We have now to consider this supreme poetic achievement of man--his belief in his own Immortality--in the light of our modern studies of evolution; we must notice some distinctions between its earlier and later stages, and briefly examine some of the objections which have been alleged in the name of science against the validity of the belief. Here, as in all departments of the efflorescence of the human mind, the beginnings were lowly, and necessarily so. Nothing very lofty or far-reaching could be expected from the kind of brain that was encased in the Neanderthal skull. Among existing savages there are tribes concerning which travellers have doubted whether they possess ideas that can properly be called religious. But wherever untutored humanity exists we find the conception of a world of ghosts more or less distinctly elaborated; the thronging simulacra of departed tribesmen linger near their accustomed haunts, keenly sensitive to favour or neglect, and quick to punish all infractions of the rules which the stern exigencies of life in the wilderness have prescribed for the conduct of the tribe. This crude primeval ghost-world is thus already closely associated with the ethical side of life, and out of this association have grown some of the most colossal governing agencies by which the development of human society has been influenced. It is therefore not without reason that modern students of anthropology devote so much time to animism and fetishism and other crude workings of that savage intelligence of which the primeval ghost-world is a product. It is not at all unlikely that the savage's notion of ghosts may have originated chiefly in his experience of dreams, and this is the explanation at present most in favour. The sleeping warrior ranges far and wide over the country, while he chases the buffalo and joins in the medicine dance with comrades known to have died yet now as active and as voluble as himself, but suddenly the scene changes and he is back in his familiar hut surrounded by his people who can testify that he has not for a moment left them. It is not unlikely, I say, that the notion of one's conscious self as something which can quit the material body and return to it may have started in such often-repeated humble experiences. It can hardly be doubted, however, that this savage conception of the detachable conscious self is simply the primitive phase of the Christian conception of the conscious soul which dwells within the perishable body and quits it at death. Through many stages of elaboration and refinement the sequence between the two conceptions is unmistakable.