Whence came this new thing? If we try to derive it from {119} a natural process of development in the Homeric view of life we shall find ourselves in the greatest perplexity when it comes to showing the connecting links between two such widely different conceptions. It would not avail us much to say that the prestige of the epic was such that those whom it had honoured in song must have appeared so glorious and distinguished among mankind that it was natural for later imagination to transform them to demigods and to worship them as such. The Homeric poems, so violently opposed to any idea of a conscious or active existence of the soul after death, could hardly have brought it about that those very champions whom it had represented as indeed dead and departed to the distant land of Hades should be regarded as still living and exercising an influence from out their graves. Moreover, it is in the highest degree improbable that in the process of historical development it should have been just the champions of the epic from whose worship the cult of Heroes arose; for in cult, at any rate, with negligible exceptions, those champions played little part. And, indeed, that any cult at all should have arisen from the mere suggestions of fancy, such as the epic offered, is in itself unlikely. And it is essentially upon a religious cult that the belief in Heroes is founded. In fact after all that has been hitherto shown, what we see most plainly is the _contrast_ between the belief in Heroes and Homeric conceptions. The fanciful thought of the translation of individuals to Islands of the Blest or the underground dwellings did not itself conflict with the implications of Homeric eschatology. The miraculous preservation in an immortal existence of men whom the gods loved did not involve the separation of soul from body, nor the consequence of that separation--the dim borderland existence of the disembodied soul. But the belief in Heroes was a different matter; that involved the continuation of a conscious mode of being, in the neighbourhood of the living, after death, and in spite of the separation of soul from body. This directly contradicts Homeric psychology. We should have to give up the attempt altogether to bring this new belief into any real relationship with earlier development--if we could not draw upon what we have learnt from our previous investigations. In the Homeric poems themselves, in striking contrast with the general conception there prevailing of the insubstantiality of the disembodied soul, we found vestiges of a once-vigorous _cult of the soul_ which implied the existence of a corresponding belief in the conscious after-life of the soul and its lingering {120} in the neighbourhood of the living. From the study of Hesiod's picture of the Five Ages of Men, we saw that, in fact, vestiges of an ancient belief in the continued and enhanced existence of dead men, of which no clear trace remained in Homer,