phrase 'immortality of the soul' is to be avoided as misleading. It is doubtful how far the lower psychology entertains at all an absolute conception of immortality, for past and future fade soon into utter vagueness as the savage mind quits the present to explore them, the measure of months and years breaks down even within the narrow span of human life, and the survivor's thought of the soul of the departed dwindles and disappears with the personal memory, that kept it alive. The doctrine of the surviving soul may indeed be treated as common to all known races, though its acceptance is not unanimous. In savage as in civilized life, dull and careless natures ignore a world to come as too far off, while sceptical intellects are apt to reject its belief as wanting proof. There are even statements on record of whole classes being formally excluded from future life. This may be a matter of social pride. In the Tonga Islands, according to Mariner, it was held that the chiefs and nobles would live hereafter in the happy island of Bolotu, but that the souls of the common people would die with their bodies. So Captain John Smith relates as to the belief of the Virginians, that the chiefs went after death beyond the sunset mountains, there to dance and sing with their predecessors, 'but the common people they suppose shall not live after death.' In the record of a missionary examination of the Nicaraguans, they are made to state their belief that if a man lived well, his soul would ascend to dwell among the gods, but if ill it would perish with the body, and there would be an end of it.[1] None of these accounts, however, agree with what is known of the religion of kindred peoples, Polynesian, Algonquin, or Aztec. But granted that the soul survives the death of the body, instance after instance from the records of the lower culture shows this soul to be regarded as a mortal being, liable like the body itself to accident and death. The Greenlanders pitied the poor souls who must pass in winter or in storm the dreadful mountain where
- ↑ Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 136; John Smith, 'Descr. of Virginia,' 33; Oviedo, 'Nicaragua,' p. 50. The reference to the Laos in Meiners, vol. ii. p. 760, is worthless.
