It is a fact worthy of notice that the belief in immortality fills, I will not say a more important, but a more prominent, place in the hearts and hopes of uncivilised than of civilised man; and it is also a fact worthy of notice that among primitive men the belief in immortality is much less intimately bound up with religion than it comes to be at a later period of evolution. The two facts are probably not wholly without relation to one another. So long as the belief in immortality luxuriates and grows wild, so to speak, untrained and unrestrained by religion, it {36} developes as the fancy wills, and lives by flattering the fancy. When, however, the relations of a future life to morality and religion come to be realised, when the conception of the next world comes to be moralised, then it becomes the subject of fear as well as of hope; and the fancy loses much of the freedom with which it tricked out the pictures that once it drew, purely according to its own sweet liking, of a future state. On the one hand, the guilty mind prefers not to dwell upon the day of reckoning, so long as it can stave off the idea; and it may succeed more or less in putting it on one side until the proximity of death makes the idea insistent. Thus the mind more or less deliberately dismisses the future life from attention. On the other hand, religion itself insists persistently on the fact that you have your duty here and now in this world to perform, and that the rest, the future consequences, you must leave to God. Thus, once more, and this time not from unworthy motives, attention is directed to this life rather than to the next; and it is this point that is critical for the fate both of the belief in immortality and of religion itself. At this point, religion may, as in the case of Buddhism it actually has done, formally give up and disavow {37} belief in immortality. And in that case it sows the seed of its own destruction. Or it may recognise that the immortality of the soul is postulated by and essential to morality and religion alike. And in that case, even in that case alone, is religion in a position to provide a logical basis for morality and to place the natural desire for a future life on a firmer basis than the untutored fancy of primitive man could find for it.