This continuation theory, the view that the dead continue in the next world as they left this, means that, to the people who entertain it, the dead are merely a memory. It is forbidden to think of them as doing anything, as affecting the living in any way. They are conceived as powerless to gratify the wishes of the living, or to thwart them. Where the Lord God is a jealous God, religion cannot tolerate the idea that any other spirit should be conceived as usurping His functions, still less that such spirits should receive the offerings and the prayers which are the due of Him alone. But though the dead are thus reduced to a mere memory, the memory itself does not and cannot die. Accordingly the dead, or rather those whose bodies are dead, continue to live. But, as they exercise no action in, or control over, the world of the living, their place of abode comes to be regarded as another world, to which they are confined. Speculation, therefore, where speculation is made, as to the case of the inhabitants of this other world, must take the direction of enquiring as to their fate. Where speculation is not made, the dead are conceived merely to continue to be as they are remembered to have been in this life. But, if there is to be room for any speculation {56} at all, there must be assumed to be some diversity in their fate, and therefore some reason, intelligible to man, for that diversity. That is a conclusion to which tribes attain who have apparently gone through no period of ancestor worship,--indeed, ancestor worship only impedes or defers the attainment of that conclusion. The diversity of fate could only consist in the difference between being where you would be and being where you would not. But the reasons for that diversity may be very different amongst different peoples. First, where religion is at its lowest or is in its least developed form, the gods are not the cause of the diversity nor do they seem concerned in it. Such diversity as there is seems in its simplest form merely to be a continuance of the social distinctions which prevail among the living: the high chieftains rest in a calm, plenteous, sunny land in the sky; while "all Indians of low degree go deep down under the earth to the land of Chay-her, with its poor houses and no salmon and no deer, and blankets so small and thin, that when the dead are buried the friends often bury blankets with them" (Tylor, _P. C._, II, 85). Elsewhere, it is not social distinctions, but moral, that make the difference: "the rude Tupinambas of Brazil think {57} the souls of such as had lived virtuously, that is to say who have well avenged themselves and eaten many of their enemies," (_ib._) rejoin the souls of their fathers in the happy land, while the cowards go to the other place. Thus, though the distinctions in the next world do not seem originally to have sprung from or to have been connected with morality, and still less with religion, they are,