SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 31 



and prejudiced mind which does not recognize that the book of Gene- 

 sis, which, upon any theory, contains man's earliest thoughts about 

 himself, expresses in allegorical fashion exactly the same views. 



The same views are also apparently expressed by Prof. Max Miiller, 

 in a very beautiful passage in the article on Semitic Monotheism, in the 

 same volume : 



" The primitive intuition of God and the ineradicable feeling of dependence 

 upon God could only have been the result of a primitive revelation in the 

 truest sense of that word. Man, who owed his existence to God, and whose 

 being centred and rested in God, saw and felt God as the only source of his 

 own and all other existence. By the very act of the creation God had revealed 

 Himself. Here He was, manifested in His works in all His majesty and power 

 before the face of those to whom He had given eyes to see and ears to hear, and 

 into whose nostrils He had breathed the breath of life, even the Spirit of 

 God." 



The first impression made by this passage may be, that, in speak- 

 ing of a " revelation in the truest sense," it affords an instance of that 

 hateful habit of using religious words in a non-natural sense. But a 

 little deeper consideration will show that no possible definition of a 

 revelation, accompanied and attested by miracles, can exclude the 

 revelation made by Nature to the first man who thought. In fact, we 

 have here a description of creation, which science, with possibly a little 

 suspiciousness at some of the phrases, may accept, while, at the same 

 time, natural religion is carried to its utmost and highest limits, and 

 a*ong with this a foundation is laid for a truer theory of the miracu- 

 lous. But, while gladly admitting all this, the fact remains that these 

 intuitions, following upon a revelation in which Nature herself was the 

 miracle, are still plainly only the expressions of man's inward experi- 

 ences, and that, however old, and venerable, and exalted, they are still 

 only hopes, wishes, and aspirations, which may or may not be true, 

 but which are incapable of proving the actual facts toward which they 

 soar. It is open, therefore, to any man, accustomed to look for positive 

 demonstration, to dismiss them as dreams of the infancy of man, or to 

 relegate them into the prison-house of the incomprehensibilities, or to 

 content himself with a purely natural theory of human life which re- 

 jects and dislikes the theological. 



2. But when we come to inquire how far these primary intuitions 

 have been universal, and whether they can be fairly called ineradica- 

 ble, we are met by some very startling facts. The dictum -naa SoKet 

 tovto alvai (pa/xev is so reasonable in itself that no serious attempt 

 would be made to question a belief that even approached to being uni- 

 versal, even if it could not be shown to be part of the original furni- 

 ture of the mind. But the real difficulty lies in finding (apart from 

 morals) any beliefs of which this universality can be predicated, and 

 assuredly the immortality of the soul is not one of them. The mind 

 of man at its lowest seems incapable of grasping the idea, and the 



