MORAL EVOLUTION 301 



If the spirit could journey far away from the body during Retribu- 

 sleep, why should it not continue to exist after the death of 

 the body ? This we may imagine to be the argument which 

 savage peoples have dimly formulated to themselves. There 

 seems to be very generally a belief in a future life, but the 

 doctrine of mere continuance is that which we find among the 

 most primitive. A man is not rewarded or punished in the 

 after-world for his good or bad deeds, but he lives on there 

 as he has lived here. " The shade of the Algonquin hunter 

 hunts souls of beaver and elk, walking on the souls of his snow- 

 shoes over the soul of the snow." 1 "The Norseman's ideal is 

 sketched in the few broad touches which show him in Walhalla, 

 where he and the other warriors without number ride forth 

 arrayed each morning and hew each other on Odin's plain, till 

 the slain have been ' chosen ' as in earthly battle, and meal-tide 

 comes, and slayers and slain mount and ride home to feast on 

 the everlasting boar, and drink mead and ale with the Aesir." 2 

 Some very serious defects of this world are evidently corrected 

 in Walhalla, but it is still only continuance, a glorified con- 

 tinuance. Then comes a doctrine which bridges the gulf be- 

 tween the continuance theory and the retribution theory. A 

 man's position in the next world results from his position in 

 this. The great here are great there and vice versa. But 

 directly there is differentiation, then the doctrine of retribution 

 must of necessity follow. For it cannot fail to be noticed, when 

 men begin to think, that prosperity in this world is not fairly 

 allotted. While still maintaining, therefore, the old assumption 

 that a man's position in the next world depended on what he 

 had been in this, they came to see that "what he had been" 

 was a question of character, not of wealth, titles and power. 

 Merit or demerit, therefore, decided his fate. This is the 

 doctrine of retribution that so solemnly proclaims to men the 

 consequences of wickedness. Though this view is not a 

 primitive one, yet many races arrived at it and it is found among 

 some who have advanced but a very little way in civilisation. 

 The Choctaw souls journey " far westward to where the long 



1 Tylor: Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 75. 2 Loc, cit. vol. ii. p. 77. 



