RATIONAL LIFE 335 



beings appears among all low races with whom we have 

 attained to thoroughly intimate acquaintance. l The 

 following is his contrast, when the several races of 

 men are looked at ethnographically/ with a view to 

 ascertain the general relations of the lower to the 

 higher culture, as to the belief in future existence : 2 

 On the savage side, we find the dominant idea to be, 

 a continuance of the soul in a new existence, like the 

 present life, or idealised and exaggerated on its model ; 

 while on the cultured side, the doctrine of judgment 

 and moral retribution prevails with paramount, though 

 not indeed absolute, sway. 3 With illustrations before 

 us of Greek thought, prior to the Christian era, and 

 with such testimony as that of Tylor, depending on the 

 widest inductions, it seems clear that belief in a future 

 state is a natural product of reflection, when dealing 

 with the facts of the present life. If then, we would 

 complete our view of man s place in Nature, we must 

 hold that Expectation is as essential to a rational life 

 as Memory proves to be. Such Expectation is not the 

 expression of Experience. While it stands related 

 with experience, it arises out of the conditions of 

 thought itself, as it bears on the Unknown. 



Under the conditions of a rational life, it happens, 

 that to men all the world over, the gates of death are 

 not opened and shut on the darkness of a closing tomb. 

 The body does not seem the man; the link of 

 sympathy does not seem broken, though the eye be 

 glazed, and the ear be dull. Even if the body be not 

 buried out of sight, but placed on the funeral pile, the 

 expiring flame, which flickers and dies before afflicted 



1 Primitive Culture, vol. i. p. 425. 



2 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 100. 3 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 101. 



