^o Science Religion and Reality 



selecting the positive creed, the comforting view, the culturally 

 valuable belief in immortality, in the spirit independent of the body, 

 and in the continuance of life after death. In the various cere- 

 monies at death, in coinmemoration and communion with the 

 departed, and worship of ancestral ghosts, religion gives body and 

 form to the saving beliefs. 



Thus the belief in immortality is the result of a deep emotional 

 revelation, standardised by religion, rather than a primitive 

 philosophic doctrine. Man's conviction of continued life is one 

 of the supreme gifts of religion, which judges and selects the better 

 of the two alternatives suggested by self-preservation — the hope 

 of continued life and the fear of annihilation. The belief in 

 spirits is the result of the belief in immortality. The substance 

 of which the spirits are made is the full-blooded passion and 

 desire for life, rather than the shadowy stuff which haunts his 

 dreams and illusions. Religion saves man from a surrender to 

 death and destruction, and in doing this it merely makes use of the 

 observations of dreams, shadows, and visions. The real nucleus of 

 animism lies in the deepest emotional fact of human nature, the 

 desire for life. 



Thus the rites of mourning, the ritual behaviour immediately 

 after death, can be taken as pattern of the religious act, while the 

 belief in immortality, in the continuity of life and in the nether 

 world, can be taken as the prototype of an act of faith. Here, as 

 in the religious ceremonies previously described, we find self- 

 contained acts, the aim of which is achieved in their very perform- 

 ance. The ritual despair, the obsequies, the acts of mourning, 

 express the emotion of the bereaved and the loss of the whole 

 group. They endorse and they duplicate the natural feelings 

 of the survivors ; they create a social event out of a natural fact. 

 Yet, though in the acts of mourning, in the mimic despair of 

 wailing, in the treatment of the corpse and in its disposal, nothing 

 ulterior is achieved, these acts fulfil an important function and 

 possess a considerable value for primitive culture. 



What is this function ? The initiation ceremonies we have 

 found fulfil theirs in sacralising tradition ; the food cults, sacra- 

 ment and sacrifice bring man into communion with providence, 

 with the beneficent forces of plenty ; totemism standardises man's 

 practical, useful attitude of selective interest towards his surround- 

 ings. If the view here taken of the biological function of religion 



