274 HUMANISM xv 



Now this, I venture to think, is a philosophic result of 

 no small practical importance. 



(1) It goes a long way towards explaining the 

 anomaly of the feebleness of most people s religious 

 beliefs about the future life. For the heavens and hells 

 of the various religions, in spite of their pretensions to 

 evoke forces which should utterly dwarf the threescore 

 years and ten of our mortal life, are found in practice to 

 constitute motives so weak that they are continually 

 routed and set aside by the trivial temptations of the 

 moment. The reason is that they have ordinarily been 

 conceived as differing too radically from the known 

 conditions of life to excite the same serious belief, to 

 require the same matter-of-fact forethought as, e.g., next 

 year s crops or to-morrow s money market. And so the 

 belief in a future life, even where it has not been 

 degraded into a merely verbal assent to a traditional 

 formula, has commonly lacked that intimacy of associa 

 tion with the ordinary concerns of life which is needed to 

 render it psychologically efficacious as a stimulus to 

 action. 



(2) Again, it turns out that the spiritists were by no 

 means wrong in principle when they proceeded to 

 construe the future life, of which they believed themselves 

 to possess cogent evidence, very much on the lines of 

 our earthly life. Their constructions may in detail be 

 as crude and absurd as their adversaries allege I am 

 neither familiar enough with the literature to discuss this 

 point nor convinced that they are but it is a mistaken 

 prejudice to reject such accounts a priori as too trivial or 

 undignified to be ascribed to the inhabitants of another 

 world. Owing, no doubt, to the unduly tragic view we 

 have come to take of death, the prejudice that the decease 

 of Brown, Jones, and Robinson must instantly transmute 

 them into beings of superhuman powers and tastes, and 

 transport them into regions where they are initiated into 

 the uttermost ecstasies and agonies of the scheme of 

 things, has become inveterate. Indeed, I have often been 

 amused to see how strongly this notion influences people 



