Probable Future Advances in Evolution 843 



The varied and often conflicting as well as vague views of 

 primitive races, now extinct or still existing, regarding a future 

 life might represent either a proenvironal picture and hope, 

 or the crude beginning of a definite goal toward which man 

 has been, is now, and will continue to be moving. We shall 

 accordingly compare both possibilities, and the views that 

 might be advanced in favor of or against them. 



If immortality be a proenvironal picture, we would expect 

 to find as in all proenvironal advances a fairly uniform set 

 of desirable positions or conditions attained from stage to 

 stage, and then that the best points of these would be selected 

 and combined in advancing to the next higher stage. But 

 the uncertainties, inconsistencies, and vagaries of the positions 

 assumed and of the results secured seem completely to mili- 

 tate against this. Thus, even after long millennia of advance 

 by man from beliefs in the wind, the breath, dream visions, 

 and crystal-gazing, as being expressive of powers of the being 

 that were higher than and could be separated from the body, 

 the wise Socrates confessed that he was in doubt whether 

 death meant dissolution or separation of the body from an 

 ethereal essence that lived on somewhere. 



Aristotle's view that the intellect is the undying part of 

 man was shared by many, but was reduced to a limited and 

 conditional immortality by Chrysippus and others. The most 

 sanguine eschatologists confess that little evidence is met with 

 in the Old Testament which would favor immortality, and 

 even that little is most shadowy. 



But Israelitish contact with Egypt and later with Zara- 

 thushtrian and Mesopotamian influences during the exile 

 developed a national though largely materialistic view of im- 

 mortality, that was connected more with well-being and tem- 

 poral national triumph than with post-mortem existence. 



The belief in a heaven, a hell, and even a Sheol or purgatory 

 by some and the rejection of one or all of these by other sects 

 in a common nationality — as seen amid Pharisees and Sadducees 

 of the Jewish nation — is proof that a common basis of thought 

 and aspiration had not been secured. 



