souls of their departed husbands, who might still be hanging about them, clinging closest to the best-loved wives. After this ceremony, they went and married again.[1] From such details it appears that the conception of some souls suffering extinction at death or dying a second death, a thought still as heretofore familiar to speculative theology, is not unknown in the lower culture.
The soul, as recognized in the philosophy of the lower races, may be denned as an ethereal surviving being, conceptions of which preceded and led up to the more transcendental theory of the immaterial and immortal soul, which forms part of the theology of higher nations. It is principally the ethereal surviving soul of early culture that has now to be studied in the religions of savages and barbarians and the folk-lore of the civilized world. That this soul should be looked on as surviving beyond death is a matter scarcely needing elaborate argument. Plain experience is there to teach it to every savage; his friend or his enemy is dead, yet still in dream or open vision he sees the spectral form which is to his philosophy a real objective being, carrying personality as it carries likeness. This thought of the soul's continued existence is, however, but the gateway into a complex region of belief. The doctrines which, separate or compounded, make up the scheme of future existence among particular tribes, are principally these: the theories of lingering, wandering, and returning ghosts, and of souls dwelling on or below or above the earth in a spirit-world, where existence is modelled upon the earthly life, or raised to higher glory, or placed under reversed conditions, and lastly, the belief in a division between happiness and misery of departed souls, by a retribution for deeds done in life, determined in a judgment after death.
'All argument is against it; but all belief is for it,' said Dr. Johnson of the apparition of departed spirits. The doctrine that ghost-souls of the dead hover among the
- ↑ Cavazzi, 'Congo, Matamba, et Angola,' lib. i. p. 270. See also Liebrecht in 'Zeitschr. für Ethnologie,' vol. v. p. 96 (Tartary, Scandinavia, Greece).
