author, and took a prominent part in all educational and reform movements in Boston. His principal publications are: "Ten Great Religions" (1871-1883), "Christian Doctrine of Prayer," "Thomas Didymus," "Common Sense in Religion," ," "Events and Epochs in Religious History," and "Self-Culture."]

THE mixture of a hidden and private Monotheism with a public Polytheism was the religion of the civilized world, with the exception of Judea, when Christ came. Now, probably, one half of the human race have a Monotheistic religion. These Monotheistic religions are the work of two prophets, Moses and Jesus, from whose teachings Mohammed drew his own inspiration. The semi-Monotheism of China and Eastern Asia is also the result of the teaching of two great souls, Buddha and Confucius. The nature of their inspiration we shall consider in another chapter. Christianity teaches the highest form of Monotheism. Jesus gives no personal name to the Deity, as the religions before him had done. He does not call God by the sacred Jewish name of Yahveh, but by a word designating his character of parental care and love, "Father." The peculiarity of Christian Monotheism is that it combines with the conception of one Supreme, All-perfect Being, Maker and Ruler of all things, which is the philosophic Monotheism, and with that of holy Lawgiver and Judge, and Beneficent Providence, the faith in an infinite tenderness of love. God in Christ comes near to each soul, as an ever-present friend and helper; as one who forgives and saves; a perpetual inspiration and guide; a friend nearer than any other to every child high or low. Farther than this Monotheism can hardly go, for this combines the two extremes of religious thought in a harmonious whole, that of the Being who is infinitely removed from us by his greatness, and the Being who comes nearest to us by his love. This is the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Of all the beliefs of man in regard to the supernatural world, the belief in a human soul as a substantial essence, capable of existing independently of the body, has prevailed most widely. It is found in all parts of the world, in all times, among all classes, however widely separated from each other by physical and moral barriers. The lowest tribes of savages unite with the most sublime philosophers in this conviction. On this point the Hottentot and the Fiji islander agree with Plato and Aristotle.

The evidence of this belief among the lower races, who have no metaphysical theories or language, is to be found in their

universal conviction that all men continue to exist after the death of the body, as disembodied spirits, or, as we say, ghosts.

Our word "ghost," it must be remembered, the same as the German "geist," simply means a spirit. Now the belief of the existence of disembodied spirits is well-nigh universal among the primitive races. All believe in apparitions, in unsubstantial appearances of departed friends. The Esquimaux in the Arctic Circle of North America; the natives of Siberia in the same latitudes in Asia; the Australians and Patagonians at the other extreme of the world; the great religions of antiquity those of Egypt, China, India, Persia, Greece, Rome, Mexico, Peru, the Tartar tribes of Central Asia, the Negroes of Central and Western Africa; the inhabitants of the innumerable islands of the Pacific-have all believed in such a continued spiritual existence of the dead. This belief could only have come from one of two sources from outward experience or inward consciousness. Either they have all actually seen ghosts, and believe in them for that reason, or else they have not seen them. If they have not seen them, if ghosts have never appeared, this universal belief has prevailed with no facts of outward experience to support it. It must then be based on some profound and universal fact of inward experience. Is there any such fact? There is. We are conscious of a thinking, feeling, and acting self, which has no bodily qualities. This self acts and feels in every part of the body, and yet is not located in any part, for if a part of the body is lost, the thinking and feeling and acting energy remains unimpaired. It seems to go out of the body in dreams, in memory, in imagination, and in thought which makes the past present, the distant near. The soul seems to leave the body in dreams, for then it enters into another world, seemingly as real as this one. It has a marvelous unity, correlating and combining in a central self or ego, imagination, memory, hope and fear, love and hatred, thought and sensation, action, choice, and passive receptivity. It is the one simple ego which has all this experience. Our consciousness does not allow us to suppose that one part of the soul is devoted to thought, another part to feeling, and the like. We say, "I think, I feel, I remember, I am in pain, I like the taste of this fruit, I smell the perfume of that rose, I foresee that some evil may occur, I intend to build a house next year. It is one and the same undivided, indivisible self which does all this. The consciousness of this indivisible unity, a unity of which the

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body is incapable, is the same in the savage and the philosopher. It is a primitive, universal, and necessary conviction. The body dissolves at death, but the self within the body is indissoluble. It continues one and the same through all the changes of life, and therefore will continue, men believe, after the physical body dies. Primitive man does not argue in this way, and convince himself thus of his immortality; but the belief is the natural outgrowth of his self-consciousness.

Some eminent thinkers, however, take a different view. They tell us that the man who sleeps and dreams thinks he has two individualities, one of which leaves the other in his sleep, and comes back to it again when he wakes.

Schoolcraft reports that "the North American Indians believe in duplicate souls, one of which remains with the body, while the other departs during sleep." But this is surely a misinterpretation of their idea. There is evidence enough that many primitive races believe that the conscious thinking soul leaves the body during sleep. But there is not a second conscious thinking soul left behind. There is no evidence that any human being, on awakening from a dream, ever remembered that he existed simultaneously in two distinct series of conscious thoughts and actions. His thinking self was only one. It seemed to leave his body and go elsewhere. He saw that the body had a principle of life left with it, but not a second principle of thought. This theory, then, of a double soul is a mere misuse of words, and rests on no scientific basis of observation or experience.

There have been instances of persons who, by some strange cerebral conditions, have passed from one state of consciousness into another, and in the second state have forgotten all they knew in the previous condition. They have then passed back, during an interval of sleep, into their original state, instantly remembering all they learned before while in that condition, but forgetting all they knew in the second. But even this extremely rare phenomenon does not justify the assumption of a double soul. The patient in this case had no double consciousness, but simply forgot in one condition what was remembered in another. This was not having two souls, but it was one soul passing into two different states of thought and life.

It is often asserted that the primitive races regard their shadows as their soul, and hence it is argued that the very notion of the soul may have been derived from the sight of the

shadow. This is reversing the order of thought. The idea of the soul must have existed before it could have been compared to a shadow. When the Romans called a disembodied spirit an "umbra," or shadow, and the Greeks used the same word, they simply meant that it was unsubstantial, like a shadow.

As a shadow is visible, but not tangible, as it retains the outline of the form, so the ghost was believed to be visible but not tangible, and to have a vague outline of the human form. But how could any human being believe that the shadow which always accompanies the body, and is never seen without it, can be the spirit which has no body, and which leaves the body in dreams? The most striking case on record of such an imagination is in the story of Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow. We ourselves often use the word "shadow" to express something unsubstantial, as when we say, "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" No one would infer from this that we considered our souls to be the shadows. We can usually best get at the conceptions of the undeveloped races by recalling our own notions when we were children. We shall remember, I think, that our shadow had a mysterious quality to our infantile mind. It aroused our fancy; we may have tried to run away from it; we may have stamped upon it; it was an attendant from which we could not get away. But it never occurred to us for a moment that it was our soul, or self. Similar childish fancies take possession of the childlike races. The natives of Benin call a man's shadow his guide, and believe it will witness if he has done well or ill. The Basutos are careful not to let their shadow fall on the river, lest a crocodile should seize it, and draw them in.

One remarkable and unaccountable exception, if it is an exception, to the universal belief of mankind in the soul as a simple substantial principle of feeling, thought, and will, known by consciousness, is the great religion of Buddha. We are positively assured by the best-informed writers on this religion, that it persistently denies and rejects the notion of a soul in man. This is stated in the most decided form by Rhys Davids, one of the most recent and learned writers. Buddhism, he says, teaches that man is a flux of emotions, thought, acts, with no abiding principle behind them. He quotes a passage from the "Sutta Pitaka," to the effect that the unlearned and sensual man regards the soul as residing in sensation and matter, and so gets the idea "I am." But the wise man who has

escaped both from ignorance and from acquired knowledge does not have this idea, "I am."

Here, however, comes in the necessity of understanding the meaning of words, of entering into the state of mind of the Buddhist thinker. It is of small consequence to have any statement, unless we comprehend the intention of the man who makes it.

Now the whole purpose of original Buddhism was to teach men how to escape the miseries of life by the destruction of desire. Among these desires is the wish for continued existence. This also must be destroyed. Therefore the Pitakas, or oldest religious books, perpetually repeat such statements as this:

I see in the world this trembling race given to desire for existences; they lament in the mouth of death, not being free from the desire for reiterated existences. Look on those men trembling with selfishness; let them be unselfish, not having any attachment to existences.

The object being to produce perfect peace by the destruction of all desire-even the desire for continued existence - the remedy must be found in knowledge, which is the Buddhist way of salvation. Brahmanism in the time of Buddha sought the same end. The Laws of Manu say of the sage: "Let him not seek for death, let him not seek for life." But their method of extinguishing all desire was by ascetic mortifications. Buddha had tried these, and found them insufficient. His great discovery was that salvation came through knowledge, knowledge of the laws of being. He reached that state, not by reasoning or philosophy, which he declares can never produce knowledge, but only fluctuating opinion. To him knowledge came by an interior insight of spiritual, moral, and physical law. To destroy all desire, the desire for future existence must be destroyed. This is destroyed by seeing that there is no soul, or personal identity, or ego to continue. Thus Buddhism seems to deny the existence of the soul.

On the other hand it teaches transmigration. This is a fundamental doctrine with Buddhism. But how can there be a migration of souls from one body to another, unless there are souls to migrate? The answer is an ingenious one. Here comes in the great law called Karma, which is the law of cause