THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 199 



no belief whatever in the immortality of the soul ; it 

 is not found in Buddhism, the religion that dominates 

 thirty per cent, of the entire human race ; it is not 

 found in the ancient popular religion of the Chinese, 

 nor in the reformed religion of Confucius which 

 succeeded it ; and, what is still more significant, it is 

 not found in the earlier and purer religion of the Jews. 

 Neither in the " five Mosaic books," nor in any of the 

 writings of the Old Testament which were written 

 before the Babylonian Exile, is there any trace of the 

 notion of individual persistence after death. 



The mystic notion that the human soul will live for 

 ever after death has had a polyphyletic origin. It 

 was unknown to the earliest speaking man (the 

 hypothetical homo primigenius of Asia), to his prede- 

 cessors, of course, the pithecanthropus and prothylo- 

 bates, and to the least developed of his modern 

 successors, the Yeddahs of Ceylon, the Seelongs of 

 India, and other distant races. With the develop- 

 ment of reason and deeper reflection on life and 

 death, sleep and dreams, mystic ideas of a dualistic 

 composition of our nature were evolved — indepen- 

 dently of each other — in a number of the earlier races. 

 Very different influences were at work in these 

 polyphyletic creations — worship of ancestors, love of 

 relatives, love of life and desire of its prolongation, 

 hope of better conditions of life beyond the grave, 

 hope of the reward of good and punishment of evil 

 deeds, and so forth. Comparative psychology has 

 recently brought to our knowledge a great variety of 

 myths and legends of that character ; they are, for 

 the most part, closely associated with the oldest forms 

 of theistic and religious belief. In most of the modern 

 religions athanatism is intimately connected with 



