But though it leaves out an element which is at least as important as any element it includes, it would be an error to take no account of what it does contribute. It would be an error of this kind if we closed our eyes to the fact that what first arrests the attention of man, in the lower stages of his evolution, is the survival of others than himself. That is the belief which first manifests itself in his heart and mind; and what first reveals it to him is the appearance of the dead to his sleeping or his waking eye. He does not first hope or believe that he himself will survive the death of the body and then go { 42} on to infer that therefore others also will similarly survive. On the contrary, it is the appearance of others in his sleeping or waking moments that first gives him the idea; and it is only later and on reflection that it occurs to him that he also will have, or be, a ghost.
But though we must recognise the intellectual element in the belief and the intellectual processes which are involved in the belief, we must also take into account the emotional element, the element of desire. And first we should notice that the desire is not a selfish or self-regarding desire; it is the longing for one loved and lost, of the mother for her child, or of the child for its mother. It is desire of that kind which gives to dreams and apparitions their emotional value, without which they would have little significance and no spiritual importance. That is the direction in which we must look for the reason why, on the one hand, belief in the continuation of existence after death seems at first to have no connection with religion, while, on the other hand, the connection is ultimately shown by the evolution of belief to be so intimate that neither can attain its proper development without the other.
Dreams are occasions on which the longing for { 43} one loved and lost manifests itself, but they are not the cause or the origin of the affection and the longing. But dreams are not exclusively, specially, or even usually the domain in which religion plays a part. Hence the visions of the night, in which the memory of the departed and the craving for reunion with them are manifested, bear no necessary reference to religion; and it is therefore possible, and _prima facie_ plausible, to maintain that the belief in the immortality of the soul has its origin in a centre quite distinct from the sphere of religion, and that it is only very slowly, if at all, that the belief in immortality comes to be incorporated with religion. On the other hand, the very craving for reunion or continued communion with those who are felt not to be lost but gone before, is itself the feeling which is, not the base, but at the base, of religion. In the lowest forms to which religion can be reduced, or in which it manifests itself, religion is a bond of community; it manifests itself externally in joint acts of worship, internally in the feeling that the worshippers are bound together by it and united with the object of their worship. This feeling of communion is not a mere article of intellectual belief, nor is it imposed upon the members; it is what they themselves desire. { 44} Höffding states the truth when he says that in its most rudimentary form we encounter "religion under the guise of desire"; but in saying so he omits the essence of the truth, that essence without which the truth that he partially enunciates may become wholly misleading,--he omits to say, and I think he fails to see, that the desire which alone can claim to be considered as religious is the desire of the community, not of the individual as such, and the desire of the community as united in common worship. The idea of religion as a bond of spiritual communion is implicit from the first, even though a long process of evolution be necessary to disentangle it and set it forth self-consciously. Now, it is precisely this spiritual communion of which man becomes conscious in his craving after reunion or continued communion with those who have departed this life. And it is with the history of his attempts to harmonise this desire with what he knows and demands of the universe otherwise, that we are here and now concerned.