest extant literature.

1. THE HYMNS OF THE RIG-VEDA.

In the earlier books of this Veda the indications of the belief are few, and, in some respects, indefinite.* This, indeed, was to be expected. The religion there revealed exists still in great part under the forms of the old nature-worship, though it moves in a circle of spiritual ideas, not, indeed, distinctly conceived, but

* Muir's "Original Sanskrit Texts," v. 284 ff.; Wilson's "Hymns of the Rig-Veda," i. xxv.; Max Müller's "Ancient Sans. Lit.," 19, note 2.

floating in the individual and general consciousness like shadows unrealized. The gods are' conceived more or less under physical forms, and so thought is occupied with the visible manifestations of the gods and their present relations to man rather than with modes of being and relations invisible and future.

Thus intimations of a belief in a life after death could not be numerous, but though the intimations are few, it does not follow that the belief was uncertain. Agni,* Soma, † Soma, the Maruts, Mitra and Varuna, § are implored to grant immortality. By liberality || and sacrifice, a man "attains immortality," "goes to the gods," meets in the highest heaven the recompense of the sacrifices he has offered. The Vedic notion of immortality was not, indeed, like ours, a positive abstract conception, but an indefinite concrete representation. Still it was as comprehensive and affirmative as was possible to those early Hindus, -the very immortality attributed to their gods.** Hence to

* R.-V., v. 4, 10; i. 31, 7.

R.-V., ix. 113, 7 ff.; Muir's "Sans. Texts," v. 306; R.-V., i. 191, 18.

R.-V., v. 55, 4.

|| R.-V., i. 125, 5; x. 107, 2.

§ R.-V., v. 63, 2. Tx. 14, 8.

** In certain cases, as possibly R.-V., v. 4, 10, the immortality meant was to be realized on earth in offspring (Muir, "Sans. Texts," v. 285, note 415). But a comparison of the above texts with iv. 54, 2; vi. 7, 4; ix. 106, 8; x. 53, 10, &c., will bear out the statement of the text. In truth, Vedic thought had not yet learned to affirm an absolute immortality.